features

Unreal Engine 4 supports advanced DirectX 11 & 12 rendering features such as full-scene HDR reflections, thousands of dynamic lights per scene, artist-programmable tessellation and displacement, physically-based shading and materials, IES lighting profiles and much more.

The Cascade VFX editor provides the tools needed to create detailed fire, smoke, snow, dust, dirt, rubble and more. Cascade's pipelined includes fast, low-cost GPU particle simulation and a collision system that interacts with the depth buffer. Millions of dynamic particles can receive and emit light within a scene, and you can control all kinds of particle properties, including size, color, density, falloff and bounciness.

Unreal Engine 4's new material pipeline makes use of physically-based shading to give you unprecedented control over the look and feel of characters and objects. Quickly create a wide range of surfaces that hold up visually under close examination. Layer materials and fine-tune values at the pixel level to achieve any kind of style you desire.

Bring your creative visions to life in-game with Blueprint visual scripting. Blueprints enable anyone to rapidly prototype and build playable content without touching a line of code. Use Blueprints to author level, object and gameplay behaviors, modify user interface, adjust input controls and so much more.

Blueprint visual scripting comes with a built-in debugger you can use to interactively visualize gameplay flow and inspect property values while testing your game. Freeze the game at any time and audit its state by setting breakpoints on individual nodes in your Blueprint graphs. Step through actions and events, make changes as you like, and have fun optimizing your game on the fly. 

Use Unreal Engine 4's Content Browser to import, organize, search, tag, filter and modify terabytes of game assets within the Unreal Editor. Real-time animated thumbnail previews can easily be changed and saved with the handy screenshot function. Create any type of asset collection to be used for individual work or shared with other developers. 

Use the Persona animation toolset to edit skeletons, skeletal meshes and sockets, animation Blueprints and more. This multi-purpose tool enables you to preview animation sequences and morph targets, and also set up animation blend spaces and montages. You can also modify physics and collision properties for skeletal mesh actors using the Physics Asset editing tool (PhAT). 

Unreal Engine 4's Matinee cinematic toolset provides director-level control over cut scenes, dynamic gameplay sequences and movies. With a look and feel similar to non-linear editors used for video editing, Matinee enables you to set up action within your scenes down to the finest detail, animate scene properties over time, and produce awesome filmic moments.

Create large, open world environments with the Landscape system, which paves the way for terrains that are orders of magnitude larger than what have been previously possible thanks to its powerful LOD system and efficient memory use. Customize huge, outdoor worlds using the foliage tool by quickly painting or erasing all sorts of terrain components.

Unreal Engine 4's post-processing features enable you to gracefully adjust the look and feel of scenes. Filmic effects at your fingertips include ambient cubemaps, ambient occlusion, bloom, color grading, depth of field, eye adaptation, lens flares, light shafts, temporal anti-aliasing and tone mapping, just to name a few.

With C++ source code for all of Unreal Engine 4, you can customize and extend Unreal Editor tools and Unreal Engine subsystems, including physics, audio, online, animation, rendering as well as Slate UI. With complete control over engine and gameplay code, you get everything so you can build anything.

Unreal Engine 4 supports full C++ source code access via GitHub for subscription members with clear version documentation and tracking. In addition, both Perforce version control and Apache Subversion support are available to developers with custom license terms. No matter your team size, you can easily coordinate development and design efforts with others through UE4's versioning infrastructure.

Unreal Engine 4 Code View saves time by allowing you to browse C++ functions directly on game characters and objects and jump straight to source code lines in Microsoft Visual Studio to make changes.

Make updates to your gameplay code while the game is running using Unreal Engine 4's popular Hot Reload feature. This tool allows you to edit C++ code and see those changes reflected immediately in-game without ever pausing gameplay.

Quickly debug and update gameplay behaviors as they happen through Simulate Mode, which lets you run game logic in the editor viewport and inspect AI as characters perform actions. View your game in full screen within the editing environment with Immersive View, which allows you to complete iterations on gameplay changes without added UI clutter or distractions.

Update your game and use Instant Game Preview to instantly spawn a player and play anywhere in-game without waiting for files to save.

The Possess and Eject features allow you to play your game in-editor to easily “eject” from the player’s perspective at any time and take control of the camera to inspect anything that may not be behaving properly.

Give AI-controlled characters increased spatial awareness of the world around them and enable them to make smarter movements with Unreal Engine 4’s gameplay framework and artificial intelligence system. Dynamic navigation mesh updates in real time as you move objects for optimal pathing at all times.

Use Unreal Engine 4's Sound Cue Editor to build the audio pipeline and define audio playback for your game. 

The premier Unreal Engine 4 Integrated Partner Program provides integrations with more than a dozen industry-leading middleware technologies, including NVIDIA PhysX, Autodesk Gameware, Enlighten, Umbra, Oculus VR and other software libraries.