News
June 23, 2026
Unreal Engine HMI Template available now
Unreal Engine 5.8 brings two powerful updates that significantly reduce the friction for automotive HMI teams looking to evaluate Unreal Engine.
The new Unreal Engine HMI Template provides a ready-to-use foundation that helps teams quickly explore, prototype, and accelerate HMI development in UE5.
It works hand in hand with a new Data Reduction Pipeline Plugin that transforms complex Unreal Engine models for marketing and engineering into optimized assets for mobile and embedded applications.
No consolidated reference previously existed showing how these pieces fit together inside UE. Teams either had to rebuild infrastructure independently or deliver ad hoc solutions that were hard to extend or hand off. With the Unreal Engine HMI Template, that’s all changed.
The new Unreal Engine HMI Template provides a ready-to-use foundation that helps teams quickly explore, prototype, and accelerate HMI development in UE5.
It works hand in hand with a new Data Reduction Pipeline Plugin that transforms complex Unreal Engine models for marketing and engineering into optimized assets for mobile and embedded applications.
Why this is a step change for automotive HMI teams
Building automotive HMI in Unreal Engine from scratch means solving the same infrastructure problems every time: ingesting vehicle signals, binding them to UI widgets, rendering maps, configuring mobile render settings, and targeting embedded platforms.No consolidated reference previously existed showing how these pieces fit together inside UE. Teams either had to rebuild infrastructure independently or deliver ad hoc solutions that were hard to extend or hand off. With the Unreal Engine HMI Template, that’s all changed.
You might be a technical artist integrating HMI widgets into existing UE projects. Perhaps you’re an integration engineer replacing mock signal servers with a live vehicle data backend.
Whatever your role, if you’re an HMI professional evaluating or implementing Unreal Engine, this new template is for you.
Whatever your role, if you’re an HMI professional evaluating or implementing Unreal Engine, this new template is for you.
What’s in the Unreal Engine HMI Template?
The template comprises three core components. Easily navigate between the different experiences directly from Play Mode using the in-project launcher.Instrument cluster
A fully wired digital cluster that receives live vehicle signals over a standard protocol and renders them in real time.- Signals flow from a vehicle data source over WebSocket via OLink (a standard protocol) into the cluster with no custom transport code.
- Replacing the included Python simulator with a real vehicle backend requires changing one URL in a config file. Nothing else.
- The MVVM binding pattern means Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG) widgets are signal-agnostic—they bind to a viewmodel, not directly to OLink. Swap the signal source without touching widget code.
- It covers EV signals out of the box: charge level, charge status, range, regen power.
Maps
A high-performance offline-capable map experience—flexible architecture to extend with your own data or swap rendering—that runs on embedded hardware.Tile data is packaged into a single file and loaded from disk. No network connection is required at runtime.
- It comprises three rendering systems working in parallel: Skia for roads and land use, UMG widgets for road names and place labels, and UE mesh for 3D building extrusion.
- GPS tracking is built in. The camera follows a position marker. Panning disengages tracking; recenter re-engages it—the same pattern as a navigation app.
- Buildings can be pre-baked to static .glb files for custom geometry—bridge models, stadium geometry, client headquarters—and layered over the procedural base.
- Tile data comes from OpenStreetMap, which is free and covers the entire world.
Widget library
Every widget used in the instrument cluster, available independently. No C++ required.- It comprises 13 widgets: speedometer, tachometer, gear selector, turn signals, EV charge display, weather, notifications, and more.
- It’s signal-agnostic by design. Widgets bind to a viewmodel—swap the data source without changing widget code.
- Each widget is a drop-in. Take one widget, use it in any UE project.
- It covers both standard ICE and EV signal sets.
Who should use the Unreal Engine HMI Template?
The template has been built specifically for HMI professionals and requires Perforce access:UE developers at OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers who need to evaluate whether UE can handle their HMI architecture—signal ingestion, map rendering, widget reuse—before committing to it.
Integration engineers who need to connect a real vehicle signal backend to a UE project and want a working OLink pipeline to start from rather than building one.
Technical artists and UI developers who need production-quality HMI widgets they can drop into an existing project without writing C++.
Introducing the Data Reduction Pipeline Plugin
HMI developers know the pain of adapting heavy engineering vehicle models to the constraints of a lightweight, embedded HMI environment.The Data Reduction Pipeline Plugin is designed to leverage existing Unreal Engine models—such as those created for marketing, design, or engineering purposes—and optimize them to an appropriate level of detail for mobile and real-time applications, including AR, VR, HMI, and 3D apps.
This process is a critical step in enabling the reuse of existing assets, eliminating the need for time-consuming reverse engineering or complete remodels when preparing content for lower-end platforms. Using the tool, teams can fully optimize assets for HMI applications and deploy them on Snapdragon 8155-class platforms and above.
That not only streamlines HMI development in Unreal Engine by enabling a smoother, more seamless workflow, but also establishes a single source of truth that can be shared across both marketing visualization and HMI engineering teams.
The new optimization workflow empowers anybody looking to adapt high-poly models for use on lower-end hardware. It’s been built with cars in mind, but can be used for digital twins of any kind.
In Epic’s internal tests with a highly complex car model, we were able to reduce a 150% configurator model—a superset model that includes every configurable vehicle option—from more than 80 million triangles down to below one million triangles, all running on a QC 8155 (Samsung S6 Tablet) at 60 fps.