LogInIntroducing major enhancements to animation authoring, virtual production, mobile game development, rendering, developer iteration toolsets, and much more.
The highly anticipated Unreal Engine 5.5 has finally arrived, just a month after the release of the Preview version, bringing major enhancements to animation authoring, rendering, ICVFX, mobile game dev, and experimental features like MegaLights to everyone.
Unreal Engine 5.5 introduces new options and improvements to facilitate high-fidelity in-editor animation authoring workflows, allowing for animating in context and minimizing the need to roundtrip with DCC applications. Also, there are updates to the animation gameplay authoring toolset.
The Sequencer now features a more customizable interface, nondestructive animation layers, and additional functionalities, including the ability to author animatable deformers inside Control Rig and apply them to characters in Sequencer with a single click.
The MetaHuman Animator, part of the MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine, gets a major upgrade in this release: now it can generate high-quality facial animation, including upper face gestures, just from audio performances.
The new Mutable character customization system lets developers create dynamic meshes, materials, and textures for characters and props that change at runtime while optimizing memory, shaders, and draw calls. A sample project to explore its features will be available in the next few days.
Lumen now runs at 60 Hz on supported hardware. The DXR-accelerated Path Tracer mode is now production-ready, providing high-quality rendering for final pixels in nonlinear applications and ground-truth reference images. This release also includes performance and fidelity improvements, Linux support, and other full production-ready features like sky atmosphere and volumetric clouds.
The highlight of Unreal Engine 5.5, a brand-new experimental lighting feature MegaLights, also referred to as the "Nanite of lights", allows you to add hundreds of dynamic, shadow-casting lights to your scenes without performance limitations. For the first time, lighting artists can freely use textured area lights with soft shadows, Light Functions, media texture playback, and volumetric shadows on both consoles and PC, prioritizing artistic expression over performance.
Unreal Engine 5.5 also builds on previous virtual production updates, bringing the ICVFX toolset to full production-readiness, along with other enhancements for virtual production and visualization. Elevate your projects with added support for SMPTE 2110, a production-ready Camera Calibration solver, and Virtual Scouting, and explore the new Color Grading Panel in the Unreal Editor, offering a user-friendly interface for creative color manipulation in any scene.
The Mobile Forward Renderer gains new features for improved visual fidelity, including D-buffer decals, rectangular area lights, capsule shadows, movable IES textures, volumetric fog, and Niagara particle lights. Screen-space reflections are now supported in both Forward and Deferred Renderers.
Additionally, this release now enables runtime automatic PSO precaching by default, and the Mobile Previewer also receives several updates, including the ability to capture and preview specific Android device profiles and emulate half-precision 16-bit float shaders, helping developers identify and address artifacts more easily.
Finally, Unreal Engine 5 continues to enhance its data processing and iteration pipelines to support the growing scale and ambitions of creator experiences.
Unreal Zen Server, a new optimized cached data storage and network communication system, is now production-ready. In this release, it can also stream cooked data to target platforms, including PC, console, and mobile, allowing developers to quickly and easily assess their game's look and behavior on different platforms during the production.
Finally, last month, Epic Games launched Fab, a new unified content marketplace. Now integrated into Unreal Engine 5.5, Fab allows you to easily drag and drop individual assets, like Quixel Megascans, directly into your scene, or add asset packs to your Content Browser.
Check out the release notes for the full list of features in Unreal Engine 5.5 and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.