The release of Unreal Engine 5.5 has brought us a wealth of exciting features. This update has made significant advances in the areas of animation authoring, virtual production, and mobile game development. Additionally, the features within fields such as rendering, in-camera visual effects (VFX), and developer iteration have reached a stage of production-readiness. Let's delve into some of the new highlights together.
What’s New in Unreal Engine 5.5?
Unreal Engine 5.5 brings various new features and enhancements for high-quality in-editor animation workflows, reducing the need for roundtrips with DCC applications, and offers an upgraded Sequencer for efficient productivity. The new nondestructive animation layers also provide controls similar to traditional DCC applications.
Notably, realistic animation effects are achievable with animatable animation deformers inside Control Rig. An Animator Kit plugin is also provided with ready-made Control Rigs for use or reference.
Image from Epic Games
Modular Control Rig now supports beta with improved UI and UX; more modules, facilitating bipedal skeleton types. The Skeletal Editor has equally improved for simpler workflows in painting and editing weights.
The MetaHuman Plugin has also seen significant upgrades, introducing a fully local, offline solution for generating high-quality facial animation just from audio performances.
The Mutable character customization system enables dynamic changes at runtime for optimized memory usage and shader costs. The feature can handle highly customized parameters, mesh interactions, and texture effects.
The Production-Ready choosers provide a framework for asset selection based on the game’s context, reducing complex logic-writing. They can handle simple selectors to database-driven logic involving thousands of animations.
Unreal Engine 5.5 continues to enhance rendering performance and fidelity while leading the real-time rendering innovation.
Lumen's significant improvements now support running at 60 Hz on platforms with suitable hardware, enhancing Path Tracer and light baking performance too.
Image from Epic Games
The DXR-accelerated Path Tracer has become Production-Ready, providing excellent quality for rendering and compatibility with the sky atmosphere and volumetric clouds.
Substrate, offering rich material authoring capabilities, is now in Beta and supports all features of legacy materials and all platforms that UE deploys. It's optimized to offer enhanced control over object look and feel.
Movie Render Graph (MRG), introduced as Experimental, is in Beta, offering enhanced configuration workflows and full support for all asset types in MRG’s Render Layers feature, providing an Experimental spatio-temporal denoiser for Path Tracer.
The Experimental feature MegaLights is previewed in this release. It allows you to add numerous dynamic, shadow-casting lights to scenes without constraints, prioritizing artistic considerations over performance impact.
Image from Epic Games
There are many other new releases in Unreal Engine 5.5 in terms of virtual production, mobile game development, developer iteration etc. You can discover more details in their release notes.
Check out the video to learn more:
Source: Epic Games
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