Hot the the heels of shipping the first early access release of Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games have released the first preview of Unreal Engine 4.27. One of the major new features of Unreal Engine 4.27 (and UE5) is the integration of RAD Tools technologies such as Oodle and Bink. They announced the acquisition of Rad Tools back in January of 2021. There are other nice features in Unreal Engine 4.27 preview 1 including a new Enhanced Input system for easily mapping and dealing with multiple input devices, new tools for VR/AR development, improved path tracing and more.
Details from the Unreal Engine blog:
Explore exciting new workflows for virtual production and in-camera VFX that deliver whole new levels of creative freedom to filmmakers. Get your hands on updates to architectural and manufacturing pipelines such as Movie Render Queue improvements, Open XR support, and enhanced Datasmith workflows. Then, share all of your progress with anyone, anywhere via the cloud with production-ready Pixel Streaming. And for game developers looking to optimize data compression and video encoding, Oodle and Bink are now built in!
As you can tell from this summary, much of the focus of the 4.27 release are on features that aren’t necisarrily game development related, instead focusing on the motion picture and CAD worlds. That said, there are still a decent number of new features for game developers, with complete details available in the release notes here.
Also don’t forget you have a couple more weeks to pick up this month’s free Unreal Engine Marketplace content, two of which are featured in the video below.