Epic Games releases a preview of Unreal Engine 5.4

Epic Games has presented a preview of Unreal Engine 5.4 at the State of Unreal presentation at Game Developers Conference 2024.

Version 5.4 improves the overall performance and productivity of visualization workflows. They also continue to develop Nanite technology, which, with the new experimental Tessellation feature, allows for the addition of fine details such as cracks and bumps during visualization.

The company also says that by adding variable rate software shading (VRS) through computational materials, Nanite brings significant performance gains.

Animation in Unreal Engine 5.4 also goes a step further with Motion Matching, a simple and effective way to animate characters in the game, which is used in Fortnite.

Later this year, Epic Games will also release a free sample training project that includes more than 500 animations created from high-quality motion capture data with a set of movement and traversal data.

Additionally, thanks to extensive battlefield testing in LEGO Fortnite development, developers can now fully animate their game with Control Rig and Sequencer without switching between programs.

Epic Games also immediately warns that Unreal Engine 5.4 previews are not fully quality assured and are still under active development, so they should be considered unstable until the final release. Developers are advised to make copies of their projects to test these builds.

The preview is already available for download from the Epic Games Store, GitHub, and there is also a Linux version. You can find a complete list of changes in UE 5.4 on the Epic blog.