Epic Games rolls out Unreal Engine 4.26 with new features, improvements

Epic Games on Monday announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.26. The new version of the real-time 3D creation platform aims to assist developers in developing life-like environments and characters for video games, films, training, and simulation.

The latest version of Unreal Engine brings a new Volumetric Cloud component which helps improve the quality of both realistic and stylised skies, clouds, and other atmospheric effects. The company says the new component now allows in real-time to reflect time-of-day changes. There’s also a new Environment Lighting Mixer window that enables all components affecting atmosphere lighting to be authored in one place, it added. Similarly, it brings a new Water system to help artists better realise oceans, lakes, rivers, and islands using splines.

Unreal Engine’s 4.26 version aims to enhance high-quality media output through new features. The updated Movie Render Queue allows output render passes including matte IDs, camera motion vectors, Z-depth, ambient occlusion, reflections, and more. The 4.26 version adds support for exporting multi-channel EXRs, Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHR codecs, and Final Cut Pro XML EDLs, as well as the ability to integrate render farms.

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“Users will see significant usability and performance improvements in the Collaborative Viewer template that enables multi-user design reviews on VR/AR/Desktop, both enhancing the collaborative design review process and allowing more users to join a session. In addition, there’s now support for voice communication between participants over VOIP using in-engine peer-to-peer protocols,” said Epic Games in a post.

The new version also offers improvements to the Chaos physics tool, ray tracing, new GPU Lightmass, a new Virtual Camera system, enhanced DMX support, and new Datasmith exporter plugins for Rhino and Naviworks. You can learn more about the new version here.