Preview 1 for Unreal Engine 5.4, a new iteration of Epic Games’ popular game engine that introduces a number of rendering performance improvements, including major updates to Nanite—Unreal Engine 5’s virtualized geometry system—is now available for testing, Epic Games has announced. A public roadmap for Unreal Engine 5.4, which teases the long list of features that are in development for the latest version of the engine, can be found here.
Links:
- Download Unreal Engine 5.4 Preview from the Epic Games launcher, GitHub, or Linux
- Unresolved issues in 5.4 Preview targeted to be fixed by the 5.4 Release
- Unresolved issues in 5.4 Preview
- Issues fixed in 5.4
Unreal Engine 5.4’s new features include:
- Improved rendering performance
- Experimental new Tessellation feature, enabling fine details, such as cracks and bumps, to be added at render time
- Updated animation toolset, featuring experimental Modular Control Rig, Automatic Retargeting, reorganized Anim Details, an overhauled Sequencer, and more
- Motion Matching, a simple and efficient way for animating characters in game
- Multi-Process Cooking is now three times faster
Epic Games on what else is coming for developers:
Later this year we will also release a free sample learning project that includes over 500 AAA animations created from high-end motion capture data with the locomotion and traversal dataset used in the keynote demo. In addition, thanks to extensive battletesting in LEGO Fortnite development, you can now fully animate your game using Control Rig and Sequencer with no round tripping between applications.
The fully in-engine Procedural Content Generation Framework has significant improvements, too. We’re releasing a PCG Biome creation plugin as a concrete example of a flexible, data-driven tool built with a systemic approach featuring the latest updates.