LogInThis release introduces Nanite Foliage, production-ready PCG and Substrate frameworks, enhanced animation workflows, a new AI Assistant, and more.
After a couple of months in preview, Unreal Engine 5.7 has officially arrived, packed with powerful tools to help you craft vast, richly detailed worlds with better lighting capabilities. You can now also enjoy more intuitive and robust animation and rigging workflows, deeper MetaHuman integration, and much more.
The highlight of this release is Nanite Foliage, an experimental new geometry rendering system built to create and animate dense, highly detailed foliage for open-world environments, all while maintaining efficient performance on current-generation hardware. Powered by Nanite Voxels, it uses Nanite Assemblies to cut storage and rendering costs, and Nanite Skinning to drive dynamic effects like wind movement.
Unreal Engine 5.7 makes both the Procedural Content Generation framework and the Substrate modular material authoring and rendering framework production-ready.
The new PCG Editor Mode introduces a library of customizable, no-code tools built on the PCG framework. You can draw splines, paint points, or create volumes, each powered by a PCG Graph that offers real-time parameter control and standalone asset workflows. Alongside this, PCG GPU compute is now much faster thanks to multiple performance optimizations, and there's also new support for GPU parameter overrides, allowing you to dynamically adjust parameter values when working with GPU nodes.
Built upon the PCG framework, Procedural Vegetation Editor is a new graph-based tool that lets you create and customize high-quality vegetation assets directly in the engine, with the option to directly output Nanite skeletal assemblies:
MegaLights is moving from experimental to beta in this release, bringing a major boost to visual fidelity. It now supports directional lights, translucency, shadow-casting for Niagara particles, and more accurate shading and shadows for hair. Performance is improved out of the box, with better noise reduction and less need for manual light optimization.
Following significant improvements in the in-editor rigging and animation authoring toolset in Unreal Engine 5.6, Unreal Engine 5.7 adds a refactored Animation Mode that streamlines workflows and makes better use of screen space. This release also includes improvements to the IK Retargeter and Skeletal Editor, along with a new Dependency View for clearer visualization.
Virtual production workflows have been enhanced with a new Live Link Broadcast Component, allowing Unreal Engine to serve as a source of animation data across your network, and an updated Composure tool for real-time compositing.
Also, there's now a new AI Assistant that provides guidance directly in the Editor: a slide-out panel lets you ask questions, generate C++ code, or follow step-by-step instructions.
Learn how MetaHuman is gaining deeper integration with Unreal Engine and your pipeline tools, and explore other new Unreal Engine 5.7 features here. Don't forget to check out 80 Level's new digital art courses, subscribe to our Newsletter, and join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.