A mere 5 weeks after the launch of Unreal Engine 5.5 preview and Seattle Unrealfest Epic Games have released Unreal Engine 5.5. Jam packed with new features including vastly improved animation tools, the marquee feature of Unreal Engine 5.5 is the new experimental MegaLights, which has been called the ‘nanite for lighting’.
MegaLights is a whole new direct lighting path in Unreal Engine 5 enabling artists to place orders of magnitudes more dynamic and shadowed area lights than they could ever before.
MegaLights is designed to support current generation consoles and leverages ray tracing to enable realistic soft shadows from various types of area lights.
MegaLights not only reduces the cost of dynamic shadowing, it also reduces the cost of unshadowed light evaluation, making it possible to use expensive light sources, such as textured area lights, on consoles.
MegaLights is considered an experimental feature and should not be used in a production project.
Other features of Unreal Engine 5.5 include:
- Improved animation tooling
- Modular control rig is now beta
- MetaHuman animator now has the ability to generation facial animations from just an audio performance
- Mutable character customization(beta)
- Lumen can now run at 60hz on supported platforms
- Path Tracer is now production ready
- Substrate material system now beta
- Mobile rendering improvements and previewer
- Much, much more
Key Links
Unreal Engine 5.5 Full Release Notes
You can learn more about the Unreal Engine 5.5 release in the video below. Also note, this is the first version of Unreal Engine under the new pricing structure and you will need to approve of an updated EULA before you can update to UE 5.5.