What’s new in Unreal Engine 5.1?
Epic Games is here yet again to make waves with the latest Unreal Engine 5.1. With the release, they've built upon the groundbreaking feature set introduced in UE5, making it more robust, efficient, and versatile for creators across all industries.
Lumen, Nanite, and virtual shadow maps
They’ve laid the groundwork for the Lumen dynamic global illumination and reflection system, the Nanite virtualized micro polygon geometry system, and Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM) to support games and experience running at 60 fps on next-gen consoles and capable PCs to run without latency.
Increased developer efficiency
Virtual assets detached metadata from the object data, which made it possible for developers to sync only the necessary data from the source control system. This feature will make it possible to use textures and audio assets to create more diverse content.
Enhanced world-building tools
World Partition has been updated to support large world coordinates, which means that you can create massive open worlds with ease. With world partition, you can enjoy accelerated source control workflows. In addition, you can also make large water bodies with better performance.
Updates for virtual production, and live events
Unreal Engine 5.1 significantly improves performance and usability for in-camera VFX workflows that apply equally to the broadcast and live events space. It starts with a new dedicated in-camera VFX editor that supports a range of workflows specifically tailored for the tasks they need to carry out. The panel also features an improved light card system that presents a preview of the n display.
Animation, rigging, and modeling enhancement
A machine learning deformer is an effective tool for creating high-fidelity approximations of complex rigs. Control rig continues to expand toward fully procedural rigging with many updates to the core framework which enables you to create rig hierarchies.
Audio system enhancement
Meta sound updates include additional node types, together with the support of various multichannel output formats, and the new ability to show feedback on real-time node connections. They’ve also introduced Soundscape, a plugin for procedural ambient sound generation.
AI toolset
In this release, several artificial intelligence tools introduced in Unreal Engine 5.0 move out of experimental status: Smart objects and State Tree to Production-Ready and MassEntry to beta.
All games will be using Unreal Engine 5.1 so far
Unreal Engine 5.1 is the latest version of the epic games creation platform, and several upcoming games are confirmed. During their event, Epic games made Unreal Engine 5.1 available for all developers to use for their upcoming projects.