Epic has announced the release of Unreal Studio 4.22. In addition to the benefits of the 4.22 release of the Unreal Engine such as real-time ray tracing, the Studio sister product adds several improvements aimed at non-game users.
This includes changes to the Datasmith tool for transferring and optimising scenes for import to Unreal. The 3DS Max exporter gains the ability to import basic animations and has improved compatibility and performance with 3DS Max plugins Forest Pack and RailClone. There are also fixes to the way that light intensity is interpreted.
For Revit users the early access exporter continues to progress, but for other CAD apps there’s improved performance for importing large scenes, the addition of NURBS stitching options, and more control over the tessellation of Rhino files.
The glTF format gains early access compatibility with support for object animation, basic lights, and PBR materials, as well as a nondestructive re-import workflow. MDL/AxF is improved for better user experience, enhanced visual fidelity, and faster iterations and VRED/DELTAGEN gains support for using variants.
Changes have been made to Unreal to make it more useful for creating content that goes beyond real time gaming. For still images and video, render layers are supported in Unreal Engine’s built-in compositing module which now offers a UI to easily organise objects into separate render layers for use in Photoshop, Nuke, After Effects etc. nDisplay support has been improved, with the ability to render different viewports to multiple displays from a single instance of Unreal Engine, making the creation of immersive environments more efficient.
Finally, Unreal Editor itself sees some usability tweaks with improved navigation, selection, layer manipulation, mesh editing and more.
To find out more about the new features, visit Epic’s website.
