Epic Games Korea (CEO Park Seong-cheol) announced on the 24th that it has officially released Unreal Engine 5.4, a new update to Unreal Engine that provides new features and improvements.
This Unreal Engine 5.4 update includes new features and improvements in areas such as ▲animation ▲rendering ▲media and entertainment ▲improvement of developer iteration tasks ▲cloth simulation.
First, in the animation sector, Unreal Engine’s basic animation toolset has been updated for character rigging and animation production. You can quickly and easily rig characters and create animations directly in the engine, no longer needing to waste time working in multiple external applications.
By using the newly introduced feature ‘Modular Control Rig’, you can create animation rigs with easy-to-understand modular parts instead of complex and segmented graphs, and the ‘Automatic Retargeting’ function improves the results when reusing bipedal character animation. It’s easy to get. To make it easier to use the ‘Deformer Graph’, the ‘Skeleton Editor’ has been expanded and a new set of deformer functions have also been added.
Additionally, in terms of animation creation, the new feature ‘Gizmo’, the revamped ‘Anim Detail’, ‘Constraint’ system upgrades and enhancements, and the new feature ‘Layered Control Rig’ that simplifies the process of adding animation to anim clips. We focused on making the animation toolset more intuitive and powerful while streamlining the workflow.
‘Sequencer’, Unreal Engine’s non-linear animation editor, has improved readability and usability in various aspects of the sequencer tree, and a new ‘keyframe script method’ has been added, opening up the possibility of creating custom animation tools.
In the animation gameplay section, the ‘Motion Matching’ function, which has been tested in ‘Fortnite Battle Royale’ and applied to more than 100 characters and NPCs on all platforms from mobile to console, is provided in the official version. Motion Matching, a next-generation, scalable framework for animation functions, uses the current motion information of in-game characters as a key to create a relatively large database of captured animations, rather than using complex logic to select and transition animation clips at runtime. Use the search method.
In version 5.4, we focused on making Unreal Engine’s animator-friendly toolset into a tool with excellent performance and memory expansion, and added a debugging toolset that allows developers to understand what is happening internally. Additionally, by adding a ‘selector’, you can now select animations using the game context.
In the rendering area, continuous improvements are made, starting with the new function ‘Tessellation’, which allows adding fine details such as cracks and bumps to ‘Nanite’, Unreal Engine 5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry system, when rendering without changing the original mesh. This is being done.
Performance has been improved with the introduction of ‘Variable Rate Shading (VRS)’ through the ‘Nanite’ computational material, and ‘Spline Mesh Workflow’, which is useful for tasks such as creating roads in a landscape, is also supported.
Additionally, a new option to disable UV interpolation allows vertex animation textures to be used for world position offset animation, allowing the ‘AnimToTexture’ plugin to be used with Nanite geometry.
‘Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) has also improved stability and performance. This ensures predictable results regardless of the target platform, and ghosting is reduced thanks to the new history resurrected heuristic and the ability to flag materials that use pixel animation. In addition, a new visualization mode that makes it easier to fine-tune and debug TSR’s behavior has been added, as well as a variety of new options in engine quality settings to control it according to target performance.
Meanwhile, Epic Games worked to improve rendering performance in this version for many developers aiming for a 60Hz experience. System refactoring to support a higher degree of parallelism, GPU instance culling has been added to hardware ray tracing, which can now take advantage of additional primitive types and optimized path tracers, and shader compilation has also been further optimized, significantly reducing project cook times. Noticeably improved.
Major updates to the movie render queue have also been made for creators who create one-way content. The new node-based architecture, Movie Render Graph (MRG), allows users to construct a graph to render a single shot or, for large teams of artists, to scale across complex multi-shot workflows. Graph is pipeline-friendly, and studios can build and automate tools with Python Hooks. In addition, a ‘render layer’ is provided, allowing you to easily create high-quality elements for post-compositing, such as separating foreground and background elements, and supports both path tracer and deferred renderer.
In the media and entertainment section, motion graphics introduced a new ‘Motion Design’ mode consisting of specialized tools for creating complex 2D motion graphics. Developed based on production testing and feedback from major broadcasters, this feature is designed to provide motion designers with an improved user experience and continuous productivity, and provides a comprehensive toolset including 3D cloners, effects, modifiers, animators, and more.
Filmmakers who adopt virtual production can enjoy many advantages through updates to Unreal Engine’s ‘Virtual Camera’ tool, which is provided in the official version, and support for Android in addition to the existing iOS platform. Virtual camera work is also available in Unreal Engine for macOS. Flow is fully supported. This mobile application, which has been renamed ‘Unreal VCam’, can be downloaded from the App Store and Google Play Store.
In VR Scouting, a new, fully customizable toolkit using the ‘XR Creative Framework’ has been added. This supports OpenXR HMDs such as Oculus and Valve Index, providing a significantly improved user experience than the existing virtual scouting toolkit.
In the area of improving developer iteration, ‘Unreal Cloud DDC’, a self-hosted cloud storage system for Unreal Engine Derived Data Cache (DDC), has been newly added. Designed for distributed users and teams, this easy-to-maintain, reliable, and accessible feature automatically replicates data between endpoints hosted in Unreal Cloud DDC across multiple geographies, ensuring users are always connected to the closest endpoint. Supports access to . This system, protected by OIDC login and authentication, has been verified in practice through Epic Games’ Amazon Web Service (AWS) and provides deployment guidelines for Microsoft Azure.
Local DDC has also been improved using the new ‘Unreal Zen Storage’ server architecture. This provides improved data conditioning performance, faster editor load times and play-in-editor (PIE) workflows, and more control over cache writes, purges, and data duplication prevention.
In the cloth simulation sector, the collaboration between Epic Games and CLO Virtual Fashion has resulted in the addition of a new USD importer to the panel cloth editor, allowing you to now import clothes and simulation parameters from Marvelous Designer or CLO in real time in just minutes. It is now possible to configure a simulation.
In addition, various new and improved features have been added to Unreal Engine version 5.4, and the new pricing and licensing models for Unreal Engine, Twinmotion, and Reality Capture announced in March will be applied with the release of Unreal Engine version 5.4.
