Unreal Engine 5.4 Has Been Launched

Unreal Engine 5.4, a highly anticipated update to Epic Games' flagship game engine, has finally been officially launched, arriving a month after its Preview version debut during Game Developers Conference 2024.

Aiming to expand the engine's capabilities and refine its existing tools, the release introduces a slew of new features and improvements across the board. One of 5.4's highlights is the engine's revamped animation toolset, enhanced by the addition of a new Modular Control Rig feature, which lets you build animation rigs from modular parts directly in the editor, Automatic Retargeting, and a novel Layered Control Rigs feature that simplifies adding animation on top of anim clips.

Moreover, the experimental Motion Matching feature, described by the team as a next-gen framework for animation features, is now production-ready, providing UE5 users access to a vast database of captured animations for selecting and transitioning animation clips at runtime.

When it comes to the software's rendering tools, the addition of the long-awaited Tessellation feature to Nanite stands in a league of its own. With it, users can easily add fine details such as cracks and bumps at render time, all without altering the original mesh. Additional upgrades received by Nanite include performance-boosting Variable Rate Shading (VRS), support for spline mesh workflows, and a new option to disable UV interpolation.

On top of that, the engine's Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), a platform-agnostic Temporal Upscaler for rendering 4K images, has been upgraded, with the team reducing ghosting and adding new visualization modes that make it easier to fine-tune and debug TSR's behavior.

Another noteworthy addition in Unreal Engine 5.4 is the brand-new Movie Render Graph (MRG), a node-based architecture that enables users to set up graphs to render a single shot or design them to scale out across complex multi-shot workflows. Within MRG, users will find Render Layers, a highly requested feature enabling the easy generation of high-quality elements for post-compositing, such as separating foreground and background elements.

Multi-Process Cook, first introduced as Beta in Unreal Engine 5.3, has also been refined and is now production-ready, enabling developers to convert content from the internal Unreal Engine format to a platform-specific format much faster by harnessing additional CPU and memory resources.

Furthermore, Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces an experimental new Motion Design mode, equipped with specialized tools for authoring complex 2D motion graphics. Designed to enhance user experience and boost productivity for motion designers, the mode offers a comprehensive suite of tools, including 3D cloners, effectors, modifiers, animators, and more.

If your work involves cloth simulation, you'll also be pleased to know that this release introduces a new USD Importer in the Panel Cloth Editor, enabling one to import a garment and its simulation parameters from Marvelous Designer or CLO, and set it up for real-time simulation in just minutes. With automatic simulation graph setup, skinning, and LOD creation, this new workflow enables users, even those with limited experience, to effortlessly create convincing garments for their Unreal Engine characters.

You can find the full list of Unreal Engine 5.4's features by clicking this link. Don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.