Unreal Engine 5.7 The Newest and Major Developments and Improvements
Unreal Engine 5.7 marks yet another major milestone in this toolset through all sorts of improvements or new features in rendering, animation, worldbuilding, and developer workflows. Fine-tuning previously developed systems and preparing for production these powerful new tools into use.
Major Rendering Breakthroughs
A set of rendering pipeline updates has been in development with UE 5.7, getting visual fidelity or performance beyond reach.
- MegaLights (Beta) This global illumination system is currently in Beta with improvement of noise reduction and performance sunshine. It now supports directional lights, particle lights from Niagara, and translucency.
- Nanite Foliage and Skinning (Experimental) With this new standard rendering path for foliage, Nanite Assemblies are coupled with Nanite Skinning-for wind dynamics, and also Nanite Voxels-for distant rendering. Thus, it makes possible cinerich, lifelife, animated worlds efficiently within a budget of 60fps on today's hardware.
- Substrate (Production Ready) The modular, physically grounded materials framework is now activated by default and is considered production-ready, allowing more expressive and flexible material creation replacing fixed shading models.
- SMAA Anti-Aliasing (Experimental) With high-fidelity edge smoothing which minimizes performance overhead, this feature is great for mobile titling as it is now supported by both mobile and desktop renderers using Subpixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing (SMAA).
Improvements in Character Animation Tool
Animators and character artists are also gaining even more control and efficiency from a series of newly developed and improved tools.
- Motion Matching with Chooser (Experimental) Motion Matching is now integrated into Choosers, the first stage of its development, and users can now specify the conditions under which they wish particular animation assets to be selected as valid, based on game logic or other considerations.
- Blendshapes and Sculpting Tools One can now also create and edit morph shapes (blendshapes), bones, and skin weights directly within the Skeletal Editor as part and parcel to streamline workflows in character building.
- Improved IK Retargeting The IK Retargeter is now upgraded to achieve better ground contact and handling of characters with vastly different proportions, thus making retargeting simpler across a broad variety of characters.
- MetaHuman Creator in UE MetaHuman Creator is now also available on Linux and macOS directly within Unreal Engine itself and will come complete with an extensive Python/Blueprint API to enable automating nearly all editing and assembly operations.
Worldbuilding and PCG
Tools for building immense, dynamic worlds made major improvements in this release.
- PCG Framework (Production Ready) The Proceedurally Created Content Framework is now production ready, effectively providing a stable and reliable tool as well as approaches for generating content within the editor and at runtime.
- PCG Editor Mode A new, dedicated editor mode comes with a library of customizable PCG tools for tasks such as drawing splines or painting volumes, and it edits the relevant PCG Graph parameters live.
- Procedural Vegetation Editor (Experimental) This new plugin enables the construction and modification of such vegetation meshes as Nanite foliage completely inside Unreal Engine through the functionality of a PCG node graph.
- Custom HLODs The developers can now provide their individual custom HLOD (Hierarchical Level of Detail) representations for individual actors or groups of actors, thus giving far better control from optimization than purely automatic methods.
Developer and Pipeline Improvements
UE 5.7 also features solid updates regarding improving iteration times in developing as well as enhancing the experience of the developer overall.
- AI Assistant (Experimental) Now, developers can ask questions, write codes and be guided through a process without leaving the editor using an integrated AI Assistant panel.
- Incremental Cooking (Beta) This feature is now in Beta and greatly reduces cooking times in that it analyzes what changed and performs cooking again only if those assets were directly affected by the change and brings iteration much faster on target devices.
- Iris Network (Beta) The next-generation replication system is already in Beta, equipped with a firmware solid API and usability improvements. It now also supports Unreal Engine's seamless travel.
- Chaos Destruction Updates The destruction system allows now resetting the state of a geometry collection and exporting to a skeletal mesh asset.
