Unreal Engine 5.6 Released: Faster, Bigger Worlds and Enhanced Tools

Epic Games has just announced the launch of Unreal Engine 5.6, the latest iteration of its industry-leading game engine. This version aims to empower developers with robust toolsets, especially for running high-quality, large-scale open worlds smoothly at 60 frames per second (FPS) on current-gen hardware. Furthermore, in-engine capabilities for animation and rigging have been boosted, reducing the need to jump between digital content creation (DCC) software, and MetaHuman characters can now be created entirely within the engine.

Unreal Engine 5.6 is packed with a suite of improvements designed to help developers work faster and smarter. Key highlights include quicker access to essential tools, better asset organization, and significant updates to procedural and virtual production toolsets.

Performance and Expansive Worlds

One of the primary goals of this release is to enable developers to create games that consistently run at 60 FPS on current-gen consoles, high-end PCs, and modern mobile devices.

• Lumen Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) Optimizations: Higher performance is targeted for Lumen Global Illumination. Key CPU bottlenecks have been eliminated, allowing for a sustained 60 FPS frame rate even when rendering more complex scenes.
• Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin (Experimental): Enables faster loading of immutable static geometry and stable frame rates.
• General Streaming Improvements: Overall enhancements to content streaming, such as asynchronous physics state creation and destruction, will benefit all projects.
• Updated Device Profiles: Profiles optimized for 60 FPS and tailored for current-gen consoles and desktop platforms make it easier to hit performance targets.

Accelerated Animation Creation

Unreal Engine 5.6 brings the biggest update yet to its in-editor animation toolset, offering greater speed, precision, and control.

• Motion Trails: Completely redesigned, this feature allows for visual and intuitive animation editing. Arcs and spacing can be adjusted directly in the viewport.
• Tween Tools: Revamped for faster fine-tuning of animations on controls or selected keys.
• Curve Editor: Redesigned for speed and performance. Handling keyframes is now easier and cleaner.
• Sequencer Updates: Introduces the new Sequencer Navigation Tool for navigating complex hierarchies and real-time Audio Scrubbing for synchronizing animation, dialogue, and effects.
• In-Engine Rigging Solutions (Experimental):
  • Morph Target Creation: Create and sculpt morph targets directly within the Skeletal Mesh Editor.
  • Control Rig Physics: Easily add procedural physics motion to character rigs for more dynamic movements. Additionally, a new internal ragdoll physics feature within rigs is also available experimentally.

MetaHuman Innovations: Now Fully In-Engine

MetaHuman Creator is now fully integrated into Unreal Engine and includes a range of additional enhancements alongside MetaHuman Animator.

• Parametric Body Shapes: Similar to faces, an almost infinite variety of possible body shapes can be created.
• Unreal Engine Clothing Asset: Complete outfits that automatically conform to MetaHumans can now be created.
• Enhanced Animation Capture: MetaHuman Animator can now capture actor performances in real-time from most webcams, many smartphones, and even from audio.
• Expanded Licensing Options: New licensing options in the UE EULA allow MetaHumans to be used with any engine or creative software.
• Fab Integration: MetaHumans and compatible assets can now be bought and sold on the Fab marketplace.

Simplified User Experience and Interface

The editor has been updated to offer faster workflows, smarter content organization, and quicker access to the tools and settings needed to maintain productivity.

• Redesigned Content Browser: Enhances asset organization and viewing, offering smoother thumbnail resizing and seamless support for both horizontal and vertical orientations.
• Viewport Toolbar: Section Menus and Quick Access Controls have been redesigned for faster access to essential tools. The toolbar now dynamically resizes to display relevant tool options.

Improved Developer Iteration

Speed up workflows on target platforms and devices and deliver content faster with developer tools designed for quicker iteration.

• Project Launcher Interface (Beta): Completely redesigned for usability and efficiency, speeding up the creation and management of device launch profiles.
• Zen Streaming (Beta): Boosts efficiency by eliminating the time-consuming steps of full packaged builds and copy/install deployments, facilitating content iteration and testing on the target platform.
• Incremental Cook (Experimental): Accelerates cooking times by analyzing asset changes and only cooking the updates.

