Gamingdeputy reported on April 24 that the official version of Unreal Engine 5.4 has been released. According to reports, it includes new features and improvements in performance, visual fidelity and production efficiency. Gamingdeputy has compiled some of the feature highlights as follows:
animation
Character Rigging and Animation
This release updates the animation toolset built into Unreal Engine,Users can rig characters and animate directly in the engine without having to repeatedly switch to external applications..
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Users can use modular parts to build animation rigs with the new experimental modular control rigging feature; automatic redirection makes it easier to achieve great results when reusing animations on bipedal characters.
In addition, Unreal Engine 5.4 also expands the skeleton editor, provides a new set of deformer functions, and improves the ease of use of deformer charts.
When it comes to animation production, Unreal Engine 5.4 simplifies the workflow. include:
New experimental gadgets launched;
Reorganized animation details panel;
Upgraded and improved restraint systems;
New hierarchical control binding functionality providedsimplifying the process of adding animation based on animation clips.
At the same time, Unreal Engine's non-linear animation editor Sequencer has also been improved. The Sequencer tree improves readability and improves usability. Other new features in this release include keyframe scripting, providing more possibilities for creating custom animation tools.
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Application of animation in games
Motion matching, introduced as an experimental feature, is now available in production environments. Fortnite's Airborne Ops mode has put it to the test:Supports all platforms from mobile devices to consolesand has been applied to 100 characters and NPCs.
Motion Matching is an extensible next-generation animation feature framework. It does not require complex logic to select and transform animation clips at runtime, relying on the current motion information of the character in the game as a key to search a relatively large database of captured animations.
In this release, Unreal Engine 5.4 focuses on improving the robustness, performance, and memory scalability of the animator toolset, and adds a set of debugging tools that allow developers to see its inner workings.
In terms of game features, Unreal Engine 5.4 also adds selectors, a tool that supports using game context to drive animation selections. At the same time, the system can either use variables to inform choices or set variables based on those choices to feed information back to the game logic.
rendering
Nanite
Nanite, UE5's virtualized micropolygon geometry system, has been enhanced with:
Added experimental tessellation function,Details like cracks and bumps can be added at render time without modifying the original mesh;
Improved software variable rate shading (VRS) performance added to Nanite computational materials;
Added support for the spline mesh workflow, with examples of applications including quickly creating roads on terrain.
Additionally, Unreal Engine 5.4 provides a new option to disable UV interpolation, which enables vertex animation textures to be used for global position offset animations. This means that the AnimToTexture plug-in can now be used with Nanite geometry.
Timing Super Resolution
In this version, the stability and performance of Timing Super Resolution (TSR) have been enhanced to ensure predictable output results on any target platform, including:
Leverage new historical reconstruction heuristics to reduce ghosting;
Supports marking materials that use pixel animation;
A new visualization mode has been added to simplify the adjustment and debugging of TSR behavior;
Many new options have been added to the extensibility settings,to control TSR based on target performance.
Rendering performance
Unreal Engine officials stated that since many developers aim to develop a 60Hz experience, Unreal Engine 5.4 has optimized the rendering performance in UE 5.4, including:
Refactor the systemimprove the degree of parallelization;
Adds GPU instance culling for hardware ray tracing(Additional primitive types and optimized path tracers will also benefit hardware ray tracing);
Shader compilation optimizationimprove the baking time of the project.
Video rendering chart
Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces major updates to the movie render queue. With a new node-based architecture called the Movie Render Graph (MRG), users can set up graphs to render individual shots or scale them by design across complex multi-shot workflows for large teams of artists.
Charts are pipeline-friendly and provide Python hooks for studio build tools and automated processes.
MRG includes render layers, a feature that generates high-quality elements (such as separated foreground and background elements) for post-compositing, with support for both path tracers and deferred renderers.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
neural network engine
In Unreal Engine 5.4, the Neural Network Engine (NNE) has moved from experimental to beta. NNE supports in-editor applications and runtime applications, allowing developers to load and run pre-trained neural network models.
