Digital artists working across animation, film & TV production, games, visualization and more will find compelling reasons to update to Unreal Engine 5.7, available now from Epic Games. The new release offers the power to procedurally generate lush foliage and other content on a mass scale, author complex layered and blended materials with physical accuracy and use more lights than ever before.
The updates also brings users more powerful and intuitive animation and rigging workflows, deeper and more flexible MetaHuman integrations and expanded virtual production possibilities — plus guidance from the new in-editor AI Assistant.
Highlights include:
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The Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework is now production-ready, enabling users to quickly populate environments, introduce natural variety and deliver more engaging game experiences in less time. This release also includes new enhancements including PCG Editor Mode and the Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE), plus new performance optimizations to make PCG GPU compute significantly faster.
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Scalable high-fidelity rendering is now available with Nanite Foliage. This Experimental new geometry rendering system enables teams to create and animate dense, high-detail, foliage-heavy environments for large open worlds that efficiently render on current-gen hardware.
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Also production-ready in this release is Substrate, Unreal Engine’s state-of-the-art modular material authoring and rendering framework. Substrate lets creators combine multiple material behaviors — such as those found in metal, clear coat, skin and cloth — with true high-quality physical accuracy, for effects such as realistic multi-layered car paint, oiled leather, or blood and sweat on skin.
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Extended MetaHuman integration, including support for the MetaHuman Creator Unreal Engine plugin now on both Linux and macOS.
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An enhanced in-editor animation toolset adds features like refactored Animation Mode, improvements to the IK Retargeter and Skeletal Editor, and the addition of a new Dependency View for better visualization.
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Enhancements for virtual production workflows include a new Live Link Broadcast Component, which enables Unreal Engine itself to act as a source of animation data across your network, as well as a new and improved version of Composure, Unreal Engine’s built-in real-time compositing tool.
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The new AI Assistant offers helpful guidance on Unreal Engine directly in the Editor. A dedicated slide-out panel enables you to ask questions, generate C++ code, or follow step-by-step guidance, all without leaving the Editor.
Unreal Engine 5.7 is now available. Learn more about the latest updates UE’s blog post.
