Epic Games releases Unreal Engine 5.4 < Game < News < Text of article

A new version of Unreal Engine 5 has been released with added and improved features related to performance, visual quality, and productivity.

Epic Games Korea 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 for game developers and creators in all industries.

This Unreal Engine 5.4 update, which has been thoroughly tested during Epic Games’ in-house development process, includes new features and improvements in areas such as animation, rendering, media and entertainment, developer iteration improvements, and cloth simulation.

First, in the animation sector, Unreal Engine’s basic animation toolset has been significantly updated for character rigging and animation production, allowing you to quickly and easily rig characters and create animations directly in the engine without having to waste time working cumbersomely in multiple external applications. It was possible to produce it.

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 greatly simplifies the process of adding animation to anim clips, etc. 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.

Performance has been significantly improved with the introduction of ‘Variable Rate Shading (VRS)’ through nanite computational materials, 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, resulting in predictable results regardless of the target platform, including a new history resurrection heuristic and the ability to flag materials that use pixel animation. Sting phenomenon has been reduced. 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.

Major updates to the movie render queue have also been made for creators who create one-way content. Using the new node-based architecture ‘Movie Render Graph (MRG)’, it is now possible to construct a graph that renders a single shot, or for large teams of artists, 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.

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.