Remember those exciting new features we showcased at GDC? Well, they’re here in Unreal Engine 5.4! It’s packed with new features and improvements to performance, visual fidelity, and your productivity.
Download Unreal Engine 5.4 from the Epic Games launcher, GitHub, or for Linux!
Animation
Automatic Retargeting makes it easier to get great results when reusing bipedal character animations. There are also extensions to the Skeletal Editor and a suite of new deformer functions to make the Deformer Graph more accessible.
New Gizmos, reorganized Anim Details, upgrades and improvements to the Constraints system, and a new Layered Control Rigs feature make our animation authoring tools more robust and intuitive.
Unreal Engine’s nonlinear animation editor Sequencer received a significant makeover, with better readability and improved usability in several aspects of the Sequencer Tree. Among other new features in this release, we’ve also added Keyframe Scriptability.
Motion Matching, an expandable next-gen framework for animation features, is Production-Ready. We’ve focused on making the toolset robust, performant, and memory-scalable, as well as adding a suite of debugging tools.
Choosers, a much-requested tool that enables you to use game context to drive animation selection.
Rendering
UE5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry system Nanite continues to receive enhancements, such as an Experimental new Tessellation feature that enables fine details such as cracks and bumps to be added at render time, without altering the original mesh.
Moreover, the addition of software variable rate shading (VRS) via Nanite compute materials brings substantial performance gains. There’s also support for spline mesh workflows—great for creating roads on landscapes, for example.
In this release, Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) has received stability and performance enhancements to ensure a predictable output regardless of the target platform.
AI and machine learning
The Neural Network Engine (NNE) moves from Experimental to Beta. With support for both in-editor and runtime applications, NNE enables developers to load and efficiently run their pre-trained neural network models.
Developer iteration
Unreal Cloud DDC is a self-hosted cloud storage system for Unreal Engine Derived Data Cache (DDC). Designed for distributed users and teams, it enables them to efficiently share Unreal Engine cached data across public network connections.
Our local DDC now uses a new Unreal Zen Storage server architecture, offering improved data conditioning performance; faster editor load times and Play In Editor (PIE) workflows; and greater control over cache writes, eviction, and data deduplication.
Now Production-Ready, Multi-Process Cook enables developers converting content from the internal UE format to a platform-specific format to leverage additional CPU and memory resources, significantly reducing the time it takes to get a cooked output.
In Beta, Unreal Build Accelerator (UBA) is a scalable distributed compilation solution for C++. It is used in conjunction with Unreal Build Tool and/or Unreal Horde’s Remote Execution (compute task) system to accelerate build compilation time.
Media and entertainment
Virtual Camera is Production-Ready. It adds Android support and Virtual Camera workflows are fully supported on macOS. The mobile application has been renamed Unreal VCam, and can be found on the Apple Store and Google Play.
For ICVFX, a Depth of Field Compensation feature means you can accurately control the amount of DOF falloff of the digital content rendered by nDisplay as seen by the movie camera, yielding better results for close-up beauty shots.
Multi-Process Inner Frustum, enables the render of what’s seen by the movie camera to be split across more GPUs and hardware resources, alongside numerous stability improvements and other enhancements to our SMPTE 2110 support—which is moving closer to Production-Ready status.
Cloth simulation
It’s now possible to import a garment—including simulation parameters—Marvelous Designer or CLO using a new USD Importer in the Panel Cloth Editor.
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.
Build animation rigs from straightforward modular parts with Modular Control Rig, which utilizes the entire framework of Control Rig for creating rigs that are ready to be animated on any skeleton instantly.
Motion Design mode is equipped with specialized tools for authoring complex 2D motion graphics, offering a comprehensive suite of tools, including 3D cloners, effectors, modifiers, animators, and more.
Movie Render Queue received a major update with the Experimental Movie Render Graph (MRG), a node-based architecture that enables users to set up graphs to render a single shot, or design them to scale out across complex multi-shot workflows for large teams of artists.
On the VR Scouting front, try the Experimental fully customizable toolkit that utilizes XR Creative Framework to support OpenXR HMDs—such as Oculus and Valve Index—offering a dramatically improved user experience over the existing Virtual Scouting toolkit.
Experimental ray tracing support for Vulkan on Linux is now available.
