LogInThe release brings enhancements to the engine's existing features and a slew of new experimental tools for rendering, animation, and simulation.
A little over a month after the release of UE5.3 Preview, Epic Games has finally officially shipped Unreal Engine 5.3 – the long-awaited update for their renowned real-time 3D creation tool and game engine. Expanding the engine's capabilities and functionality, the release brings tons of cool new experimental features for rendering, animation, and simulation and refines the existing tools such as Lumen, Nanite, Path Tracing, and more.
Speaking of the existing tools, one of the update's highlights is the improvement of UE5's most notable features – Nanite and Lumen. According to the release notes shared by Epic, the former now delivers faster performance for materials with masking, including foliage, and offers a more extensive range of surface representation thanks to the new Explicit Tangents option. The latter with Hardware Ray Tracing has expanded capabilities, such as support for multiple reflection bounces and improved performance on consoles.
Other areas with noteworthy advancements include Virtual Shadow Maps, which are now production-ready, along with improvements to Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), Hair Grooms, Path Tracing, and Substrate.
As was promised earlier, the release also introduces Multi-Process Cook, allowing developers to make efficient use of additional CPU and memory resources during the conversion of content from the internal UE format to a platform-specific format, significantly reducing the time required to obtain a cooked output, whether from a build farm server or a local workstation.
Enabling Multi-Process Cook initiates subprocesses that work alongside the main process, performing various cooking tasks. Developers can select how many subprocesses they want to run on a single machine.
Another notable feature in Unreal Engine 5.3 is the inclusion of orthographic rendering, specifically tailored for visualizing architecture and manufacturing projects. It also offers orthographic projections as a stylistic camera option for games.
As noted by Epic, Most of UE5's modern features, including Lumen, Nanite, Shadows, and Temporal Super Resolutions, are now expected to function seamlessly with orthographic rendering. Furthermore, users can access orthographic rendering within the Unreal Editor, enabling real-time updates during their creative process.
Another cool feature present in Unreal Engine 5.3 is Skeletal Editor, which enables its users to create skeletons and edit mesh skin weights directly in the Unreal Editor. The tool allows for the addition of bones to the assets and the deformation of Static Meshes, converting them to Skeletal Meshes without having to import any skeleton data.
Furthermore, the update also enhances the engine's ML Deformer, first introduced in Unreal Engine 5.2, adding a masking system for Local Neural Morph Model, improving the Nearest Neighbor model UI and workflow, removing the NNI framework dependency, and more.
Other notable features include:
- Cine Cam Rig Rail: Filmmakers can now emulate the workflow and results of traditional camera movement along tracks or on dollies, thanks to a new Cine Cam Rig Rail Actor.
- Sparse Volume Textures and Path Tracing of Heterogeneous Volumes: Two new features that introduce a number of new capabilities for volumetric effects such as smoke and fire.
- Panel-based Chaos Cloth with ML simulation: The release brings a new Panel Cloth Editor and new skin weight transfer algorithms, and added XPBD (extended position-based dynamics) constraints as a basis for our future cloth generation in the engine. This provides for a non-destructive cloth simulation workflow in which you can trade off speed for precision.
- VCam enhancements: Enhancements to VCam in this release include the ability to review takes directly on the iPad, to simultaneously stream different VCam output for different team members, and to record at a slower frame rate and play back at normal speed.
- New tools for grooming hair and fur.
- Updates for large landscape import/export.
- New world-building tools.
- Hierarchical generation.
- nDisplay support for SMPTE ST 2110.
- Rule processing from external data.
- The ability to use data outside of the Control Rig graph to procedurally create and modify the rig.
- The ability to browse for Level Sequences from the virtual camera.
- New modeling tools.
- Enhanced audio tools.
- And much, much more!
You can find the full list of Unreal Engine 5.3's new features here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Threads, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.