Just five weeks after releasing the 5.5 preview build at Seattle Unrealfest, Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 5.5. The new engine is packed with new features, including vastly improved animation tools. The headline feature of Unreal Engine 5.5 is the new experimental MegaLights, which are described as a nanite for lighting.
MegaLights is a completely new implementation of direct lighting in Unreal Engine 5, allowing artists to place an order of magnitude more dynamic and shadowed area lights than ever before. The technology is designed to support current-gen consoles and uses ray tracing to create realistic soft shadows from various types of area lights. However, MegaLights is currently considered an experimental feature and should not be used in production.
Other features in UE5.5 include:
- Improved animation tools
- The modular control setup is now in beta testing
- MetaHuman animator can now generate facial animations just from audio
- Customizable character customization (beta)
- Lumen can now run at 60Hz on supported platforms
- Path Tracer is now production ready
- The substrate material system is now in beta
- Mobile rendering and preview improvements
You can find out more details in the official changelog. The new version is available for download and use.