Unreal Engine 5 now available in preview

Feb 25, 2022 by CGPress Staff

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Epic has announced that Unreal Engine 5 is now available in preview, bringing it a step closer to a production-ready release. New features and improvements since the early access release include:

Nanite
- Improved performance and memory usage of Nanite streaming in editor
- New error-based metric for Fallback Mesh creation (previously called Proxy Mesh)
- UX to batch convert assets to or from Nanite and perform on-disk data trimming
- Support for all view modes and usage flags, e.g. Shader Complexity view mode
- Per-instance selection
- Per-instance/Actor custom data
Lumen
- Full hardware ray tracing support, which doesn’t require distance fields or any other software tracing, and scales up to large worlds
- Improved Final Gather quality, especially visible on foliage
- Glossy reflections on translucency
- Translucency Final Gather, which improves global illumination quality on translucency
- Landscape support
Virtual Shadow Maps
- Overall stability and performance improvements
- Improved handling of shadow invalidation due to moving/deforming meshes
- Support for more non-Nanite mesh types
- Support for more material types for foliage (two-sided, subsurface)
Path Tracer
- Support for hair primitives
- Support for the eye shader model
- Improvements in sampling, BRDF models, light transport, supported geometries, and more
World Partition
- Landscape support
- Sequencer support
- New streaming source shapes
- VT support in Minimap
- Hierarchical support in Data Layers and a new UX
Introduction of Large World Coordinates for creating massive worlds
Control Rig
- Performance improvements
- Graph debugging tools that let you easily find and fix issues
- Dynamic Hierarchy and Space Switching, enabling you to attach rig controls together
- Spline tools for manipulating curves inside Control Rig
- The ability to create Functions that can be shared between Control Rigs
New Distance Matching and Pose Warping that allows a small set of animations to work with a wide range of motions.
- Distance Matching controls the play rate of an animation so that it matches the motion of the in-game character.
- Pose Warping dynamically adjusts the pose of the animation to better match the motion of the in-game character.
New Anim Blueprint Templates that allows the user to create reusable animation graphs, as well as enabling engine features to be shipped as animation graph assets.
New IK Rig and IK Retargeter to make it easier and more efficient to animate skeletal characters in the Unreal Editor.
- IK Rig enables you to interactively create solvers and goals that perform pose editing for your skeletal meshes. A common use case is to adjust a character additively while maintaining the existing animation, such as a moving character looking at a target.
- IK Retargeter enables you to rapidly and robustly transfer animations between characters of different proportions across different skeletons. The retargeting can be done either at runtime or for offline creation of new animation assets.