Unreal Engine 4.11 Preview

PREVIEW!

A Preview of the upcoming 4.11 release is now available via the Epic Games Launcher and . We have made this Preview available so that our developer-community can help us catch issues before the final release. As fixes are implemented, we will release updated previews throughout the development cycle. Please be aware that the preview releases are not fully quality tested, that they are still under heavy active development, and that they should be considered as unstable until the final release. Developers should not convert their projects for active development on preview releases. Please test on copies of your project instead.

The life cycle for this Preview will be longer than most of our other Previews. This provides the community additional time to find and report issues for this release. For additional information about this release, please see the blog post: 4.11 Preview 1 Released For Early Adopters - Unreal Engine

We encourage users to check out the preview to try new features and inform us of any issues which we may not have caught. A Known Issues List is provided below which will be updated periodically. If you discover any additional issues with this preview release, please report the issue on the Bug Reports section of the Unreal Engine AnswerHub.

4.11 Preview Summary

This list provides a brief summary of updates in this release. Full release notes will be made available with the final 4.11 release. We may not be able to provide additional information about updates at this time.

  • Rendering Updates:

  • New physically based shading model for realistic hair based on the latest research from film. It models 2 specular lobes, transmission, and scattering.

  • New physically based shading model for eyes.

  • New physically based shading model for cloth. This combines the standard shading model with a layer of velvet fibers. This layer simulates fuzz and fabrics.

  • Capsule Shadows - We now have support for very soft indirect shadows cast by a capsule representation of the character

  • Lightmass Portals - Skylight quality indoors can be massively improved by setting up Portal actors over openings. Portals tell Lightmass where to look for incoming lighting, they don’t actually emit light themselves. Portals are best used covering small openings that are important to the final lighting. Placing large Portals all over the level will dramatically increase build times.

  • Per-vertex translucency lighting - There are two new translucency lighting modes available in the material editor which compute lighting per-vertex. PerVertex lighting modes use half as many shader instructions and texture lookups.

  • We now have support for 3 lighting channels. You can set which channels a PrimitiveComponent or a LightComponent is in.

  • We’ve integrated Intel’s Embree ray tracing library into Lightmass and we got a huge lighting build speedup from it, as the majority of lighting build time goes toward tracing rays to figure out how light is bouncing.

  • We’ve integrated updates to the D3D12 RHI to allow better CPU utilization while generating rendering commands in parallel.

  • Improved quality and performance of the SubsurfaceScatteringProfile shading model.

  • Circle Depth of Field post process - New Material Functions to render small particles with out of focus.

  • Materials using separate translucency can now be rendered at a lower resolution, which can be useful to improve GPU performance for fillrate and overdraw heavy geometry (for example particle effects).
    The resolution is controlled via a console variable, r.SeparateTranslucencyScreenPercentage, which expresses separate translucency as a percentage of current screen resolution.

  • Static mesh LOD transitions now supporting dithering.

  • Core Updates:

  • CrashReporter Server available

  • Improvements
    [LIST]

  • Garbage Collection up to 4x faster

  • Dependency preloading - brings us close to seek free loading (90% of the time seek free), faster package loading

  • UnrealHeaderTool makefiles - iterative UHT runs are 5x faster

Platform Updates:

  • Metal on Mac
  • AppleTV support
  • Fast Semantics on XboxOne
  • VS2015 on XboxOne
  • Code plugins for PS4
  • Deterministic cooking “bug-finder” commandlet
  • Background content precaching for most-recently-cooked-platform

Editor/Tools Updates:

  • Sequencer improvements

  • New tracks: Shot/director, play rate, slomo, fade, material, particle parameter tracks.

  • Improved movie rendering, exr support

  • Improved/consistent keyframing behaviors, copy/paste keyframes, copy keys from matinee, 3d keyframe path display

  • Master sequence workflow

  • Spawnables workflow

  • UI improvements: track coloring, keyframe shapes/coloring, track filtering

Framework Updates:

  • Anim Dynamics Skeletal Control for Animation Blueprints - allows dynamic motion to be procedurally added to skeletal meshes without having to use a full physics solution. This is accomplished using the new “Anim Dynamics” node in the Animation Graph of an Animation Blueprint.

Networking Updates:

  • Packet handler system

  • Easy interception of packets for things like encryption, compression, etc

  • Added CryptoPP, and packet handler components that support it out of the box

  • Oodle integration (SDK purchase required)

  • Client-side replays

Blueprint Updates:

  • The Blueprint search tool has been updated to support more advanced search functionality (to get more targeted results).
  • Native C++ functions marked BlueprintCallable can now also be optionally marked as DevelopmentOnly. This new metadata allows calls to those functions to be disabled (compiled out) of all Blueprint function graphs in cooked/packaged builds without breaking the execution flow.

Mobile Rendering Updates:

  • Support for hardware instancing on iOS and many Android devices, reducing draw calls for Foliage and InstancedStaticMeshComponents.
  • Improved reflections on mobile, optionally interpolating between up to 3 reflection captures and performing parallax correction

VR Updates:

  • Instanced Stereo Rendering
  • Head Mounted Display Camera Refactor
  • Stereo Layers
  • SDK Updates: Oculus SDK 1.0, SteamVR 1.0, PlayStationVR SDK3 Updates, and Gear VR LibOVRMobile 1.0 (not yet updated for Preview 1, but will be by final release)

Landscape/Foliage Updates:

  • Landscape layer whitelisting, allowing you to control which landscape components should accept which layers in the painting tool
  • Landscape layer usage view mode, to quickly see which landscape components are using which layers
  • Support for baking WorldPositionOffset changes into landscape collision

Additional features and updates may be added to this list over time.
[/LIST]

Known Issues List

This is a list of unresolved high priority bugs in our 4.11 Preview engine release. We will attempt to resolve critical bugs before the final 4.11 release, other bugs that do not block development or have workarounds may be marked to be fixed in one of the future hotfixes or major releases.

