Get your hands on Unreal Engine 5.3 today. With this release, developers will gain access to expanded functionality in UE5’s core rendering, development iteration, and virtual production workflows. Plus, explore a slew of new experimental rendering, animation, and simulation features!
Download Unreal Engine 5.3 from the Epic Games launcher, GitHub, or for Linux!
Refinements to core UE5 rendering features
Nanite has faster performance for masked materials, including foliage, and can represent a greater range of surfaces due to the new Explicit Tangents option.
Lumen with Hardware Ray Tracing has expanded capabilities that include multiple reflection bounces, and delivers faster performance on consoles.
Other areas with notable advancements include Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM)—which is now Production-Ready—Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), Hair Grooms, Path Tracing, and Substrate.
Multi-Process Cook
Enabling Multi-Process Cook launches subprocesses that perform parts of the cooking work alongside the main process, significantly reducing the time it takes to get a cooked output from a build farm server or on a local workstation.
Cine Cam Rig Rail
Emulate the workflow and results of traditional camera movement along tracks or on dollies, thanks to a new Cine Cam Rig Rail Actor, which provides more refined controls, including the ability to choreograph settings like camera rotation, focal length, focus distance, and so on, at different control points along the path. It supports both in-editor and VCam workflows.
VCam Enhancements
Enhancements to the VCam include the ability to review takes directly on the iPad for faster iteration; to simultaneously stream different VCam output for different team members—for example, with camera controls for the camera operator, without for the director—facilitating collaborative VCam shoots; and to record at a slower frame rate and playback at normal speed for easier capture of fast-moving action.
Experimental features
Please try them out and send us your feedback, but keep in mind these features are still under heavy development and we don’t recommend using them in your final projects just yet.
Sparse Volume Textures (SVT) and Path Tracing of Heterogeneous Volumes introduce a number of new capabilities for volumetric effects such as smoke and fire. SVT store baked simulation data representing volumetric media, and can be simulated in Niagara or imported from OpenVDB (.vdb) files created in other 3D applications. More complete support for rendering volumes is now available in the Path Tracer, offering the potential for high-quality volumetric rendering—including global illumination, shadows, and scattering—for cinematics, films, episodic television, and other forms of linear content creation.
Orthographic rendering is useful for visualizing architecture and manufacturing projects, as well as offering orthographic projections as a stylistic camera choice for games. Most modern features of UE5 are expected to now work, including Lumen, Nanite, and Shadows. Orthographic rendering is also available in the Unreal Editor.
A new Skeletal Editor provides animators with a variety of tools for working with Skeletal Meshes, including the ability to paint skin weights—in editor.
We’ve introduced a new Panel Cloth Editor and new skin weight transfer algorithms, and added XPBD (extended position-based dynamics) constraints as a basis for our future cloth generation in engine. This provides a non-destructive cloth simulation workflow in which you can trade off speed for precision, and can result in better-looking simulations. Cloth can also now be simulated and cached in engine using the new Panel Cloth Editor in conjunction with the ML Deformer Editor.
Known Issues
For a complete listing of known issues affecting Unreal Engine 5.3, please see the Unreal Engine Public Issue Tracker .
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Some users are encountering an error message that the “Plugin ‘Fab’ failed to load because module ‘Fab’ could not be found.”
Workaround this issue by removing the
UE_5.3/Engine/Plugins/Fabfolder. -
In Unreal Engine 5.3, the default scheme in Xcode is incorrectly set to UnrealGame (or your project’s Game scheme). Select UnrealEditor (or your project’s Editor) scheme in the Xcode scheme dropdown.
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Orthographic rendering does not work with TSR by default. See Enabling Temporal Super Resolution support for Orthographic Rendering.
If you discover new issues with this release, please report them using the guidelines in the link, How to Report a Bug .
But wait, there's more!
Get the full list of new features and enhancements available with Unreal Engine 5.3 in the release notes—and share your feedback below!
