LogInBetter MegaLights and enhanced PCG options, along with new features like the Procedural Vegetation Editor and Nanite Foliage, are available now.
We've been closely following what's on the horizon for Unreal Engine, especially Dylan Browne's experiments with Nanite Foliage, and with Unreal Fest Stockholm 2025 taking place, it was clear the preview was on its way. Now, it's officially available to everyone through the Epic Games Launcher.
Nanite Foliage is launching as an experimental feature, offering a cutting-edge rendering solution for dense, high-detail foliage at 60 FPS on current-gen hardware. It combines three core systems: Nanite Assemblies for efficient asset variation management, Nanite Skinning for dynamic motion like wind, and Nanite Voxel for preserving detail, animation, and materials at any distance, all with reduced memory and rendering costs.
Speaking of foliage, Procedural Vegetation Editor is a new experimental plug-in in Unreal Engine 5.7 that lets you create and customize Nanite-ready foliage directly in the editor using assets from Fab. Built on a PCG-based node graph, it allows real-time tree sculpting, model swapping, and exporting as static or skeletal meshes, no third-party tools needed.
The Procedural Content Generation Framework is now production-ready, bringing substantial improvements in extensibility and GPU performance. These enhancements make it easier and more flexible to integrate PCG into your workflows.
In UE5.7, PCG is said to be nearly twice as fast compared to version 5.5, thanks to ongoing optimizations across the GPU and game thread. New GPU parameter overrides enable dynamic value changes, and the GPU Compute path has been optimized for multiplatforms, now including support for FastGeo. A new PCG Editor mode introduces powerful tools such as spline drawing and volume painting, and PCG Graphs can now run independently. This update introduces plenty of new features, with more improvements on the way.
Also, MegaLights is now in beta, adding support for Directional Lights, Niagara particle lights, translucency lighting, and hair grooms. There are new performance tuning controls to adjust resolution scale and update rate, delivering better performance and improved noise reduction right out of the box.
Unreal Engine 5.7 brings even more to the table: production-ready substrate materials, updates to MetaHuman Creator allowing real-time animation generation from external cameras, experimental enhancements to animation and rigging tools, and the AI-powered Epic Developer Assistant.
Learn more in the release notes 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.