Unreal Engine enables game developers and creators across industries to realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before.

What is Unreal Engine?

Unreal Engine is a 3D game engine developed by Epic Games, developers of Fortnite. The Unreal Engine is now in its fifth iteration, having been around since 1998, it's one of the most established and well regarded game creation and 3D visualization tools. Unreal Engine has been used to create many popular games like PUBG, the Final Fantasy VII Remake, Street Fighter 5, Borderlands 3, Gears 5, Batman: Arkham City, and Valorant.

How many GB do you need for Unreal Engine?

Once installed, Unreal Engine 5 will take up anywhere from 50GB to 120GB but you will need more free space to save your projects. For a smaller game you might fit into 10-50GB, depending on the assets. All in all, working with a 512GB drive may be sufficient, but 1TB or 2TB is recommended.

What are other Unreal Engine 5 system requirements?

For PC, you need Windows 10 64-bit or newer, a quad-core Intel or AMD CPU that is 2.5 GHz or faster and 8 GB RAM. For macOS, you need Big Sur, quad-core Intel 2.5 GHz or faster and 8 GB RAM. For Linux, Ubuntu 18.04, a quad-core Intel or AMD 2.5 GHz or faster and 32 GB RAM.

Does it cost to use Unreal Engine 5?

Unreal Engine is free to use for creating linear content like films, and for custom and internal projects. It's also free for startup game development. A 5% royalty kicks in if and when your title earns over $1 million dollars.

Which is easier to use, Unity or Unreal Engine?

There is no right answer to that question. Both game engines are extremely robust and offer a fully featured free version to get you started. Both have strong communities in which you can participate and consult with. The general consensus at this stage is that Unity and Unreal Engine both are beginner friendly and won't require advanced programming knowledge for simple projects which will get the ball rolling as you learn.

Mobile

Designed for mobile, now and in the future. From simple 2D games to stunning high-end visuals, Unreal Engine 4 gives you the power to develop your game and seamlessly deploy to iOS and Android devices.

Blueprints

Blueprint visual scripting enables you to rapidly prototype and build complete games, simulations and visualizations without the need for programming. Blueprint tools and a visual debugger are included with Unreal Engine 4.

Tools

The Unreal Editor is a fully integrated suite of tools for building every aspect of your project. Advanced features include physically-based rendering, UI, level building, animation, visual effects, physics, networking, and asset management.

New: Volumetric Fog

Create incredible ambience and mood in your environments using the new Volumetric Fog! Varying densities are supported so you can simulate clouds of dust or smoke flowing through light shafts, and any number of lights can affect the Volumetric Fog.

New: Image-Based (FFT) Convolution for Bloom

Create physically-realistic bloom post-process effects using the new image-based (FFT) convolution feature! Unreal Engine 4.16 ships with a FFT Bloom that empowers artists to use custom bloom kernel shapes, with total control over the intensity in order to match the results they imagine.

New: Release Games on Nintendo Switch

Registered developers can now build and release games for the Nintendo Switch! Unreal Engine 4's production-ready Nintendo Switch support is certification compliant, enables networked multiplayer, and provides access to multiple rendering pipelines - deferred, mobile forward, and clustered forward - to enable you to ship virtually any type of game for Nintendo Switch.

Source Code

Every Unreal Engine 4 developer has access to the complete C++ engine and editor source code. Having full source code gives you the power to customize your game, and makes it easier to debug and ship. Join Epic Games and the Unreal Engine community in updating and extending more than three million lines of code available on GitHub.

Virtual Reality

Visual fidelity combines with high performance to create engaging, immersive VR experiences in UE4. Our rendering pipeline gets you to 90 Hz stereo framerate at high resolutions with no code changes required, while scalable tools mean you can develop everything from simple scenes to complex cinematic environments. All with an iteration speed that makes your creative process easier.

Marketplace

Accelerate your development with sample games and scenes, art and audio, Blueprint logic, and even C++ code. Buy content to add to your project, or create and sell your own.

One engine, one workflow

With Unreal Engine 4, you can learn one engine and one workflow to meet all of your needs now and in the future. From mobile projects to super high-end console and PC games, Unreal Engine is in use by indies and professionals around the world.

Own the high end

Push your visuals to the limit on PC, consoles, and VR with custom lighting, shading, VFX and cinematic systems. Create beautiful visuals for architectural visualizations, simulations, digital films, and more.

Everything you need to get started

The Marketplace provides a wealth of production-ready game content, asset packs, documentation, sample projects, tutorials, and demos. Get up to speed rapidly with high-quality, UE4-ready items suitable for a wide range of art styles and game genres.

Niagara Platform Support and Usability Improvements

In our continuing effort to provide industry-leading effects tools, Niagara has received an expanded feature set, substantial quality of life improvements, and Niagara effects are now supported on Nintendo Switch.

GPU-Only Texture Sampling in Niagara

You can now sample a 2D texture or a pseudo-volume 2D texture in your particle scripts! Create amazing effects such as rendering the scene's depth, color and normal information using a Scene Capture Actor and use that to reconstruct the environment within a Niagara particle system with the particles' potential and kinetic energy visualized as emissive light.

What's New

The release of Unreal Engine 5.5 continues to improve the UE5 toolset. This release delivers improvements in a wide variety of areas, including Animation, Rendering, Virtual Production, Motion Design, and more.

Complete release notes can be found here.

Character and Animation

Sequencer Usability

Unreal Engine 5.5 brings usability improvements to Sequencer, enabling cinematic artists to control their view of contents within a sequence, gain easier access to properties, and filter viewport by sequence contents. This provides a more controllable interface to reduce workflow fatigue, helping users to create faster.

