Epic launches Unreal Engine 5

The same tool behind that impressive Matrix demo

Nearly two years after it was first announced, Epic Games has released its next-generation game engine. On April 5, the company revealed that Unreal Engine 5 is now available to download.

Unreal Engine 5 is the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool up till now. The updated engine features a number of improvements for developers — including enhanced performance and an upgraded UI — but the most significant changes come from a handful of technologies designed for more photorealistic visuals.

Its new functions include:

• Build bigger worlds

Think big, really big. Unreal Engine 5 provides the tools and assets you need to create truly expansive worlds for your players, participants, and stakeholders to explore, using content that scales.

• Leverage game-changing fidelity

Bring incredibly immersive and realistic interactive experiences to life with groundbreaking new features like Nanite and Lumen that provide a generational leap in visual fidelity, and enable worlds to be fully dynamic.

• Animate and model in context

New artist-friendly animation authoring, retargeting, and runtime tools—together with a significantly expanded modeling toolset—reduce iteration and eliminate round-tripping, speeding up the creative process.

“It’s very good that we can experiment with the user experience flows way before anybody else does,” Epic CTO Kim Libreri tells The Verge. “So actually, it’s very valuable to our customers because it means they don’t have to go through that. We don’t end up putting super unthought-out workflows in front of all users. It’s great from that perspective, especially with something as big as the Matrix demo and as big as Fortnite.”

With Quixel Bridge now fully integrated, you have drag-and-drop access to the entire Megascans library. It’s part of the new Create menu for acquiring content and creating and placing Actors.

To free up space in the viewport, you can now easily summon and stow the Content Browser and dock any editor tab to a sidebar. Plus, it’s faster to find the properties you’re looking for in the Details panel.

For more details, please check: https://www.unrealengine.com/