Unreal Engine 5.7 is now available for download. This release sees several features graudate from Beta to Production ready including Procedural Content Generation (PCG) as well as the Substrate material system. We also have several new animation tools, a new AI assistant, new procedural vegetation tools and nanite foliage rendering and much more.
Highlights of the Unreal Engine 5.7 release include:
🌍 Procedural Content Generation (PCG) and World-Building
- PCG Framework Production-Ready: The Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework has moved into full production-readiness, with notable performance gains (up to twice as fast in some areas) and the introduction of a dedicated PCG Editor mode with customizable tools.
- Procedural Vegetation Editor (Experimental): A new Experimental plugin built on a PCG-based node graph. It empowers you to quickly grow, shape, and customize Nanite-ready foliage (like trees and shrubs) directly in the Unreal Editor, generate infinite variations, and export them without external tools.
- Nanite Foliage: A new rendering path that fully integrates dense, animated vegetation into the Nanite virtualized geometry system. This allows for massive, highly-detailed environments with millions of leaves and branches at high frame rates, utilizing features like Nanite Assemblies, Skinning, and Voxels.
✨ Rendering and Material Fidelity
- Substrate Materials Production-Ready: The Substrate material system is now fully production-ready. This modular system replaces the previous fixed shading models, enabling the physically accurate and scalable combination of multiple material layers (e.g., combining metal, clear coat, skin, and cloth) for complex surface appearances.
- MegaLights (Beta): This feature, which allows artists to use an exponentially larger number of lights in their scenes, has moved to Beta. It includes improved performance, better noise reduction, and new support for Directional Lights, Niagara Particle Lights, and Translucency Lighting.
🛠️ Workflow and Animation
- AI Assistant (Experimental): An Experimental built-in tool that acts as a workflow assistant, providing instant answers, step-by-step guidance, and C++ code generation directly within a dedicated panel in the Editor.
- Animation and Rigging Workflow Improvements: The update features significant enhancements to the character pipeline, including:
- Updates to the Skeletal Editor, allowing you to seamlessly create and edit morph shapes, bones, and skin weights.
- New Sculpting and Blend Shapes tools, bringing industry-standard sculpting workflows into the engine.
- Selection Sets to streamline animation workflows by giving you quicker access to control rigs.
Key Links
Unreal Engine 5.7 Announcement
Unreal Engine 5.7 Release Notes
You can learn more about the Unreal Engine 5.7 release in the video below.