Discover 5 key features for CG artists in Godot 4.5
The Godot team has released Godot 4.5, the latest version of the open-source game engine.
It’s another sizeable update, totalling almost 2,500 separate code commits, and featuring significant improvements to engine performance, workflow, and platform support.
Below, we’ve picked out five new features of particular significance to CG artists, as opposed to programmers, including updates to shading, lighting, rendering, animation and baking.
1. Support for stencil buffers helps create cutaway and X-ray effects
Key changes in Godot 4.5 include support for stencil buffers.
As with the existing depth buffer, the stencil buffer provides a memory buffer to which meshes can write for later comparison, but supports arbitrary values.
That makes it possible to create a number of graphical effects, ranging from the cutaway-style rendering effect shown above to X-ray shading effects, and even a “cheap light effect that mimics the lighting effects in [The Legend of Zelda: The] Wind Waker”.
2. Better handling of specular occlusion increases realism of renders
Godot 4.5 also reworks the way in which Godot’s Forward+ and Mobile renderers handle specular occlusion, which is now based on ambient light instead of just the lightmap.
As well as providing specular occlusion for any object in an environment, regardless of whether it is lightmapped, ambient occlusion now automatically provides specular occlusion.
The change should increase visual realism, particularly in interior scenes, helping to prevent light being reflected unrealistically intensely from occluded parts of surfaces, like cracks.
Both Forward+ and Mobile renderers also now support bent normal maps for specular occlusion and indirect lighting.
3. Quality-of-life improvements to the animation editor
The AnimationPlayer node, Godot’s animation editor, gets a number of workflow improvements.
It is now possible to move and scale Bézier editor points in bulk using the selection box, as shown above, and to set the default tangent behavior of new Bézier points.
Users can also filter animations by name, or sort them alphabetically.
Animators also get new constraints for binding bones to other bones, described as enabling more natural movement and poses, and “really helpful for handling VR and metaverse avatars”.
4. Bake lightmaps and unwrap UVs on mobile devices
For asset preparation, Godot 4.5 makes it possible to bake lightmaps and unwrap the UVs of assets when running the Godot Editor on Android and iOS, as well as on desktop OSs.
The change makes it possible to do more work on tablets, or even phones – the video above shows a session from this year’s GodotCon conference on developing entirely on mobile.
The UI of the Godot Editor has also been adapted to streamline workflow for non-desktop users, with a new TouchActionsPanel providing access to common actions like save and undo.
The panel is currently only available on Android, but will be rolled out to other platforms.
5. New Shader Baker cuts loading times for games
One change in Godot 4.5 that doesn’t affect the workflows of artists directly, but which does affect the impact of the work they do, is support for shader baking.
The new Shader Baker option in the export settings causes the Godot Editor to scan scenes for shaders and pre-compile them in the format used by the driver on the target platform.
Pre-compilation reduces the loading times for projects by enabling some of the work previously done on the end user’s machine to be done ahead of time in the Editor.
According to the blog post announcing the release, the Godot Third-Person Shooter demo saw a “20x decrease” in load times on Windows using D3D12, and on macOS using Metal.
Other changes, performance improvements and platform support
Other changes to the Godot Editor include DPI-aware icons, helping to ensure that the GUI remains crisp on HiDPI displays.
In addition, the Godot-SMAA add-on – which implements Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing (SMAA) as a higher-quality alternative to FXAA – is now integrated directly into the engine.
The update also improves 2D physics performance through smarter handling of tilemaps, and improves 3D physics performance by moving physics interpolation to the SceneTree.
Programmers get support for script backtracing for logging errors, and a lot of improvements to the script editors, including a new color picker for customizing the default colors used.
Changes to platform support include initial support for visionOS, for developing extended reality projects for Apple’s new Vision Pro headsets.
The release also implements WebAssembly SIMD support to improve performance of browser games, and foveated rendering on Vulkan Mobile, to improve performance of XR titles.
License and system requirements
Godot 4.5 is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and 64-bit Linux and macOS. There are also browser-based and Android ports of the Godot Editor.
The source code is available under a MIT license
Read a full list of new features in Godot 4.5 on the Godot team’s blog
Download Godot from the game engine’s website
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