Unreal Engine 5.5 is here with significant advances in animation authoring, virtual production, and mobile game development, while many features in areas such as rendering, in-camera-VFX, and developer iteration reach production-readiness. Meanwhile, we continue to push boundaries with exciting new innovations like MegaLights! 
Animation
The release sees significant enhancements to Sequencer which now boasts a more controllable interface with better filtering and easier access to properties.
Nondestructive animation layers provide additional control and flexibility; this includes the ability to easily manage the contents, choose between additive or override, and animate the weights of these layers.
It’s easier to set up different dynamic cinematic scenarios to be triggered interactively, such as conditional state changes based on player choices during interactive cinematics, or custom bindings for more nuanced control of objects within gameplay cinematics. You can warp a sequence’s timing using a curve, and reposition the origin of a subsequence or shot.
Craft more realistic animation effects such as contact deformation or better cartoon-style squash-and-stretch with the new ability to author animatable animation deformers inside Control Rig and easily apply them to characters in Sequencer with a single click.
The Animator Kit plugin contains a collection of ready-made Control Rigs with built-in deformers—including Lattice, Camera Lattice, and Sculpt—and a few Utility Control Rigs that you can use in your animations or as examples for building your own rig-driven deformers or helper rigs.
Modular Control Rig moves to Beta with many UI and UX improvements; new quadruped and vehicles modules; and support for common bipedal skeleton types. The Skeletal Editor is now Production-Ready with improvements that include quicker and simpler workflows for painting and editing weights.
MetaHuman Animator also receives a significant upgrade in this release. Introduced as an Experimental feature, it’s now possible to generate high-quality facial animation—including inference of upper face gestures—just from audio performances. The fully local, offline solution works with various voices and languages and can be batch-processed and scripted alongside other MetaHuman Animator inputs.
The Mutable character customization system can be used to generate dynamic skeletal meshes, materials, and textures for characters, animals, props, weapons, and more—all while optimizing memory usage, keeping shader cost low, and reducing the draw call count.
Unlike native tools for modifying content at runtime, Mutable supports deep customization that involves many parameters and texture layers; complex mesh interactions; and texture effects that are not GPU-friendly.
Explore Mutable’s features in the corresponding sample project—available soon!
Choosers move to Production-Ready. Offering a framework for selecting animations for playback based on game context without having to write complex logic, this robust game context asset selector can now be used to select nearly any type of asset; this can encompass multiple levels of complexity, from simple random selectors to database-driven logic involving thousands of animations.
Try out these features in the updated Game Animation sample project.
Rendering
Lumen can now run at 60 Hz on platforms for which there is hardware support, thanks to many improvements to the systems that underpin hardware ray tracing (HWRT). These improvements also impact the performance and capabilities of Path Tracer and light baking.
Path Tracer is now Production-Ready with a series of performance and fidelity improvements, Linux support, and support for all other Production-Ready features, including sky atmosphere and volumetric clouds.
The material authoring framework Substrate moves to Beta. All features of legacy materials are now supported, as are all platforms to which UE deploys. While there’s ongoing work to fully optimize Substrate for real-time applications, it is considered fully ready for linear material production.
Movie Render Graph (MRG) also moves to Beta. This has yielded workflow improvements, such as the ability to use custom EXR metadata; refinements based on initial user feedback, including support for Spawnables in Collections; and improved parity with the legacy preset configuration, for example, Object ID support.
All asset types are now fully supported in MRG’s Render Layers feature, including translucent objects, Niagara FX, Heterogeneous volumes, Landscapes, and Sky Atmosphere without the requirement to use a Sky Sphere.
MRG provides access to an Experimental new spatio-temporal denoiser for Path Tracer, yielding high-quality results for linear sequences.
This release also offers a sneak peek at an Experimental new feature we’re calling MegaLights. Already being dubbed “the Nanite of lights,” MegaLights enables you to add hundreds of dynamic shadow-casting lights to your scenes, without constraints. Lighting artists, for the first time, can freely use textured area lights with soft shadows, Light Functions, media texture playback, and volumetric shadows on consoles and PC, focusing on artistic considerations rather than performance impact.
Virtual production
UE 5.5 brings the ICVFX toolset to full production-readiness, as well as advances in other features for virtual production and visualization.
Unreal Engine supports SMPTE 2110. With numerous stability improvements; automatic detection and repair of framelock loss; the ability to use PTP as a timecode provider; OCIO support for 2110 media; and other improvements to IP video signal flow, it’s ready to meet the needs of the real-world ICVFX projects as they make the transition to SMPTE 2110 deployments.