Faster World Building with Procedural Tools

The PCG (Procedural Content Generation) framework has been enhanced for creating worlds and managing complex scenes efficiently with better GPU-driven performance.

• Node Graph UX (Beta): Updated to support inline constants, making it easier to create, drag-and-drop, and manipulate elements. It also introduces a new 3D viewport (Beta) that allows for previewing points, textures, and meshes directly in the viewport.
• GPU Performance Improvements (Beta): Increases stability in managing instances, especially in dense, complex scenes.
• PCG Biome Core v2 Plugin (Experimental): Biome creation and updating are now faster and more intuitive. New features like per-biome blending and biome layering provide more control for creating rich, organic environments more efficiently.

Advanced Cinematic and Performance Capture Workflows

A suite of new integrated tools offers better control over production pipelines, including performance capture and cinematic rendering.

• Mocap Manager (Experimental): A new end-to-end solution for visualizing, recording, and managing performance capture within the Unreal Editor.
• Capture Manager (Experimental): Now integrated with Live Link Hub, offering precise control over ingesting and processing MetaHuman captures from mobile devices, video files, and stereo head-mounted cameras (HMCs).
• Cinematic Assembly Toolset (CAT) (Experimental): Featuring everything from swappable project configurations to customizable naming tokens and reusable cinematic templates, this toolset works with integrated tools like Take Recorder and Movie Render Queue to help manage your shot management pipeline from start to finish.
• Quick Render (Beta): Enables one-click creation of still images and sequences to disk from the viewport and selected cameras, using settings defined in the Movie Render Graph.

Other Notable Rendering Enhancements

• RHI - Renderer Parallelization: The Renderer Hardware Interface (RHI) API has been refactored to improve Render Thread performance.
• Substrate Materials (Beta): Replaces the material creation approach with a more expressive and modular framework.
• First Person Rendering (Beta): A rendering method that prevents player hands/weapons from clipping with world objects and includes a separate field of view (FOV).
• GPU Profiler 2.0: A re-architected Insights GPU profiler.

World Building Tools

• World Bookmarks: A system to help navigate within a level and across multiple worlds while working in the editor.
• Landscape - Batched Merge: Fixes scalability issues when working with large landscapes.
• Landscape - Level Instance and Data Layers Support: Landscape editing within a level instance is now supported.

Character and Animation (Additional Details)

• Seamless Gameplay Transition for Cinematics (Experimental): In collaboration with the new Unreal Animation Framework, Sequencer will be able to seamlessly transition character animations to/from gameplay.
• Retarget Operation Stack: The IK Retargeter’s framework has been converted into an operation stack that you can reorder.
• Control Rig Physics (Experimental): Add procedural Physics motion to animations and Control Rigs.
• Sculpt Morph Shapes: Create and sculpt morph targets directly within the Skeletal Mesh editor using Unreal Engine’s internal modeling tools.

Other Important Updates

• Niagara LWC Tile Update Mode: For Niagara systems operating in large world coordinates and covering long distances.
• Optimized Niagara System Compilation: A new compilation mode reduces time spent waiting for results and significantly lowers the number of UObjects generated.
• Chaos Enhancements: Optimizations and new features in Chaos Core, Chaos Cloth (Beta Cloth Editor), Chaos Flesh, and Chaos Visual Debugger.
• Android Emulator Integration: Ability to test Android games on virtual devices from the Unreal Editor.
• OpenXR 1.1 Support: Simplifies the development of advanced XR applications.
• Audio Insights: UX improvements in the primary tool for audio profiling and debugging.
• Texturing Tools (Beta): Numerous improvements to the TextureGraph toolset.
• FBX Level Import with Interchange: The FBX level import process can now be done via the Interchange Framework.
• Simplified Mass Processor API: The way Mass processors are created has been simplified.
• Mover Plugin: AI integration, animation support, and performance improvements.
• Revamped Templates and Variants: Templates have been significantly downsized, and an option for “Variants” for specific game genres has been added.

Unreal Engine 5.6 continues to offer developers a comprehensive suite of tools to create bigger, more realistic, and higher-performing experiences. For even more details, be sure to visit the official Unreal Engine website.