Unreal Engine 5.1 Is Now Available
Unreal Engine 5.1 version updates the Lumen dynamic global illumination and reflections system, the Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM) for more details and low latency at 60fps.
For those who don’t know, Lumen is a new dynamic lighting technology to add indirect light to virtual scenes. Now, Lumen supports nDisplay. The Nanite feature introduces intricate geometric details to the games and the virtual environment. This has been improved to include a Programmable Rasterizer for material-driven animations and deformations. Nanite and VSMs will help reduce the time taken to make virtual environments.
Unreal Engine 5.1 includes features like Virtual Assets, new automated Pipeline State Object (PSO) caching for DX12, and on-demand shader compilation for increased efficiency.
The World Partition system, an open-world toolset introduced with Unreal Engine 5, now supports Large World Coordinates for the creation of bigger open worlds without the loss of precision. The new HLOD (Hierarchical Level of Detail) support for water rendering and streaming can help developers make large water bodies.
There are several in-camera visual effects like a dedicated in-Camera VFX Editor, an improved Light Card system, improved Remote Control APIs, expanded color correction tools, and more. Unreal Engine 5.1 also includes animation improvements like the Machine Learning (ML) Deformer (in beta), support for constraints in Sequencer (the multi-track nonlinear animation editor), and much more.
You can check out the proper details on the changes introduced with Unreal Engine 5.1. It is now available to download from over here.
