Epic Games has just dropped a preview of the next major version of Unreal Engine 5, which focuses on performance improvements and introduces "systems that are more reliable, scalable, and intuitive to support all project requirements". As expected, the main highlight is Mesh Terrain as an experimental feature, introducing a new 3D mesh-based system for building large-scale environments, which integrates natively with PCG. We've been closely tracking its development thanks to Dylan Browne.

The PCG framework has also been updated, now allowing manual edits to procedural content while preserving its underlying logic. On top of that, the Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE) has been significantly improved, making it much easier to build high-quality, biologically accurate vegetation assets that are ready for Nanite straight inside the Editor.

You can now populate real-time worlds with crowds of MetaHumans using the MetaHuman Crowd plug-in, and also turn almost any human mesh into a MetaHuman, now with simultaneous head and body conforming.

MegaLights has now reached full production readiness, while Control Rig Physics moves into Beta with this release. Meanwhile, face rigging and morph target editing tools have been expanded to better support in-editor, sculpt-driven facial workflows and shot-based sculpting. These updates improve blend shape authoring for stylized characters, custom skeletal meshes, and MetaHumans.

Unreal Engine 5.8 also introduces Direct Mesh Controls (DMC), an experimental system that lets Control Rig controls be placed directly onto sections of a Skeletal Mesh.

This release includes a lot more beyond these features, such as a new NPR solution, updates to Dataflow and Chaos Physics, improvements to mobile workflows, and much more. For full details, you can check the official roadmap.

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