- What is Unreal Engine 4? Unreal Engine 4 is a complete suite of game development tools made by game developers, for game developers. From 2D mobile games to console blockbusters and VR, Unreal.
- Unreal Engine 4.3 Release! Unreal Engine 4.3 includes greatly improved mobile support, awesome new rendering features, improved Blueprint workflows, and strides toward an excellent experience on Mac and laptops. Be sure to check out the new World Composition tools, spline features, and the preview of Paper2D, our 2D toolset!
Newest release delivers expanded virtual production toolset, production-ready Hair and Fur, and much more
Dec 03, 2020 Introduced in Unreal Engine 4.25, the Movie Render Queue enables you to create high-quality frames with accumulated anti-aliasing and motion blur for film and television, cinematics, and marketing, and extremely high-resolution images for print.
Cary, NC (December 3, 2020) – Epic Games today released Unreal Engine 4.26, delivering powerful new tools that extend the ability of creators to craft believable real-time environments and characters for games, film and TV, visualization, and training and simulation; as well as continued advancements to Unreal's industry-leading virtual production toolset; higher-quality media output; improved design review tools; and much more.
Highlights of the 4.26 release include:
1. More convincing animated characters
Hair and Fur is production-ready in 4.26, delivering the ability to edit, simulate, and render true strand-based hair, fur, and feathers. Hair and Fur now features a new Asset Groom Editor for setting up properties, and compatibility with features such as DOF and Fog. LOD generation is built in, and users are now able to generate cards and meshes for lower-end hardware in-engine as an experimental feature.
Adding further believability to their characters' movements, users can now create animations in Sequencer by blending animation clips such as motion-captured data; the workflow will be familiar to animators who've worked in other nonlinear animation editors. Animators can preview skeleton animations to easily see how one skeleton blends into the next, and match joint placement for a smooth transition between clips. The feature is integrated with Control Rig, which now offers an experimental full-body IK solution in addition to the standard FK/IK.
2. Immersive natural worlds and environments
Unreal Engine 4.26 introduces a new Volumetric Cloud component that is able to interact with Sky Atmosphere, Sky Light, and up to two directional lights, improving the quality of both realistic and stylized skies, clouds, and other atmospheric effects. The atmosphere can receive volumetric shadows from meshes and clouds; lighting and shadowing updates in real time to reflect time-of-day changes. In addition, there's a new Environment Lighting Mixer window that enables all components affecting atmosphere lighting to be authored in one place.
This release also sees the introduction of a new Water system, enabling artists to define oceans, lakes, rivers, and islands using splines. Users can adjust and visualize the depth, width, and velocity of rivers along their lengths, and the wavelength, amplitude, direction, and steepness of waves on oceans and lakes. The system includes a new Water Mesh Actor that uses a quad tree grid to render detailed surfaces up close, smoothly transitioning to simplified ones at distance. Built-in fluid simulation enables characters, vehicles, and weapons to interact with the water; the fluid also responds to Terrain, such as reflecting ripples off the shore, and reacting to river flow maps.
3. Extended virtual production toolset
Unreal Engine 4.26 leverages technology such as NVIDIA's NVLink, which enables data to be transferred between two GPUs at very high speed, in order to support the increasing number of pixels on today's LED volumes. This allows any viewport to be rendered on another GPU; for example, one display-facing GPU would render the entire scene while another handles the inner frustum, passing the pixels back to the first one.
Ue4 Release Notes
The 4.26 release also introduces a new fully REST-compliant Remote Control API that enables users to easily collect and organize any parameters or function libraries from the Unreal Engine UI into customizable presets. These can be used in a panel in the Unreal Editor, or seamlessly connected to widgets—such as radial dials, sliders, or color pickers—in web applications, without coding. For example, this could enable an artist on a virtual production stage to easily change the sky rotation or the sun position from an iPad. This feature also benefits broadcast and live events teams who may need to make changes remotely in real time.
