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Epic Games launches Unreal Engine 4.27 improving on game and film development

By Tim Augustin - on 19 Aug 2021, 10:00pm

Epic Games launches Unreal Engine 4.27 improving on game and film development

Image: Epic Games

Surprise! Epic Games is launching Unreal Engine 4.27 today, introducing powerful new features to their engine that can be used by creators across game development, film production and more. The big highlights are that the engine’s virtual production toolset is getting major updates, plus faster light baking due to enhancements to GPU Lightmass. 

Let’s break this update down in more detail. First off, 4.27 brings a bunch of improvements to the Unreal Engine’s in-camera visual effects toolset, which makes it faster and easier than ever to bring it into filmmaking. You might’ve heard of The Mandalorian making use of virtual sets via the Unreal Engine - and this production technique has only become more popular since then. You can check out a short test piece by Epic Games and Bullitt putting this update through its paces below:

One of these updates includes support for more features in the Virtual Camera system, such as Multi-User Editing plus an extensible core architecture. You can also find improvements for producing correct motion blur in traveling shots - stuff like that. The new 3D Config Editor also adds Multi-GPU support, enabling users to maximise resolution on wide shots by dedicating a GPU for in-camera pixels and to shoot with multiple cameras. New Level Snapshots also let you easily save the state of a scene and later restore it either partially or in its entirety.

Next up, more enhancements are coming to GPU Lightmass, which allows for faster light baking. The system leverages the latest ray tracing capabilities with DirectX 12 and Microsoft’s DXR framework, using the GPU to progressively render pre-computed lightmaps. This allows for significantly reduced waiting times as GPU Lightmass generates lighting data for scenes with complex lighting effects. Crews can also modify virtual set lighting a lot quicker now. Essentially - lighting is faster and better now!

Image: Epic Games

The Path Tracer also makes the creation of final-pixel imagery easy, and users can render from multiple cameras with Movie Render Queue. RAD Game Tools are part of the Epic Games family now, and that means their compression and encoding tools are going into the hands of Unreal Engine developers for free. Pixel Streaming technology that allows Unreal Engine to run on a high-powered cloud virtual machine is also production-ready. That means you can get the full-quality experience anywhere on a web browser on any device. 

Unreal Engine is also getting a more connected ecosystem that lets developers export many more elements to USD, making the overall process just that much more streamlined. VR and AR templates have been redesigned to give users a quicker way to get started there, and it’s now easier to create XR content in Unreal Engine. Epic Online Services are also directly included in Unreal Engine, and a new Epic Online Services plugin for Unity is available today in open source. 

Whew, that’s a lot of technical details! If you’re a developer, you’re about to have a lot more tools at your disposal to create games, movies and more with relative ease. If you’re a consumer, get ready for some pretty neat-looking stuff from your favourite creators in the future - it only gets better from here. 

Image: Epic Games

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