  • Customizable Filtering
  • Isolate or Hide Selected Bindings, Tracks, or Channels
  • Hotkey Support for Hide, Isolate, and Show All
  • Overlay Window for Properties of Bindings, Tracks, Sections, Channels, and Keys
  • Toggle to Filter Viewport Selection of Sequence Contents
  • Take Recorder now generates thumbnails based on your recorded cameras

Dynamic Sequencer

Dynamic Sequencer provides users the ability to better define dynamic operations of data to enhance interactive cinematic experiences.

Core Functionality:

  • New Default Binding Type - Replaceable that can be dynamically bound at runtime to a different object
  • Creating Custom Binding Types - More control over how an Object is bound in Sequencer
  • Conditionally control a track row's or section's active state
  • Time Warp a Sequence, Subsequence, or Skeletal Animations with an authorable Curve
  • Override and animate the Transform Origin of a Subsequence or Shot

Animation Mode: Animation Layers

Animation Layers allow users to create motion on non-destructive layers for added control and flexibility. This takes advantage of the Section workflows in Sequencer while adding a simpler, cleaner interface for managing those Sections/Layers with lots of improvements to the usability.

Core Functionality:

  • Create Layer from Selected
  • Multi Object Layers
  • Merge Selected Layers
  • Additive and Override
  • Mute, Lock, Select
  • Animatable Weights
  • Rename, Duplicate, Delete

Modular Control Rig (Beta)

Modular Control Rig moves into Beta, adding many quality of life improvements refining the user interface to help build rigs faster.

  • Module Variants enable Modules to be easily updated.
  • Schematic Overlay UX improvements.
  • Module Hierarchy simplification
  • New Modules:
  • Quadruped Modules
  • Vehicle Modules
  • Native Bipedal module support for common skeleton types (Vicon, Mixamo, mGear, HumanIK, Motive, XSens, Advanced Skeleton).

Rig Variants (Experimental)

Rig Variants are highly experimental tools for upgrading and swapping Control Rig Modules and Functions, enabling animators to swap rigs non-destructively to a different variant for backwards and forwards compatibility.

Upgrade and swap Control Rig Modules and Functions with a new variant.

Mutable Customizable Characters and Meshes (Beta)

Mutable generates dynamic skeletal meshes, materials and textures at runtime for creating character customization systems and dynamic content.

  • Hidden surface removal to prevent z-fighting and implement object layering and interaction. Ex: jackets over shirt
  • s over the base body.
  • Mesh and texture merging to reduce draw calls.
  • Morph baking to reduce GPU load.
  • Baked texture effects such as layering and decal projection to reduce GPU load.
  • Graph-based editor.

Skeletal Editor (Production Ready)

The Skeletal Editor is now Production Ready with general improvements and visual feedback updates for working with Character Meshes within the Skeletal Editor, enabling quicker and simpler workflows for painting and editing weights on skeletal meshes.

  • Isolation of meshes
  • Robust weight transfer tools
  • Edge & Face Selection with Grow/Shrink/Flood support
  • LOD & alternate Skin Weight profile editing
  • Improved viewport wireframe and bones display
  • Improved Component Editor
  • Lasso selection
  • Experimental Quad Mesh editing
  • Bones marquee selection & multi-editing

Animation Deformers

You can now craft more realistic animation effects such as contact deformation or better cartoon-style squash-and-stretch, with the new ability to spawn custom deformers inside Control Rig, and easily apply them to characters in Sequencer with a single click.

There's also an Animator Kit plugin containing a collection of ready-made Control Rigs with built-in deformers – including Lattice, Camera Space Lattice, and Sculpt – that you can use during animation or as examples for building your own rig-driven deformers.

ML Deformer

ML Deformer brings high quality offline mesh deformations into real-time by leveraging Machine Learning. Examples of this are muscle and quasi static cloth simulations. For UE 5.5 the ML Deformer adds some additional features that can improve the runtime deformations.

  • Changes from 5.4 to 5.5
  • Added support for painting masks, directly in the viewport of the ML Deformer editor.
  • Ability to provide a mask per training animation/geom cache input, limiting the training data to a specific area.
  • Added a pose mixer tool to the Maya plugin for ML Deformer, which can be used to improve training data.
  • Improved workflow issues resolved based on feedback from internal and external teams.

Physics Control

The Physics Control plugin allows you to add simple, intuitive, and powerful physically based controls to either a blueprint using a component, or to a character using an animation graph node. This helps you gain the benefits of emergent physical motion of static and skeletal meshes, whilst still retaining artistic and gameplay control.

  • Refined Control Profile API that can be applied to either the Physics Control Component or to the Rigid Body With Control animation graph node
  • Improved Control Profile Asset Editor
  • Simplified Creation of Control Profiles

Choosers

Choosers have arrived and are production ready in 5.5. Choosers provide a robust game context asset selector with a lot of excellent additional features and debugging. While the driver was animation originally, we exposed Choosers to be able to select nearly any type of asset for the release. This can encompass multiple levels of complexity, from simple random selectors to database-driven logic involving 1000s of animations.

Audio Driven Animation for MetaHuman Animator

Generate high quality facial animation from audio to quickly deliver convincing facial performance in MetaHuman Animator.

  • Use audio assets in MetaHuman Animator to generate facial animation.
  • Quickly delivers animation for all MetaHuman facial controls, including inference of upper face gestures.
  • Works with various voices and languages.
  • A fully local, offline solution, suitable for batch-processing audio.

To learn more about audio driven animation, read the Audio Driven Animation for MetaHuman documentation.