Unreal Engine Changelog

What's new in Unreal Engine 5.4

• Animation:
• Automatic Retargeting makes it easier to get great results when reusing bipedal character animations. There are also extensions to the Skeletal Editor and a suite of new deformer functions to make the Deformer Graph more accessible.
• New Gizmos, reorganized Anim Details, upgrades and improvements to the Constraints system, and a new Layered Control Rigs feature make our animation authoring tools more robust and intuitive.
• Unreal Engine’s nonlinear animation editor Sequencer received a significant makeover, with better readability and improved usability in several aspects of the Sequencer Tree. Among other new features in this release, we’ve also added Keyframe Scriptability.
• Motion Matching, an expandable next-gen framework for animation features, is Production-Ready. We’ve focused on making the toolset robust, performant, and memory-scalable, as well as adding a suite of debugging tools.
• Choosers, a much-requested tool that enables you to use game context to drive animation selection.
• Rendering:
• UE5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry system Nanite continues to receive enhancements, such as an Experimental new Tessellation feature that enables fine details such as cracks and bumps to be added at render time, without altering the original mesh.
• Moreover, the addition of software variable rate shading (VRS) via Nanite compute materials brings substantial performance gains. There’s also support for spline mesh workflows—great for creating roads on landscapes, for example.
• In this release, Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) has received stability and performance enhancements to ensure a predictable output regardless of the target platform.
• AI and machine learning:
• The Neural Network Engine (NNE) moves from Experimental to Beta. With support for both in-editor and runtime applications, NNE enables developers to load and efficiently run their pre-trained neural network models.
• Developer iteration:
• Unreal Cloud DDC is a self-hosted cloud storage system for Unreal Engine Derived Data Cache (DDC). Designed for distributed users and teams, it enables them to efficiently share Unreal Engine cached data across public network connections.
• Our local DDC now uses a new Unreal Zen Storage server architecture, offering improved data conditioning performance; faster editor load times and Play In Editor (PIE) workflows; and greater control over cache writes, eviction, and data deduplication.
• Now Production-Ready, Multi-Process Cook enables developers converting content from the internal UE format to a platform-specific format to leverage additional CPU and memory resources, significantly reducing the time it takes to get a cooked output.
• In Beta, Unreal Build Accelerator (UBA) is a scalable distributed compilation solution for C++. It is used in conjunction with Unreal Build Tool and/or Unreal Horde’s Remote Execution (compute task) system to accelerate build compilation time.
• Media and entertainment:
• Virtual Camera is Production-Ready. It adds Android support and Virtual Camera workflows are fully supported on macOS. The mobile application has been renamed Unreal VCam, and can be found on the Apple Store 134 and Google Play 223.
• For ICVFX, a Depth of Field Compensation feature means you can accurately control the amount of DOF falloff of the digital content rendered by nDisplay as seen by the movie camera, yielding better results for close-up beauty shots.
• Multi-Process Inner Frustum, enables the render of what’s seen by the movie camera to be split across more GPUs and hardware resources, alongside numerous stability improvements and other enhancements to our SMPTE 2110 support—which is moving closer to Production-Ready status.
• Cloth simulation:
• It’s now possible to import a garment—including simulation parameters—Marvelous Designer or CLO using a new USD Importer in the Panel Cloth Editor.
• Experimental Features:
• Please try them out and send us your feedback 10, but keep in mind these features are still under heavy development and we don’t recommend using them in your final projects just yet.
• Build animation rigs from straightforward modular parts with Modular Control Rig, which utilizes the entire framework of Control Rig for creating rigs that are ready to be animated on any skeleton instantly.
• Motion Design mode is equipped with specialized tools for authoring complex 2D motion graphics, offering a comprehensive suite of tools, including 3D cloners, effectors, modifiers, animators, and more.
• Movie Render Queue received a major update with the Experimental Movie Render Graph (MRG), a node-based architecture that enables users to set up graphs to render a single shot, or design them to scale out across complex multi-shot workflows for large teams of artists.
• On the VR Scouting front, try the Experimental fully customizable toolkit that utilizes XR Creative Framework to support OpenXR HMDs—such as Oculus and Valve Index—offering a dramatically improved user experience over the existing Virtual Scouting toolkit.
• Experimental ray tracing support for Vulkan on Linux is now available.