4. Enhanced high-quality media output
Movie Render Queue lets users create high-quality frames with accumulated anti-aliasing and motion blur for film and television, cinematics, and marketing, and extremely high-resolution images for print. 4.26 adds new features to Movie Render Queue, now making it possible to output render passes including matte IDs, camera motion vectors, Z-depth, ambient occlusion, reflections, and more so that users can refine their images in a downstream compositing or photo editing application.
Movie Render Queue also now supports OpenColorIO (OCIO), enabling users to work in any color space while ensuring that their image will look as intended on its target platform. In addition, 4.26 delivers new support for exporting multi-channel EXRs, Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHR codecs, and Final Cut Pro XML EDLs, as well as the ability to integrate render farms.
4. More effective collaborative design reviews
Users will see significant usability and performance improvements in the Collaborative Viewer template that enables multi-user design reviews on VR/AR/Desktop, both enhancing the collaborative design review process and allowing more users to join a session. In addition, there's now support for voice communication between participants over VOIP using in-engine peer-to-peer protocols.
And more!
Unreal Engine 4.26 also offers new improvements to the Chaos physics tool, ray tracing, new GPU Lightmass, a completely new Virtual Camera system, enhanced DMX support, and new Datasmith exporter plugins for Rhino and Naviworks.
See the full release notes and get started with Unreal Engine today.
About Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine 4.25 Release
Epic Games' Unreal Engine is the world's most open and advanced real-time 3D tool. Creators across games, film, television, architecture, automotive and transportation, advertising, live events, and training and simulation choose Unreal to deliver cutting-edge content, interactive experiences, and immersive virtual worlds. Follow @UnrealEngine and download Unreal for free atunrealengine.com.
About Epic Games
Founded in 1991, Epic Games is an American company founded by CEO Tim Sweeney. The company is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina and has more than 40 offices worldwide. Today Epic is a leading interactive entertainment company and provider of 3D engine technology. https://pointsoft.medium.com/anti-tracking-browser-e713deaa897b. Epic operates Fortnite, one of the world's largest games with over 350 million accounts and 2.5 billion friend connections. Epic also develops Unreal Engine, which powers the world's leading games and is also adopted across industries such as film and television, architecture, automotive, manufacturing, and simulation. Through Unreal Engine, Epic Games Store, and Epic Online Services, Epic provides an end-to-end digital ecosystem for developers and creators to build, distribute, and operate games and other content.
This is a press release directly from the industry, selected by our editorial team for its importance, that we are reposting in addition to our usual coverage.
About Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine 4.25 Release
Epic Games' Unreal Engine is the world's most open and advanced real-time 3D tool. Creators across games, film, television, architecture, automotive and transportation, advertising, live events, and training and simulation choose Unreal to deliver cutting-edge content, interactive experiences, and immersive virtual worlds. Follow @UnrealEngine and download Unreal for free atunrealengine.com.
About Epic Games
Founded in 1991, Epic Games is an American company founded by CEO Tim Sweeney. The company is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina and has more than 40 offices worldwide. Today Epic is a leading interactive entertainment company and provider of 3D engine technology. https://pointsoft.medium.com/anti-tracking-browser-e713deaa897b. Epic operates Fortnite, one of the world's largest games with over 350 million accounts and 2.5 billion friend connections. Epic also develops Unreal Engine, which powers the world's leading games and is also adopted across industries such as film and television, architecture, automotive, manufacturing, and simulation. Through Unreal Engine, Epic Games Store, and Epic Online Services, Epic provides an end-to-end digital ecosystem for developers and creators to build, distribute, and operate games and other content.
This is a press release directly from the industry, selected by our editorial team for its importance, that we are reposting in addition to our usual coverage.
Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 4.26, delivering powerful new tools that extend the ability of creators to craft believable real-time environments and characters for games, film and TV, visualization, and training and simulation; as well as continued advancements to Unreal's industry-leading virtual production toolset; higher-quality media output; improved design review tools; and much more.
