Epic Games has officially released Unreal Engine 5.4, bringing new features and improvements for game developers and creators across all industries.
Unreal Engine includes new features and improvements in animation and rendering, media and entertainment, improved developer iteration, cloth simulation, and more.
As for animation features, Unreal Engine’s basic animation toolset has been significantly 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. The ‘Automatic Retargeting’ feature makes it easier to achieve results when reusing bipedal character animation. To make it easier to use the ‘Deformer Graph’, the ‘Skeleton Editor’ has been expanded and a new set of deformer functions has been added.
In terms of animation creation, it offers a new feature ‘Gizmo’, a revamped ‘Anim Detail’, ‘Constraint’ system upgrades and enhancements, and a new feature ‘Layered Control Rig’ that greatly 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 greatly 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 thoroughly 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 function, a new function, ‘Tessellation’, which can add fine details such as cracks or bumps when rendering without changing the original mesh, has been added to ‘Nanite’, Unreal Engine 5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry system.
Performance has been significantly improved with the introduction of ‘variable rate shading’ through nanite computational materials. A ‘spline mesh workflow’, 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 also improves stability and performance, resulting in predictable results regardless of the target platform. Among these, ghosting has been reduced thanks to the new history resurrected heuristic and the ability to flag materials that use pixel animation.
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’ allows you to construct a graph that renders a single shot, or for large teams of artists, you can design it to scale across complex multi-shot workflows.
Graph is pipeline-friendly and allows studios to 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.
Media and Entertainment features a new ‘Motion Design’ mode in motion graphics, 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. It provides a comprehensive toolset including 3D cloners, effectors, modifiers, animators, and more.
As a feature to improve developer iteration, ‘Unreal Cloud DDC’, a self-hosted cloud storage system for Unreal Engine-derived data cache, was introduced. Practical verification was completed through Epic Games’ Amazon Web Service.
Local DDC has 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.
As for the cloth simulation feature, a new USD importer has been added to the panel cloth editor as a result of the collaboration between Epic Games and CLO Virtual Fashion, allowing you to now import clothing and simulation parameters from Marvelous Designer or CLO to create real-time simulations in just minutes. can do.
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.
Meanwhile, to commemorate the release of the new Unreal Engine 5.4, Epic Games Korea will be holding a webinar on May 21 at 2pm where Unreal Engine experts will provide detailed explanations of key features and updates.
