Unreal 5

Unreal 5

RUIN will continue to follow the latest developments and advances in the gaming industry with a particular focus on impressive world building tools. Unreal 5 is highly relevant to the RUIN community as we research play test a variety of next generation games using this impressive technology.

The world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool

Unreal Engine 5.4 is now available

Unreal Engine 5.4 is here, and it’s packed with new features and improvements to performance, visual fidelity, and productivity that will benefit game developers and creators across industries. With this release, we’re delivering the toolsets we’ve been using internally to build and ship Fortnite Chapter 5, Rocket Racing, Fortnite Festival, and LEGO Fortnite. Here are some of the highlights.

Get an inside look at how Avalanche Software extended Unreal Engine to deliver an open world, cinematic storytelling game experience in Hogwarts Legacy. From developer experience tools, to mission editor workflows, character technologies, and cinematics storytelling editor extensions, you will get a glimpse of how the Hogwarts Legacy team embraced the Unreal Engine and extended it to achieve its game design goals and end-user gamer experience.

All the big news from the State of Unreal at GDC ’24

We just wrapped the State of Unreal at GDC ’24, which featured a brand new look at Skydance New Media’s new ensemble adventure Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, the release of Unreal Engine 5.4 Preview 1, MetaHumans coming to UEFN as non-playable characters (NPCs), new ways to build Fortnite experiences using Epic and LEGO® assets, and more.

Catch up on all the big news from the show here.

Unreal Engine 5.4 Preview 1 is here

Today we launched Unreal Engine 5.4 Preview 1 with the full release coming in late April. UE 5.4 introduces a number of rendering performance improvements, including major updates to Nanite, such as Nanite Tessellation that enables you to achieve far higher visual fidelity without making meshes larger on disk.

Animation takes big strides forward with 5.4. It includes Motion Matching, a simple and efficient way to animate characters in game that has been used in Fortnite on all platforms since the Chapter 5 launch. Later this year we will also release a free sample learning project that includes over 500 AAA animations created from high-end motion capture data with the locomotion and traversal dataset used in the keynote demo. In addition, thanks to extensive battletesting in LEGO Fortnite development, you can now fully animate your game using Control Rig and Sequencer with no round tripping between applications.

The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian Season One

A behind the scenes look at the groundbreaking virtual production technology used on The Mandalorian, Season One.

We are excited to see what the next generation of games have to offer!

Unreal Engine enables game developers and creators across industries to realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before.

Download Unreal 5

The future of next generation gaming

The world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool!

Build bigger worlds

Think big, really big. Unreal Engine 5 provides the tools and assets you need to create truly expansive worlds for your players, participants, and stakeholders to explore, using content that scales.

Leverage game-changing fidelity

Bring incredibly immersive and realistic interactive experiences to life with groundbreaking new features like Nanite and Lumen that provide a generational leap in visual fidelity, and enable worlds to be fully dynamic.

What’s new

Unreal Engine 5 empowers creators across all industries to deliver stunning real-time content and experiences. Here’s a roundup of the key new features.

See All New Features

Massively detailed

Create games and worlds with massive amounts of geometric detail with Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and a new Virtual Shadow Map system.

Directly import and replicate multi-million-polygon meshes while maintaining a real-time frame rate without any noticeable loss of fidelity.

These systems intelligently stream and process only the detail you can perceive, largely removing poly count and draw call constraints.

Dynamic global illumination and reflections

Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination and reflections solution that enables indirect lighting to adapt on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day or opening an exterior door.

With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; what you see inside the Unreal Editor is what you get on console.

WORLD PARTITION

Bigger, better Open Worlds

With Unreal Engine 5, a new World Partition system changes how levels are managed and streamed, automatically dividing the world into a grid and streaming the necessary cells.

Team members can now also simultaneously work on the same region of the same World, thanks to a new One File Per Actor system, while with Data Layers, you can create different variations of the same World—such as day and night versions—as layers that exist in the same space.

Free UE5-ready sample projects

 

Virtual world building tools

Applications in film and professional design and development

To help you explore all the new features in Unreal Engine 5, we’re offering two free sample projects for you to download. And for hundreds more free and paid UE5-compatible products, visit the Unreal Marketplace.

City Sample

The City Sample is a free downloadable sample project that reveals how the city scene from The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience was built. The project—which consists of a complete city with buildings, vehicles, and crowds of MetaHuman characters—demonstrates how we used new and improved systems in Unreal Engine 5 to create the experience.

Download

Allows for bringing virtually any intellectual property to life with cinematic visual effects.

Playing in environments previously only achievable in cinematics and film.