Highlights of the 4.26 release include:
More convincing animated characters
Hair and Fur is production-ready in 4.26, delivering the ability to edit, simulate, and render true strand-based hair, fur, and feathers. Hair and Fur now features a new Asset Groom Editor for setting up properties, and compatibility with features such as DOF and Fog. LOD generation is built in, and users are now able to generate cards and meshes for lower-end hardware in-engine as an experimental feature.
Adding further believability to their characters' movements, users can now create animations in Sequencer by blending animation clips such as motion-captured data; the workflow will be familiar to animators who've worked in other nonlinear animation editors. Animators can preview skeleton animations to easily see how one skeleton blends into the next, and match joint placement for a smooth transition between clips. The feature is integrated with Control Rig, which now offers an experimental full-body IK solution in addition to the standard FK/IK.
Immersive natural worlds and environments
Backup and restore programs steam. Unreal Engine 4.26 introduces a new Volumetric Cloud component that is able to interact with Sky Atmosphere, Sky Light, and up to two directional lights, improving the quality of both realistic and stylized skies, clouds, and other atmospheric effects. The atmosphere can receive volumetric shadows from meshes and clouds; lighting and shadowing updates in real time to reflect time-of-day changes. In addition, there's a new Environment Lighting Mixer window that enables all components affecting atmosphere lighting to be authored in one place.
This release also sees the introduction of a new Water system, enabling artists to define oceans, lakes, rivers, and islands using splines. Users can adjust and visualize the depth, width, and velocity of rivers along their lengths, and the wavelength, amplitude, direction, and steepness of waves on oceans and lakes. The system includes a new Water Mesh Actor that uses a quad tree grid to render detailed surfaces up close, smoothly transitioning to simplified ones at distance. Built-in fluid simulation enables characters, vehicles, and weapons to interact with the water; the fluid also responds to Terrain, such as reflecting ripples off the shore, and reacting to river flow maps.
Extended virtual production toolset
Unreal Engine 4.26 leverages technology such as NVIDIA's NVLink, which enables data to be transferred between two GPUs at very high speed, in order to support the increasing number of pixels on today's LED volumes. This allows any viewport to be rendered on another GPU; for example, one display-facing GPU would render the entire scene while another handles the inner frustum, passing the pixels back to the first one.
The 4.26 release also introduces a new fully REST-compliant Remote Control API that enables users to easily collect and organize any parameters or function libraries from the Unreal Engine UI into customizable presets. These can be used in a panel in the Unreal Editor, or seamlessly connected to widgets—such as radial dials, sliders, or color pickers—in web applications, without coding. For example, this could enable an artist on a virtual production stage to easily change the sky rotation or the sun position from an iPad. This feature also benefits broadcast and live events teams who may need to make changes remotely in real time.
Enhanced high-quality media output
Movie Render Queue lets users create high-quality frames with accumulated anti-aliasing and motion blur for film and television, cinematics, and marketing, and extremely high-resolution images for print. 4.26 adds new features to Movie Render Queue, now making it possible to output render passes including matte IDs, camera motion vectors, Z-depth, ambient occlusion, reflections, and more so that users can refine their images in a downstream compositing or photo editing application.
Movie Render Queue also now supports OpenColorIO (OCIO), enabling users to work in any color space while ensuring that their image will look as intended on its target platform. In addition, 4.26 delivers new support for exporting multi-channel EXRs, Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHR codecs, and Final Cut Pro XML EDLs, as well as the ability to integrate render farms.
More effective collaborative design reviews
Users will see significant usability and performance improvements in the Collaborative Viewer template that enables multi-user design reviews on VR/AR/Desktop, both enhancing the collaborative design review process and allowing more users to join a session. In addition, there's now support for voice communication between participants over VOIP using in-engine peer-to-peer protocols.
Audacity for high sierra. And more!
Unreal Engine 4.26 also offers new improvements to the Chaos physics tool, ray tracing, new GPU Lightmass, a completely new Virtual Camera system, enhanced DMX support, and new Datasmith exporter plugins for Rhino and Naviworks.
See the full release notes and get started with Unreal Engine today at: https://unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-26-released
