The latest release brings exciting new features to developers, including real-time ray tracing, in the fastest version of Unreal Engine 4 to date.
Cary, NC — Epic Games has unveiled Unreal Engine 4.22, packed with new features designed to push the boundaries of photorealistic and cinematic quality for real-time experiences. These include real-time ray tracing and build time improvements of up to 165%, helping game developers, enterprise users, and content creators achieve world-class results on any platform.
Key new features and updates in Unreal Engine 4.22 include:
Real-Time Ray Tracing (Early Access): Achieve stunning realism with selective ray tracing for true reflections, refractions, soft area shadows, and ambient occlusion. Experience these effects at remarkable speeds. Explore this technology by watching the 90-second short film, Troll, demonstrating lighting quality using UE 4.22 ray tracing features:
Simultaneous Multi-User Editing (Early Access): Collaborate effectively with multiple developers making and viewing changes to the same Unreal Engine project simultaneously. This feature streamlines teamwork, eliminates bottlenecks, and sparks creativity.
Faster Mesh Drawing: UE 4.22 significantly improves mesh drawing performance with more aggressive caching of drawing information for static scene elements and automatic instancing to merge draw calls where possible.
Faster C++ Iterations: Featuring Molecular Matters’ Live++, integrated as a new Experimental Live Coding feature, UE 4.22 also optimizes UnrealBuildTool and UnrealHeaderTool, drastically reducing build times. This results in up to 3x faster iterations when making C++ code changes.
Enhanced Sound Design: New creative sound design tools include TimeSynth (Early Access) for precise audio clip management, a spectral analyzer for Submixes, layered sound concurrency for better control of how many sounds will play at once, and spectral analysis baking.
Virtual Production Tools:
- New Composure UI: A new UI in Unreal’s built-in compositing tool Composure enables real-time compositing capabilities directly within Unreal Editor, ideal for on-set visualization.
- Sequence Take Recorder: Record animations from motion capture linked to characters in the scene and from Live Link data for future playback, enabling faster iteration and review of previous takes.
- OpenColorIO (OCIO) color profiles: Unreal Engine now supports the Open Color IO framework for managing multiple color spaces across a film, TV series, or animated project.
Hardware-Accelerated Video Decoding (Experimental): On Windows platforms, UE 4.22 uses the GPU to speed up processing of H.264 video streams, reducing CPU strain during playback. This enables smoother video and supports higher resolution movie files and more simultaneous input feeds.
New Media I/O Formats: UE 4.22 features for professional video I/O input formats and devices, including:
- 4K UHD inputs for both AJA and Blackmagic;
- Support for both 8bit and 10bit inputs;
- Single-link, dual-link, and quad-link options;
- AJA Kona 5 devices;
- HDMI 2.0 input;
- UHD at high frame rates (up to 60fps).
nDisplay Improvements (Experimental): Several enhancements make the multi-display rendering system more flexible, handling new hardware configurations and inputs. See the Childish Gambino case study to see nDisplay in action.
Animation Sharing: This new plugin significantly reduces the overall animation work required for a crowd of actors. It uses the Master-Pose Component system with blending and additive Animation States—buckets where animation instances are evaluated and poses are transferred to all child components.
Microsoft HoloLens Remote Streaming Support: UE 4.22 supports streaming to HoloLens, with full HoloLens 2 support coming in May 2019.
Google Stadia Support: Unreal Engine supports Google’s new game streaming platform, Stadia. Developers can access Stadia features through consistent interfaces, ensuring cross-platform workflow compatibility.
Source: Epic Games
