Following up on the May 2021 early access release, today Epic Games have released Unreal Engine 5 preview. One step closer to production ready, UE5 Preview seems improvements to the two new marquee features, Lumen and Nanite, among hundreds of other improvements.
Details of the Unreal Engine 5 preview release from the Unreal Engine blog:
We are currently working towards the final shipping version, with all features that we intend to include now ready for testing. In addition to many improvements to previously exposed tools like Nanite, Lumen, One File Per Actor, World Partition, and MetaSounds, you’ll find some exciting new animation tools, groundwork support for Large World Coordinates, and much more. We’ll get into a bit more detail later on in this post.
We should stress that Preview releases will still have instabilities and other issues, and should not be used for production. We suggest making a copy of existing projects if you wish to use them to experiment with the new tools and workflows. However, we’d love for you to put them through their paces to help us identify any remaining glitches, so that we can get them fixed for the final release. Please log any issues you encounter on our bug reporting page.
Unreal Engine 5 Early Access was focused on exposing new features for next-gen game development. With this Preview release, we invite creators from all industries to take it for a test-drive. One caveat, though: while you should be able work in UE5 much the same way as you have been able to do in UE4, with your existing workflows supported, some of the major new features such as Lumen and Nanite have not yet been validated with non-games workflows.
Nonetheless, you should enjoy a redesigned Unreal Editor, better performance, an extended geometry editing toolset, improved Path Tracing, and more! There’s plenty for you to get your teeth into, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.
Unreal Engine 5 preview is available for download on the Epic Game launcher. If you are looking to learn UE5 the ideal starting point is probably the Stack O Bot example that we covered here. You can learn more about Unreal Engine 5 preview and see it in action in the video below.