Unreal Engine 5.6 improvements and additions!

With the release of Preview 1 comes a bunch of much needed optimzations and features added. Particularly for non gaming, cinematic linear rendering. I've broken down them into categories here with some thoughts. You can find all the additions to 5.6 on the product board here - https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/tabs/124-unreal-engine-5-6.

Petzval Bokeh

Both Lumen and Path Tracing now supports the Petzval Bokeh lens type. The first ever portrait lens designed contained this bokeh effect which was and still is a hugely important effect in the world of photography and CGI. Hopefully with the addition of this we can start to get much more unique feeling looks and branch away from the cookie cutter DoF UE has had for so long. Below are the settings in each camera to enable and tweak the bokeh. From first glance and playing around with it, you can dial it in very nicely, much more than the standard DoF until now.

Motion Trails

A classic feature for any animator in traditional DCC now makes its way to Unreal. You will find the option in the new to 5.6, horizontal viewport toolbar. Make sure you are in Animation mode to see this feature!

Control Rig Physics

Demonstrated by the rig and animation teams at Epic Innovation London a few weeks ago. This new feature allows us to utilize true physics on Control Rig defined by the control rig network. Easily swap from standard Rigs to Physics rig, you can also define what parts receive physics etc versus a global physics toggle on the entire rig. Will be great to test this out on the samples kit, Automotive Rigging just got a lot lot nicer with true physics, collision reactions and more.

World Bookmarks

If you are using World Partition, the new world bookmarks feature is an entirely new window outliner is designed to create persistent data bookmarks across not just cameras and views, but loaded regions, volumes, states inside data layers and editor context options. Levels can have a set default bookmark when opening the level to ensure you can snap to the most optimal working environment as soon as the level is streamed in. As of right now this is only for Editor. Virtual production shoots, multi sequence / level streamed shots as well as on set operators can take advantage of this option right away to move and load data more efficiently.

OpenXR Passthrough

While not as easy to set up or use as the rest of the features listed here, this is a pretty important addition to the engine. Tested on a MetaQuest 3, we now get device agnostic passthrough on VR devices without needing vendor specifc SDK's or plugins. At the moment It is a number of steps to configure in the .ini or device profiles, there's nothing that can't be automated about this. When setting the flag bPackageForMetaQuest to true in the engine, when building it automatically adds the necessary manifest line directly into the app for MetaQuest apps to take advantage of.

PSD layer import support for Motion Design

PSD files can now be imported into the engine whcih respects said files layer stack. A new Layer Depth Offset feature allows you to animate individual layers of the stack for quick and easy transitions. Really useful to get motion design content, branding and more into the engine for PoC's and realtime rendering.

Interchange support for FBX import into level.

This one is pretty huge. Being able to take advantage of the powers and capabilities of Interchange with the feature set of Import into level now allows anyone to bring data into the engine with hierarchy respecting only now you can utilize the power of stacks to manipulate data in the 3D file before, during and after the import process. Savings tonnes of time removing unecessary asset creation as well as the full asset editing capabilities during the import process and hooks after the import to continue editing and manipulating the assets. If you don't want to use this new process there is a CVAR to go back to the legacy import into level proces. Interchange.FeatureFlags.Import.FBX.ToLevel 0

Interchange improvements

Using the Interchange import pipeline, a bunch of new improvements and additions are now available for 5.6.

• MaterialX now supported inside USD files going through Interchange
• glTF import now supports IES lights embedded within the file
• Interchange groups for presets now allow a range of users the ability to clearly see and use the correct preset groups for them.
• Better UI experience for conflicts, settings and headless import scenarios
• Sockets are now able to be imported if they are embedded within the file
• Similar to the Import into Level feature, you can now create a folder hierarchy based on the asset composition inside the content browser.

Experimental support for USD customization through Interchange

Since the introduction of USD to Interchange in 5.5 it was and still is considered experimental. New features have been added to the USD importer however to allow richer USD files across DCC's.

• GeometryCaches
• SparseVolumeTexture
• Primitive Shapes
• LODs
• Embedded MaterialX description
• Collision Schemas
• USDz

New Viewport Toolbar

A new dynamically resizing toolbar is added to the top of the viewport to allow faster access to most commonly used features, view modes and scalability settings. Changing editor modes as well as asset windows now alters the toolbar to display functions from their relevant categories.

Quick Render

Similar to the old UE4 legacy Movie Scene Capture window accessed through the sequencer (which is still functional!), this new tool gives users all the necessary information needed to render in a nicely formatted window to get renders of work started in rapid time. Ability to render Current Sequence (anim), Current Viewport (still), Selected Camera (still) or Current Viewport Camera in Sequence (anim). These options should be plenty for anyone to get out renders or multiple renders in quick succession without needing to set up a length MRQ or MRG process.

Production Wizard

Think of this like DataAssets but for rendering. Conventionalize specifc parameters such as sequencer settings, asset names, folder hierarchies all in one handy window. You can set multiple productions and swap them out via a drop down box whilst still in the same project. This is a really neat tool and it's something that all artists can take advantage of from small independent studios to larger VFX houses and vendors.

A lot more additions I can't wait to get my hands on such as

• Movie Render Graph updates
• High Resoltion rendering overhaul and optimizations
• New Electra Proton sequencer player, giving us smoother playback of media as well as better read and decode for IMG media playback
• Multipart EXR support (finally!!)
• Dockable Media Viewer! Something more usuable than the image plate plugin we've had up until now.
• Plethora of PCG improvements and UX enhancements

These are just my own features that stood out to me. There is so so so much more under the hood that I'm looking forward to finding. If you enjoyed reading this so far, share your thoughts in the comments about what you are looking forward to using in 5.6 or what's not yet made the cut that you are desperately looking for!

Happy developing!