Its common application scenarios include:
Build tool chain
Animation
rendering
physics simulation
Each application scenario has different requirements in terms of platform and model support. NNE addresses these diverse needs by providing a common API that enables simple switching of backends as needed.Unreal Engine 5.4 also provides extensibility hooks (Hook), allowing third-party developers to implement the NNE interface in plug-ins..
Developer iteration
Cloud services and locally derived data caching
Unreal Cloud DCC is a self-hosted cloud storage system for the Unreal Engine Derived Data Cache (DDC). Designed for users and teams distributed across multiple locations, it enables teams to share Unreal Engine cache data over a public network.
Officials say this is a low-maintenance, secure, and easy-to-use solution that can automatically replicate data between multiple regional Unreal Cloud DDC hosted endpoints, allowing users to always connect to the nearest available endpoint.
The system is protected by OIDC login and authentication, has been production tested on Epic's AWS, and has deployment instructions for Azure.
This release also enhances Unreal Engine 5.4’s native DDC, which now uses the new Unreal Zen Storage Server architecture.Provides higher data conditioning performance, faster editor load timesand “Run in Editor” (PIE) workflows, as well as greater control over cache writes, evictions, and data deduplication.
Multi-process baking
Multi-process baking, introduced as a beta feature in Unreal Engine 5.3, is now production-ready. This feature allows developers to convert content from UE internal formats to platform-specific formats to take advantage of additional CPU and memory resources, reducing the time required to obtain baked output from a build farm server or local workstation.
Unreal Build Accelerator
This version introduces the new Unreal Build Accelerator (UBA), which is said to be a scalable C++ distributed compilation solution.
UBA can be used in conjunction with Unreal Build Tools and/or Unreal Horde's remote execution (compute task) system to speed up build compilation times.
at present,UBA is also a beta feature, and in this version it supports C++ compilation tasks for Windows operating systems; and provides experimental native macOS and Linux supportas well as process idle detection and shader compilation.
media and entertainment
motion graphics
Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces an experimental new mode: Motion Design.
This mode comes with specialized tools for creating complex 2D motion graphics.This dedicated mode provides a comprehensive set of tools, including 3D cloners, effects, modifiers, animators and more.
virtual production
The tool is now production ready,Platform will expand support from current iOS to Android. Unreal Engine on macOS also fully supports virtual camera workflows. Its mobile app has been renamed Unreal VCam and can be found on the Apple Store and Google Play.
In terms of virtual surveying, Unreal Engine 5.4 launches a new, fully customizable experimental toolkit that uses the XR creative framework to provide support for OpenXR HMDs (such as Oculus and Valve Index). Compared with existing virtual surveying toolkits, User experience is improved.
In in-camera visual effects, a new depth-of-field compensation feature allows users to precisely control the amount of depth-of-field attenuation seen in cinema cameras for digital content rendered by nDisplay, resulting in better results for close-up scenic shots.
Unreal Engine 5.4 also adds multi-process in-process view frustums to split rendering tasks and utilize more GPU and hardware resources to handle rendering displayed in the movie camera. Unreal Engine 5.4 also provides a number of stability improvements and enhanced support for SMPTE Support for the 2110 standard brings it one step closer to production-ready status.
Support for Linux
Studios using Linux will also benefit from editor stability improvements on the platform, as well as the introduction of experimental support for Vulkan ray tracing.
cloth simulation
USD importer
With the newly added USD importer in the panel cloth editor, it is now possible to import garments (including simulation parameters) from Marvelous Designer or CLO and set up a real-time simulation in minutes. Create realistic clothing for Unreal Engine characters by automatically setting up simulation charts, skinning, and creating Levels of Detail (LOD).
Unreal Engine officially releases new version and new feature highlights:
Gamingdeputy previously reported that in March this year, Epic Games attended the 2024 Game Developers Conference (GDC 2024) and officially announced the launch of the first preview version of Unreal Engine 5.4. The main new feature of this version in terms of animation is motion matching (Motion Matching), which blends positions to efficiently animate game characters.