Please be aware that this is not a comprehensive list of all engine bugs, it is simply a snapshot of some of the latest bugs discovered with this preview that we aim to fix prior to release. This list will be periodically updated with new additions and to reflect which ones have been fixed, so be sure to check back!

Known Issues in 4.11 Preview 8

Important Known Issue: UE-27673 - Mac crashes when building lighting. This is due to an Nvidia GPU driver bug on OSX 10.11.3 or earlier. The solution for this is to update to OSX 10.11.4.

UE-27978 Editor on close if custom Data Asset is not saved after hot reload.
UE-28581 Trophy files are failing to get packaged
UE-28591 Remove combo box for Search For Help in editor help bar
UE-28557 Vehicle and Vehicle Advanced Code Feature Pack fails to compile
UE-28527 Decal missing on user touch for TopDown template on Android device
UE-26104 FPS regression on Galaxy Note 4 (Sun Temple)
UE-25693 Some maps in ContentExamples have inconsistant Player Start node positions
UE-24994 Character is discolored and has a square shadow on Galaxy S5
UE-24878 Crash when Converting 4.10 Project to 4.11 possibly related to Oculus Config Utility

I hate to be the sour grape, I am stupidly excited by all the new rendering improvements, but has there been ANY progress on UE-23368, it’s a complete showstopper for any and all updates on our project.

[=;441798]
has there been ANY progress on UE-23368, it’s a complete showstopper for any and all updates on our project.

Hi ,

There’s no update on this yet, but I’ll follow up on it with our engineers once is back from the holiday break.

Cheers

Looking forward to the final version of 4.11, great job guys! :slight_smile:

[= Ellis;437457]

Garbage Collection up to 4x faster

Awesome! Thank you Epic <3

estoy trabajando duro en unreal engine en un proyecto que espero mostrar pronto…! gracias UE4 maravillos

“Static mesh LOD transitions now supporting dithering.”
I can’t believe what, I mean, I didn’t expect any update about this subject! Can’t wait for stable release :slight_smile:

Looks like great update. Are “Capsule Shadows” casting distance field shadows and DFAO?

Nice release! (especially instanced stereo rendering)

Is it Oculus Mobile SDK 1.0 or Oculus desktop SDK 1.0 ?

Does UE4 utilize async timewarp for Gear VR ? If not, will 4.11 use it ?

Any news on Oculus Audio SDK 1.0.1 for spatialized sound in 4.11 ?

Will you have GL ES 3.1 render path enabled in 4.11, so that we can use it for Gear VR phones? (in 4.10.1 it is disabled and requires engine re-build, which isn’t something I want to mess with)

Any to see First Person / Third Person templates shipping with 4.11 that are optimized for Gear VR ?

What about some fast dynamic shadows for mobile VR ? (blob or whatever)

I see that the 4.11 release notes mention stereo layer support. Any idea how one can go about using that? It also mentions the 1.0 SDK being integrated but it doesn’t look like that from browsing the source. Are either of those features in the preview build?

Thanks for putting the 4.11 preview out before the break. It would be amazing if you guys could post highres screens of the material setups for eye, tearline and hair!

Is UE-23894 yet fixed for 4.11? :slight_smile: Update list looks anyway very nice. Cant wait to try it, tried first time to load 4.10 Project in this but it crashed on start up (edit again, seems like my Project wont load with preview 1 at least).

This is an awesome update. Cannot wait to test. Thank you.

“New physically based shading model for eyes.” Epic failed to give correct credit here in the Twitch video :frowning: Big props to Jorge Jimenez’s research in this area which Epic used directly - Jorge Jimenez – Next Generation Character Rendering

Epic Games launcher for Linux, or I will stick to using Unity.

Thanks.

Skin/eyes update alongside Sequencer update is veeerrry exciting!

Any word on getting an update to the example content for these? That is…the character shaders and sequencer. Or perhaps something akin to the matinee demo? (I learn best when I’m taking something apart!)

What is Instanced Stereo Rendering and does it affect Gear VR development?

[=darkpivot;441851]
What is Instanced Stereo Rendering and does it affect Gear VR development?

Renders both views in one draw call, or something like that (instead of rendering twice).

[=;441833]
It also mentions the 1.0 SDK being integrated but it doesn’t look like that from browsing the source.

Apologies for that. We are intending to update to update the SDK by the final release, but it’s not happened yet for the Preview 1. I have updated the notes above.

Please be aware that many members of Epic staff are now on holiday break, so to many of those with questions I regret that we won’t be able to provide in-depth answers currently, but rest assured that more clarification (and screenshots) will be provided with the final release notes. Bug reports for the 4.11 Preview posted to the UE4 Answerhub will continue to be investigated and processed, and Preview 2 will release after the new year.

Cheers!

-Metal on Mac
-AppleTV support

i’m very happy!!

tnx epic

regards from Costa Rica