Unreal Engine 5.5: New Feature Highlights

Epic revealed all the new features in Unreal Engine version 5.5, the fifth significant update since Unreal 5’s release in 2022, during this year’s Unreal Fest. Users in many industries look forward to every new release, hoping their most requested features will be incorporated. 5.5 is a significant update, especially since Unreal 5.4 exited early access and was made public in April of this year.  There are too many improvements to list, as is common with Unreal Engine releases. In addition to the features previously mentioned, Unreal Engine 5.5 includes several other notable enhancements and features. In this blog, iRender will discuss New Feature Highlights. 

Unreal Engine 5.5 includes several exciting updates and improvements specifically focused on animation, enhancing the workflow for animators and developers enabling you to reap the benefits of animating in context, and reducing the requirement to roundtrip with DCC applications. Here are some of the key animation features in this version.

Control Rig Enhancements

Control Rig has been further improved, providing animators with more tools for creating and manipulating complex rigs directly within the engine. This allows for more iterative workflows and real-time feedback when adjusting animations.

Sequencer

The release sees significant enhancements to Sequencer, Unreal Engine’s nonlinear animation editor, which now boasts a more controllable interface with better filtering and easier access to properties, reducing workflow fatigue and increasing productivity.

Animation deformers

With the ability to create animation deformers within Control Rig and apply them to characters in Sequencer with a single click, you can now create more realistic animation effects like contact deformation or better cartoon-style squash-and-stretch. 

MetaHuman Animator

This release also includes a major update for MetaHuman Animator, which is a component of the MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine. It is now feasible to produce excellent facial animation, including the inference of upper face gestures, just from audio performances thanks to an experimental feature. 

On the rendering front, we continue to deliver on the performance and fidelity promises of UE5, while maintaining our goal of leading the industry on real-time rendering innovation. Unreal Engine 5.5 introduces significant advancements in rendering technology, enhancing visual fidelity and performance. 

Lumen 

The real-time global illumination system, Lumen, has been further optimized for performance and accuracy. Lumen can now run at 60 Hz on platforms for which there is hardware support, thanks to many improvements to the systems that underpin hardware ray tracing (HWRT). These improvements also impact the performance and capabilities of Path Tracer and light baking.

Path Tracer

Unreal Engine 5.5 continues to enhance the Path Tracer, which is part of its advanced rendering capabilities.

With regard to Path Tracer, the physically correct, DXR-accelerated progressive rendering mode is now Production-Ready, providing unaltered quality for producing fully-featured ground-truth reference images or final pixels for nonlinear applications.  

Substrate

In the meantime, Unreal Engine 5.2’s experimental material authoring system, Substrate, enters beta testing. Every functionality of legacy materials and every platform that UE deploys to is now supported. Look dev artists can use Substrate’s strong and adaptable foundation to get greater control over the appearance and feel of their objects, even if work is still being done to completely optimize it for real-time applications.

Movie Render Graph

Movie Render Graph (MRG), which was first introduced as Experimental in Unreal Engine 5.4, also advances to Beta in this version, with additional investment made in the graph-based configuration process.

In addition, all asset types are now fully supported in MRG’s Render Layers feature, including translucent objects, Niagara FX, Heterogeneous volumes, Landscapes, and Sky Atmosphere without the requirement to use a Sky Sphere.

MegaLights

This release also provides an early look at a new experimental feature that we’ve named MegaLights. You can add hundreds of dynamic, shadow-casting lights to your settings with MegaLights, which has already earned the moniker “the Nanite of lights.” For the first time, lighting artists may freely employ consoles and PCs to create textured area lights with soft shadows, Light Functions, media texture playback, and volumetric shadows, putting more emphasis on artistic concerns than performance impact.

With a specialized in-camera visual effects (ICVFX) toolkit that powers numerous productions in television, movies, and advertisements worldwide, Unreal Engine is leading the way in the virtual production revolution. With UE 5.5, the ICVFX toolset is now production-ready thanks to the cumulative investment made over several releases, along with advancements in other virtual production and visualization technologies.

Camera Calibration

Additionally, ProductionThe Camera Calibration solver, which is compatible with UE 5.5, has significantly increased lens and camera parameter estimation accuracy. As a result of this effort, Overscan is now integrated into all cameras to accommodate use cases such as post-production camera shake and lens distortion rendering.

Virtual Scouting

UE 5.4’s improved Virtual Scouting toolset is the next step toward production readiness. It provides a robust out-of-the-box experience with OpenXR-compatible HMDs (Oculus and Valve Index are supported by default) and new customisation options through a comprehensive API. Additionally, the toolkit now includes a new VR Content Browser and asset placement, a Blueprint-customizable Transform Gizmo, and additional refinement, such as a color-correct Viewfinder.

Color Grading Panel

Color Grading Panel has been made available for general use in the Unreal Editor, providing a rich, artist-friendly interface for creative color manipulation in any Unreal Engine scene. For offline rendering, another small-but-significant change in Unreal Engine 5.5 is that the Color Grading Panel is now available for general use, not just for virtual production. It offers a “rich, artist-friendly interface for creative color manipulation” and was initially included in the In-Camera VFX Editor (ICVFX Editor).

Mobile game development

On the platform front, we’ve been investing in our support for mobile, with the aim of cementing Unreal Engine as the best engine for mobile and cross-platform AAA game development.

The Mobile Forward Renderer sees a slew of new features that will increase visual fidelity on the platform. It now supports D-buffer decals, rectangular area lights, capsule shadows, moveable IES textures for point and spotlights, volumetric fog, and Niagara particle lights. Screen-space reflections now work in both Mobile Forward and Deferred Renderers.

iRender is a perfect option to render projects in PC optimization for rendering tasks, CGI, and VFX with over 30.000 customers. To bring the best experiences for customers, iRender has been improving the quality and updating the newest technology every day. We provide high-configuration dedicated servers (physical computers/machines) specifically optimized for GPU rendering.

iRender provides high-configuration servers that increase CPU and GPU rendering speeds. We offer the most powerful RTX 4090 configuration packages on the market, all equipped with AMD RyzenTM ThreadripperTM PRO 3955WX @ 3.9 – 4.2GHz and AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO 5975WX @ 3.6 – 4.5GHz processors, 256GB RAM and 2T NVMe SSD hard drive capacity. With a wide range of GPU servers (1/2/4/6/8x) – RTX 4090, you can choose the server that suits your needs to start the rendering process. 

We have many server packages, from single GPU to multiple GPUs. For real-time rendering software like Unreal Engine, we suggest our server 3S with the high-end hardware such as CPU AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX at 3.9GHz clock speed, core 16, thread 32. RAM 256GB Storage NVMe SSD 2TB and Video card RTX4090.

Check out Unreal Engine’s rendering performance on our servers: 

In case you have any problems or questions, don’t hesitate to contact the 24/7 support team. We will be happy to help you with your questions and problems at all times.

This month, we are running a SPECIAL OFFER: 100% Additional Bonus for new clients who register an account and make a top-up within 24 hours after their registration.

Moreover, iRender is running a promotion campaign:

• 100% bonus promotion for all transactions from $1500
• 50% bonus promotion for all transactions from $575

The promotion will be applied from 17th November to 30th November 2024. I hope you won’t miss this out so that we can keep working in the future.