Epic has announced the release of Unreal Engine 5.4.
This update improves the built-in animation toolset of Unreal Engine, making character rigging and animation authoring more intuitive and less dependent on external applications. The introduction of a Modular Control Rig enables users to construct animation rigs directly in Unreal. Additionally, the update brings improvements to the Sequencer, Unreal Engine’s nonlinear animation editor, to improve its user experience.
Motion Matching, which was previously in the experimental phase, has now been promoted to production-ready status. It thoroughly tested in Fortnite Battle Royale and rolled out across all platforms. The system simplifies the animation process by using a large database of captured animations to match the in-game movement of characters.
On the rendering side, Nanite received updates including a new Tessellation feature and software variable rate shading, which are expected to contribute to performance improvements. Temporal Super Resolution was also improved to stabilize its output across different platforms.
Other improvements to rendering performance are included, for example, hardware ray tracing and shader compilation has been optimized to reduce project cook times. This release also introduces the Movie Render Graph for users creating linear content. It is designed to make it easier to create complex multi-shot workflows and offers new features like Render Layers for post-compositing.
The Neural Network Engine is now available in Beta, supporting in-editor and runtime applications, and provides a scalable cloud storage for Unreal Engine’s Derived Data Cache, designed to enhance efficiency for distributed teams.
As with any Unreal release, many many more features are included for a full list, check out the detailed release notes.