Camera Calibration solver is now Production-Ready, with drastically improved accuracy for lens and camera parameters estimation. Stemming from this work, Overscan is now built into all cameras to support use cases like rendering with lens distortion or adding camera shake in post.
Also Production-Ready, the Virtual Scouting toolset offers a powerful out-of-the-box experience using OpenXR-compatible HMDs (with Oculus and Valve Index supported by default), and new opportunities for customization via an extensive API. The toolset now features a VR Content Browser and asset placement; a Transform Gizmo that is customizable via Blueprint; and further polish, including a color-correct Viewfinder.
Previously part of the ICVFX Editor, the Color Grading Panel provides a rich, artist-friendly interface for creative color manipulation in any Unreal Engine scene. Offering an enhanced color grading experience for all artists—not just those working with nDisplay—the panel now also supports post-process volumes, cine cameras, and color correction regions.
The DMX tech stack joins the list of Production-Ready toolsets, with enhancements to the Control Console, Pixel Mapping, and Conflict Monitor. This release adds GDTF compliance to the DMX Plugin for interfacing with GDTF- and MVR-enabled control devices and software, among other enhancements.
Mobile game development
The Mobile Forward Renderer sees a slew of new features that will increase visual fidelity. It now supports D-buffer decals, rectangular area lights, capsule shadows, moveable IES textures for point and spotlights, volumetric fog, and Niagara particle lights. Screen-space reflections now work in both Mobile Forward and Deferred Renderers.
Runtime automatic PSO (Pipeline State Object) precaching is now enabled by default, offering a faster and easier alternative to the manual PSO gathering workflows.
The Mobile Previewer sees several improvements including the ability to capture and preview a specific Android device profile, and to emulate half-precision 16-bit float shaders—making it easier to detect and deal with artifacts.
Developer iteration
Unreal Zen Server is now Production-Ready* for deployment as a shared Derived Data Cache (DDC).
Zen Server can also now stream cooked data to target platforms, from PC and console to mobile. This Experimental new feature enables developers to more quickly and easily evaluate the look and behavior of their game on the target platform, from console to mobile, during development.
Several additional features also reach Production-Ready status in this release, including the Unreal Zen Loader, which offers an optimized asset loading path for editor systems and cook processes; the Unreal Build Accelerator (UBA)*, which delivers faster C++ and shader compilation; and Unreal Horde Continuous Integration and Remote Execution, bringing more efficient and scalable development workflows.
*Production-Ready status applies to Windows host machines; other applicable platforms are currently in Beta.
Fab integration
Last month, we announced that Fab, our new unified content marketplace, is now open for business. Fab is integrated into Unreal Engine 5.5, enabling you to drag and drop atomic assets, such as Quixel Megascans, directly into your scene. You can also add asset packs from Fab to your Content Browser.
Known Issues
For a complete listing of known issues affecting Unreal Engine 5.5, please see the Unreal Engine Public Issue Tracker .
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Critical Issue - Updating to 5.5.2 causes Skeletal Mesh Asset Overrides to be lost. Our team is aware of a critical issue impacting existing overrides on Skeletal Mesh Assets when updating a project from 5.5.X to 5.5.2. Full details below.
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We’re aware of an issue that is causing more frequent crashes when a project is streaming 8K and 16K textures. We’re still investigating the root cause of the issue.
Convert those assets to Virtual Textures, and modify the materials which use them. This method is likely preferable for keeping memory costs under control.
OR Limit the maximum in-game size of those textures to 4k. Note that this could lead to a loss of quality for the time being.
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Certain NVIDIA Vulkan Drivers are known to cause crashes when leveraging Vulkan ray tracing in 5.5.1.
Try disabling ray tracing if your project doesn’t require it. The 560.X driver version releases have helped avoid the issue internally, and we’re working with NVIDIA to get a fix into a future version of the drivers.
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There’s a known editor hang when switching to Landscape Tools on Mac.
The CVar r.GPUStatsEnabled should be set to 0. At startup is preferred (can be achieved by editing ini files), but any method of setting this to 0 will suffice.
But wait, there's more!
Loads of additional new features and enhancements are available in Unreal Engine 5.5. Explore the release notes for a complete list!
