5. April 2019
Real-time ray tracing and new on-set tools in Unreal Engine 4.22
Real-time ray tracing (Beta)
Unreal Engine 4.22 is the first game engine to leverage Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR) framework, and take advantage of NVIDIA’s powerful RTX graphics technology, to bring you real-time ray tracing. Our approach lets you choose which passes to ray trace—including reflections, shadows, translucency, and image-based lighting—while continuing to rasterize other passes that don’t benefit from the slower method.
This lets you achieve incredible levels of realism at up to real-time speeds. Subtle effects like soft shadows from area lights, ambient occlusion, and illumination from Sky Light HDR textures contribute to the accuracy and believability of your scene. The new system also avoids time-consuming and difficult workarounds like reflection planes and probes, making rendering easier and more fun.
Film and video production tools
Throughout the media and entertainment industry, more and more film studios are revolutionizing their production pipelines with real-time technology, while broadcasters are engaging audiences with mixed reality and virtual sets. Unreal Engine 4.22 continues to push the boundaries.
- Multi-user editing (Beta): It’s now possible for multiple artists and developers to simultaneously make changes to the same Unreal Engine project in a safe and reliable way, eliminating bottlenecks and inspiring creativity on set. See the multi-user editing documentation for more details.
- Real-time compositing (Beta): We’ve added a new UI to Composure, Unreal Engine’s built-in compositor, making it much easier to use, and enabling artists to leverage its real-time compositing capabilities directly in the Unreal Editor.
- Take Recorder: A new Take Recorder enables you to record animations from motion capture linked to characters in the scene, and from Live Link data, for future playback—so you can quickly iterate on performance recordings, and easily review previous takes.
- Extended media I/O support: We’ve added support for higher bit depths, resolutions, and frame rates for professional media I/O.
Extended rendering output options
Whether you’re producing linear entertainment or creating an immersive experience, there are even more options for using your output data.
- Render layers (Beta): It’s now easy to organize objects into separate layers within Composure, Unreal Engine’s built-in compositor—similar to a traditional offline workflow. These layers can then be output from Sequencer and used in a compositing package such as Nuke or After Effects.
- nDisplay improvements: Creating immersive multi-display experiences such as CAVEs or powerwalls is now more efficient, thanks to the new ability to render different viewports to multiple displays from a single instance of Unreal Engine. See the nDisplay documentation for more details.
- New HoloLens support: New support for holographic remoting enables you to run Unreal Engine on a Windows desktop PC and stream the rendered result wirelessly to a HoloLens in real time. We’re also working on supporting Hololens 2 when it becomes available. See the HoloLens streaming documentation for more details.
Enhanced Unreal Editor Usability
We’ve improved the user experience when you’re working in the Unreal Editor, with an option to orbit around selected faces; adaptive mouse wheel and pan sensitivity based on selection size; the ability to toggle the visibility of multiple layers in one click; and more selection control when working with hierarchies. These improvements make it easier to deal with complex scenes that can contain thousands of objects of different sizes.
Find out more about all the new features, and download Unreal Engine 4.22 today.