Epic Games releases Unreal Engine 5.6
Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 5.6, the latest major version of the game engine and real-time renderer.
As usual, it’s a huge update, with several major new features, plus updates throughout Unreal Engine’s key toolsets: particularly Lumen, and character rigging and animation.
You can find a brief summary below, but we aim to update this story with a more detailed look at the key features in Unreal Engine for CG artists, so check back for updates.
Major updates to the in-editor animation tools and to Lumen performance
Character artists get the “biggest update yet” to the in-editor animation tools, with major revamps of Motion Trails, the Tween Tools, and the Curve Editor, plus the option to sculpt morph targets in-editor, and built-in physics in the Control Rig.
Lumen gets performance updates to Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) mode, intended to help games using the real-time global illumination system run more consistently at 60fps.
New Mocap Manager toolset and integrated MetaHuman Creator
There are also several completely new toolsets, including the Mocap Manager, a new “end-to-end solution” for recording and managing mocap data inside the Unreal Editor.
In addition, MetaHuman Creator is now integrated directly inside Unreal Engine: part of a wide-ranging set of changes to the character-creation framework.
System requirements and availability
The Unreal Engine 5.6 Editor is compatible with Windows 10+, macOS 14.0+ and RHEL/Rocky Linux 8+.
For non-interactive content, the software is free to users with revenue under $1 million/year. For larger studios, subscriptions cost $1,850/seat/year, including Twinmotion and RealityCapture.
For games developed with the engine, Epic takes 5% of the gross royalties after the first $1 million generated.
Read an overview of the new features in Unreal Engine 5.6 on Epic Games’ blog
Read a full list of new features in Unreal Engine 5.6 in the online release notes
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