Unreal Engine 5.4 brings many new features for game developers

Epic Games relies on its in-house Unreal Engine 5 for games such as Fortnite and Rocket Racing, but Remnant 2, Tekken 8 and Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 also use the latest version of the popular game engine. Version 5.4 of the Unreal Engine is now available and offers new features for game developers and content creators.

The integrated animation toolset in Unreal Engine 5.4 has been completely redesigned. The new Modular Control Rig feature, currently in beta, allows animation rigs to be built from modular parts rather than using extensive granular diagrams. Automatic Retargeting makes it easy to transfer existing animations to other bipedal characters. Among many other animation features, Motion Matching is an extensible, next-generation framework for animation elements.

In terms of rendering in Unreal Engine 5.4, Nanite, a virtualised micropolygon geometry system, will see a number of improvements. A new experimental tessellation function can be used for details such as bumps or cracks without having to edit the original mesh. In addition, Epic says Nanite's performance will be greatly enhanced by Variable Rate Software Shading (VRS).

Other new features in version 5.4 of the game engine include performance and stability improvements for Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), optimised rendering performance and a neural network engine. Read the Unreal Engine 5.4 release blog post for more details.