Note
Support for platforms such as iOS, Android, and Linux will no longer be installed by default alongside the engine.
Known Issues
For a complete listing of known issues affecting Unreal Engine 5.4, please see the Unreal Engine Public Issue Tracker .
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On Mac/Linux, when the UnrealEditor process is shutting down and starting up quickly (such as when creating a new project or switching between existing projects) we have observed that the accompanying ZenServer process may not be started correctly. This leads to the editor logging a message,
LogZenServiceInstance: Warning: Found locked valid lock file but no matching process.and crashes the editor, stating “no writable nodes available”.Attempting a re-launch of the editor for the target project will succeed.
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The Quixel plugin encounters a Critical Error when logging in on Linux. This occurs on AMD machines running Mesa drivers on version 22.2.5.
To fix, please update your Mesa drivers to version 23.2.1 or newer.
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Compiling Microsoft platforms with the Visual Studio 2022 “MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++ x64/x86 build tools (v14.39-17.9)” toolchain with /arch:AVX architectures generates incorrect bytecode and will cause unexpected runtime crashes
In the Visual Studio 2022 installer, install the “MSVC v143 - VS 2022 C++ x64/x86 build tools (v14.38-17.8)” individual component before compiling.
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Sonic Studio Virtual Mixer on certain ASUS boards causes various crashes.
Disable the Sonic Studio Virtual Mixer in the Device Manager under “Sound, video and game controllers.”
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When you close the editor with the Actor Coloration framework active and re-open it again, it automatically enters that state, making all rendering gray.
Turn off Actor Coloration when you re-open the editor, or turn off Actor Coloration before you close the editor.
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Packaged applications crash when trying to display a landscape actor if ALL of the following conditions are true on the target platform:
- Lumen is not enabled.
- Runtime Virtual Texture (RVT) is not enabled.
- The Water plugin is not installed.
Add the Water plugin to your project even if you do not need it.
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Packaging with Editor Default Configuration always defaults to initial value when the editor is started.
Either restart the editor after changing configuration in Packaging settings or select the configuration for the platform in the menu before packaging instead of using Default Configuration.
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Build fails when verifying that the entire VisualStudio solution can be built in an Installed Build workspace.
error CS0103: The name 'Catch2' does not exist in the current contextInstall the latest QFE from here to address this issue: Current Available Quick-Fix Solutions
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There are broken shadows with Instanced Stereo Rendering enabled. (Affects VR primarily)
Apply this shader fix—there’s no need to recompile the editor, but it will recompile a lot of shaders. https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/90ef97eee45bdb2665fafbd49d3784241ddba202
If you discover new issues with this release, please report them using the guidelines in the link: How to Report a Bug .
Pricing and licensing
In March, we announced that a new pricing and licensing model for Unreal Engine, Twinmotion, and RealityCapture would start in late April. With this release, that model—which will enable us to fund future engine development for all creators—is now in effect. If you missed the announcement, you can read ALL the details in our blog.
But that’s not all!
There are many more features and improvements now available in Unreal Engine 5.4. Explore the release notes for a complete list!
Fixed in 5.4.1
| Issue | Summary |
|---|---|
| UE-213361 | The first frame is not automatically played when a recording is loaded |
| UE-213190 | Crashing on trying to render sequence |
| UE-213137 | UBT does not error when compiling targets with a banned MSVC version , need to expand Ban Range |
| UE-213059 | Fatal error during cooking - [X] was an archetype of FooComponent [Y] but returned a null index mapping object |
| UE-212795 | Crash when creating a new media plate |
| UE-212785 | Actor Coloration state is persistent between editor runs. |
| UE-212439 | Disable TObjectPtr placeholder type flag checks in editor runtime |
| UE-212069 | Modular Rig - Severe slowness |
| UE-212055 | Crash closing persona with cloth paint active |
| UE-211808 | Packaging with Editor Default Configuration always defaults to initial value when editor started |
| UE-211555 | Light Intensity keyframes get removed when converting from Spawnable to Possessable in Sequencer |
| UE-211170 | GitHub 11703 : Fixed the reference of Entitlement |
| UE-211144 | Recording time counter, counts faster each time a new recording is started |
| UE-210257 | Build fails when Verifying that the entire VisualStudio solution can be built in an Installed Build workspace. error CS0103: The name ‘Catch2’ does not exist in the current context |
