December 9, 2019
Unreal Engine 4.24 released!
There’s a host of new features and improvements across the board, with something for everyone. You can now create even more convincing interior and exterior scenes for games and visualization with new tools for nondestructively creating and editing open-world landscapes that adapt to other scene elements; gorgeous atmospheric skies; and Screen Space Global Illumination that scales across console and desktop platforms.
For those looking to create more believable characters, creatures, and virtual beings, we’re proud to offer a first look at our new strand-based hair and fur system that enables you to simulate and render hundreds of thousands of photoreal hairs at up to real time speeds.
Formerly part of Unreal Studio, Datasmith—the toolkit for converting entire scenes at high fidelity from 3ds Max, SketchUp Pro, Cinema 4D, and a host of CAD and BIM formats—is now available for free as part of 4.24 and all future versions of Unreal Engine going forward. Add to that new Visual Dataprep for streamlined, easy-to-use, automated data preparation, and getting data from any source real-time ready is faster and easier.
That’s not to mention the first-class USD support that enables modelers and layout artists to work in parallel; enhancements to multi-display rendering that make it much easier to use out of the box, even on existing projects; and a new task-based wizard to give you a better starting point when creating new projects.
And last, but definitely not least, in fulfilment of our announcement last month, you can access Quixel Megascans in the Marketplace and through Quixel Bridge—all free for use with Unreal Engine.
See all the new features
If you’re an existing Unreal Engine or Unreal Studio user, you can download Unreal Engine 4.24 from the Epic Games launcher. If you haven’t yet taken the plunge, there’s never been a better time; click the link below to get started. Either way, we hope you enjoy all the new features and upgrades, and as always, we encourage your feedback!
Get started now
Some features are beta or experimental, and should not be considered production ready. See the Release Notes for details.