The official version of Unreal Engine 5 is now available for download.
Major new features
Next-Generation Real-Time Rendering
Unreal Engine 5 introduces a series of groundbreaking features to render real-time scenes in stunning high-fidelity detail.
First up is Lumen , a fully dynamic global illumination solution that helps you create unrealistic scenes when direct lighting or geometry in the scene changes (e.g. the sun angle changes with the time of day, turn on flashlight, or opening an outdoor door), indirect lighting will also adjust accordingly on the fly. With Lumen, you no longer need to edit lightmap UVs and wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; you can simply create and edit lights in Unreal Editor, and then see the game or experience running directly on the target The final lighting that will be presented to the player while on the platform.
Unreal Engine 5's new virtualized micropolygon geometry system , Nanite , is no different, and with it, you can create games and experiences with massive geometric detail. Whether it's a ZBrush sculpt, or photogrammetry scan data, you can directly import movie-quality art footage consisting of millions of polygons, maintaining real-time frame rates without any noticeable distortion, even if you place them millions of times.
Complementing this is the Virtual Shadow Map (VSM) , which is designed for Lumen and Nanite to provide realistic soft shadows at a reasonable, manageable performance cost. Nanite and VSM intelligently stream and process only the details you can perceive, which greatly relaxes the constraints on polygon counts and draw calls, eliminating time-consuming work like baking details to normal maps , or manually adjust the LOD), allowing you to focus on creating.
The next-generation console has been eagerly awaited by a new generation of players. On high-resolution monitors, players need frame rates of 60FPS or higher, which puts a huge strain on rendering resources. Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) is a high-quality upsampling system built into Unreal Engine and is platform-independent, allowing the engine to render at lower resolutions, but output pixel fidelity close to that at higher resolutions. Resolution rendered frame. What result will this create? Certainly better performance.
New open world toolset
Our goal is to enable teams of all sizes to create open worlds faster and easier through deeper collaboration. In Unreal Engine 5, the new world partition system changes the way levels are managed and streamed, which automatically divides the world into grids and streams only the necessary cells.
With the new One Actor One File (OFPA) system, team members can now also work in the same area of the same world at the same time without any conflict; and through the data layer, you can create different variants of the same world (for example, a day version and a night version, or a version with full geometry and a version with broken geometry), the variants will exist as data layers in the same space.
Finally, we have preliminary support for Large World Coordinates (LWC) , which use double precision values under the hood, which gives us the foundation to create very large worlds in Unreal Engine 5 without rebases or other tricks.
Built-in character and animation tools
Constantly switching between DCC software to tweak and iterate on animations is time-consuming, tedious, and inefficient. In Unreal Engine 5, you can animate in the authoring environment, reuse existing animations, and adjust animations to suit the game conditions at runtime.
We've introduced a powerful new set of artist-friendly tools that allow you to create animations directly in Unreal Engine. The most exciting part is that you can quickly and easily create a rig with production-ready enhanced control rigs , share that rig across multiple characters, and then go into Sequencer to animate them, where you can Save and apply poses using the latest pose browser , then use the Tween tool to apply blended keyframes with front and rear neighbors.
Why repeat meaningless labor when time is tight? A new set of retargeting toolset in Unreal Engine 5 helps you quickly and easily reuse animations and enhance existing animations. With the IK Redirector , you can transfer animations between characters with different skeletons and scales, for example, you can even redirect a human's animation to a wolf. On the other hand, IK rigs also allow you to overlay adjustments to character animations, for example, have the character gaze at a target while moving.
There are also new features that adjust animations at runtime to coordinate with different game scenarios, such as different speeds or terrain, for increased believability and immersion. Motion Distortion enables you to dynamically adjust the motion of a character's root bone to match different targets, for example, through an animation that makes a character jump over a wall of different heights. At the same time, you can also use distance matching to control the playback rate of animations, or use pose warps to dynamically adjust poses to better match character movement in the game.
In-editor modeling, UV editing and baking
In addition to animation, you should also reduce the number of switching back and forth between DCC software in other areas to avoid unnecessary time. In Unreal Engine 5, you'll find a vastly expanded and enhanced toolset dedicated to mesh modeling, UV editing, and baking. Together, they form a powerful workflow that allows artists to develop and optimize assets directly in Unreal Engine. These tools are especially useful when dealing with dense meshes, such as those generated by photogrammetry tools like RealityCapture, or those cobbled together from Quixel Megascans assets.
There are tons of new tools and enhancements to mesh creation and editing that represent a fundamental leap forward. These updates are based on an improved architecture for the creation of a framework for future tools and include several enhancements to core modeling , sculpting , and mesh refactoring and simplification . Stay tuned for further development!
Another important aspect is that we have also significantly updated and expanded the UV editing tool suite. We've introduced a new UV Editor panel that supports: Arrange, select, transform, cut and stitch UVs in 2D space; view, duplicate, add and delete UV channels; auto unwrap; use checkerboard in 3D Or custom texture preview UVs. There are also improvements for Project UVs and Auto UVs.
Last but not least, the Baking and Mesh toolset has also been greatly expanded. New baking tools offer improvements to normals, ambient occlusion and vertex baking, while the updated toolset also introduces key features such as multisampling, texture filtering, UV layers and N:1 baking.
Enhanced editor UI and workflow
It's time for a big change! Unreal Engine 5 supports a modern look, streamlined workflow, and optimized screen space usage, making it simpler, faster, and easier to use.
Quixel Bridge is now fully integrated into the engine and you can drag and drop directly and access all assets in the Megascans library without downloading Bridge separately. In the new "Create" menu , you can get a catalog of all Actors, create and place Actors with a simple drag-and-drop motion, and access recently used Actors with one click, all in one place, making the scene populate The process becomes faster and more convenient.
To make more room for interaction in the viewport, while ensuring you still have easy access to tools and content, we've added the ability to quickly expand and collapse the Content Browser via hotkeys or buttons , and also allow you to place any editor options Cards are docked to a collapsible sidebar.
In addition, in the Details panel , you can access the properties you're looking for more quickly: at the top of the panel, there's a Favorites system to keep properties you use frequently, and a new Column Bar for one-click Access groups of related properties.
Finally, you will also experience a simpler and faster new project process in an integrated screen window.
Fully procedural audio engine
In Unreal Engine 5, we're introducing a whole new way of producing audio. MetaSounds is a high-performance system that allows you to fully master how to generate audio DSP graphics for sound sources, allowing you to manage all aspects of audio rendering and driving the next generation of procedural audio experiences.
Similar to a fully programmable material and rendering pipeline, MetaSounds brings all the benefits of creating procedural content to audio (as the material editor is to shaders), including: dynamically driving assets with data, changing game parameters Mapped to sound playback, vastly improved workflow, and more.
Stunning final pixel images
First introduced in Unreal Engine 4.27, Path Tracer is a DXR-accelerated, physically accurate progressive rendering mode that requires no additional setup. When creating static images or linear content, it allows you to produce images with quality comparable to offline rendering directly from Unreal Engine in a short amount of time.
Unreal Engine 5 enhances the stability , performance , and functional integrity of the path tracer , including support for hair primitives and eye shader models , as well as improvements to sampling, bireflection models, light transport, supported geometry, and more.
See the release notes for details .
Download address: https://www.unrealengine.com/zh-CN/download