The latest version of the engine brings updates to Lumen and Nanite, enhanced world-building tools, and improvements to virtual production workflows.
The Unreal Engine team announced that Unreal Engine 5.1, the long-awaited update to the latest version of Epic Games' game engine, has finally been released and is now available. Thanks to the feedback the team received from UE5.1 Preview users, the new version of the engine has been stress-tested against different workflows and is now applicable to more sectors. According to the developers, Unreal Engine 5.1 brings updates to Lumen and Nanite, enhanced world-building tools, and improvements to virtual production workflows.
The highlight of the update is the enhancements to UE5's flagship Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps features. The developers commented that all of these tools now support games and experiences running at 60 FPS on next-gen consoles and capable PCs, with Nanite also receiving a Programmable Rasterizer to allow for material-driven animations and deformations via World Position Offset, as well as opacity masks.
Those who are working on large open worlds will be able to enjoy an improved workflow thanks to the updated World Partition, which now supports Large World Coordinates, improved user experience around managing, filtering, searching, and viewing files and change lists, and the Hierarchical Level of Detail support for water rendering and streaming.
In-camera VFX workflows in Unreal Engine 5.1 have also been upgraded by the addition of a new dedicated In-Camera VFX Editor, which supports a range of workflows, an improved Light Card system, Color Correction Windows, a new Media Plate Actor that enables you to drag and drop footage from the Content Browser, and more.
And here are some more upgrades the engine's new version has received:
- Machine Learning Deformer has been added in beta;
- Enhancements to the Deformer Graph Editor;
- Sequencer now supports constraints;
- New functions for Geometry Scripting, UV Editor improvements, and additional mesh editing and creation tools;
- Additional node types added to MetaSounds;
- Support for various multichannel output formats in MetaSounds;
- MassEntity, a new gameplay-focused framework for data-oriented calculations that enables you to efficiently populate large-scale worlds and create crowds with tens of thousands of believable AI agents, has been added;
- And much, much more!
You can check out the full list of UE5.1's upgrades and new features by clicking this link. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.