What's New on Unreal Engine 5.3?

Unreal Engine 5.3 has arrived with a slew of thrilling updates and enhancements, promising game developers and creators across various industries an even more powerful toolkit. Let's dive into the key highlights of this release.

Rendering

Unreal Engine 5.3 continues to improve its core rendering capabilities, making it easier for developers to create high-quality games running at 60 fps on next-gen consoles.

Nanite

• Nanite now supports custom tangents for better rendering, especially for low-poly models.
• Adds about 10% to memory and disk usage.
  

• Initial implementation of spline meshes in Nanite
• Impact performance and has some issues with deformation.

• Introduced a vertex cache for faster rendering of masked materials and Pixel Depth Offset
• Improve speed by around 20%.

• Improved Nanite object selections, eliminating flickering and occlusion issues, rendering at final resolution.

• Resolved issues related to selecting, modifying, or deleting instances of Nanite
• Enabled instanced static meshes and foliage actors in the editor.

• Added a setting for Nanite static meshes to control fallback mesh reduction, either based on Relative Error or Percent Triangles.

Lumen

• Now supports multiple reflection bounces with hardware ray tracing (HWRT) and Max Reflection Bounces setting.
• Can be used independently of Lumen GI for better reflection quality.
• Optimized for HWRT with async compute on consoles.

• Added geometry normals view for easier troubleshooting of global distance field or Nanite fallback meshes.

• Introduced r.Lumen.Reflections.VisualizeTraces for visualizing and debugging reflection rays.

• Fixed an issue where Material AO affected emissive and direct lighting.
  
  

Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM)

• • VSMs now work well with Nanite cull distance, even when shadow caching is on.
  • This helps improve performance for scenes relying on culling, though there might be some shadow artifacts in certain cases.

Multi-Process Cook for Faster Content Conversion

Developers will appreciate the Multi-Process Cook feature, which harnesses additional CPU and memory resources during content conversion.

This significantly reduces the time required to obtain a cooked output, whether on a build farm server or local workstation, by launching subprocesses to handle specific tasks.

Multi-process cooking is an experimental functionality introduced in UE 5.3. The extent of performance improvements can fluctuate, contingent on the project's scale and the method used for data division.

To achieve optimal outcomes, it is advisable to experiment with various CookProcessCount settings, taking into consideration the specific project requirements and the hardware specifications at your disposal.

Virtual Production

UE 5.3 update also provides practical tools for filmmakers, such as virtual cameras and the CineCamera Rig Rail.

Cine Cam Rig Rail for Filmmakers

Filmmakers will love the new Cine Cam Rig Rail Actor, enabling traditional camera movements along tracks or dollies. It offers precise control over camera settings like rotation, focal length, and focus distance at different control points along the path, supporting both in-editor and VCam workflows.

VCam Enhancements for Collaborative Shooting

VCam receives a boost with features like the ability to review takes on an iPad for faster iteration, simultaneous streaming of different VCam outputs for team members, and the option to record at a slower frame rate for easier capture of fast-moving action.

Cinematic-quality volumetric rendering

• Store pre-calculated simulation data for volumetric effects
• Can be used in Unreal Engine's Niagara system or imported from other 3D software in the form of OpenVDB files.

• Offer advanced capabilities for rendering volumetric effects like global illumination, shadows, and scattering
• Particularly useful for creating high-quality cinematic content in Unreal Engine

While these features have potential applications in real-time use cases like games and virtual production, they may not perform optimally yet and their performance depends on the complexity of the content being rendered.

Modeling

Unreal Engine 5.3 introduces UI improvements, tool presets, and streamlined element selection for modeling:

• New tools include spline tools and element selection tools.
• Provide support for LODs, vertex color painting, and various tool enhancements.
• The UV tool offers distortion display and texel density normalization.
• Geometry Scripting (Beta) adds custom modeling tools and functions for technical artists.

These updates enhance the modeling workflow in Unreal Engine.

Simulation

Updates also bring key improvements and features in simulation. These updates enhance Unreal Engine for developers, artists, and designers.

• The Chaos Cloth Editor Foundation: streamlines clothing setup, offering non-destructive workflows and advanced collision support.
• The Chaos ML Cloth: introduces the Chaos Cloth Generator plugin for in-engine cloth simulation.
• Chaos Physics: receives optimizations for rigid body simulation and scene queries.
• The Fracture Editor: gains material control and runtime optimizations.
• Niagara Fluids: simulations become more versatile, supporting transformations, data channels, and rendering in the Path Tracer.
• Niagara Summary View Editor: simplifies emitter settings, benefiting fluid emitters by creating custom views of essential parameters.

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More updates such as Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), Hair Grooms, Path Tracing, and Substrate can be accessable via Unreal Engine 5.3 Release Notes