Fixed in 5.5.1
| Issue | Summary |
|---|---|
| UE-230698 | Crash when creating a child blueprint based on a dirty blueprint |
| UE-229712 | MovieGraph: Crash when using BurnIn + 32 Bit PPM to Single Layer EXR |
| UE-230710 | [PCG] Crash when double-click on an inspected point in Collision Wrapper data |
| UE-229151 | Crash in OpenGL-only build on an Android 14 Xclipse-based device causes a shader compiler crash |
| UE-229659 | Collision wrapper can crash with meshes that don’t have a proper body setup |
| UE-230984 | Possible crash when the active camera rig is frozen |
| UE-231280 | MRQ Graph - Avid DNx plugin does not compile in shipping builds |
| UE-231082 | MovieGraph: Crash with ObjectID pass |
| UE-229447 | MovieGraph: Crash when rendering with Additional PPMs |
| UE-231174 | Motion Design Rundown (game mode) Crash with BP modifiers |
| UE-230366 | An Assert occurs when resetting a response curve with keys used for a Utility Weight in a State Tree |
| UE-229250 | DirectX 11 crashes with -Renderoffscreen |
| UE-230359 | MM Database crashes if adding an animation to a pose schema that’s linked with no set skeleton, or a differently set skeleton |
| UE-230330 | Delete Attribute node causes Crash |
| UE-229146 | Crash enabling Lumen visualization on consoles |
| UE-230583 | [CrashReport][Assert] UnrealEditor-InterchangeEngine!UInterchangeManager::ReleaseAsyncHelper(TWeakPtrUE::Interchange::FImportAsyncHelper,1) [Engine/Source/Runtime/Interchange/Engine/Private/InterchangeManager.cpp:2638] |
| UE-227658 | [CrashReport][Crash] Unknown() Address = 0x19a5af0ac (filename not found) [in libsystem_kernel.dylib] |
| UE-226339 | [CrashReport][Crash] libpython3.11.so.1!7f1e67200000 + 239c80 |
| UE-195187 | [CrashReport] Assertion failed: UsedStagingBuffers.Num() == 0 |
| UE-228298 | MAC - Substrate - Crash with sm5 |
| UE-230578 | [CrashReport][Crash] UnrealEditor-CoreUObject!UStruct::IsChildOf(UStruct const*) const [Engine/Source/Runtime/CoreUObject/Public/UObject/ObjectHandle.h:268] |
| UE-226877 | GitHub 12399 : Reset OpenXRHMD SwapChains declared as static on update |
| UE-229001 | UE 5.5 delayed Python initialization causes issues |
| UE-230070 | [PCG] GPU SM Spawner in loop subgraphs is crashing the editor when added to the viewport |
| UE-228760 | [PCG] GPU - invalid FName values trigger crash |
| UE-229228 | OCIO Crash On Empty Config String |
| UE-230408 | SVG import causes crash due to different file format |
| UE-229953 | [deformer graph] per-bone animation attribute are unusable, they generate shader compilation error when plugged into a kernel |
| UE-228054 | MGPU - QAVirtualProduction crashes at launch |
| UE-223475 | Enabling ZenLoader causes editor crash when undoing Level Instance deletion |
Fixed in 5.5.2
| Issue | Summary |
|---|---|
| UE-228848 | Crash in FPipelineFileCacheManager::RegisterPSOStats |
| UE-227647 | [CrashReport][Assert] UnrealEditor-ControlRig!static bool ??R<lambda_2>@?L@??Execute_Internal@UFKControlRig@@UEAA_NAEBVFName@@@Z@QEBA_NPEAUFRigCurveElement@@@Z(struct FRigCurveElement *) [Engine/Plugins/Animation/ControlRig/Source… |
| UE-217931 | Add Support for Archicad 28 |
| UE-229154 | [PCG] ensure firing with pcg.GraphMultithreading == 1 |
| UE-229030 | [PCG] Fix performance hitches in GPU data collection packing/unpacking |
| UE-228893 | Modifiers applied multiple times |
| UE-228796 | Incorrect hair shadow |
| UE-228822 | //UE5/Release-5.5 - Build Engine Localization - LogLocTextHelper: Warning: Source/[…]/LevelEditorViewportToolbarSections.cpp(1561): Text conflict from LOCTEXT macro for namespace LevelEditorViewportToolbar |
| UE-228757 | [PCG] GPU SM Spawner attribute validation is broken |
| UE-221995 | Automation test errors in AvalancheProject Editor Win64 Test=UE.EditorAutomation(RunTest=Group_Avalanche) |
| UE-210616 | Update Techsoft API to 2024.6 |
| UE-201823 | When adding the UIRenderer to the Movie Render Queue, the rendering output is a difference in PIE and MRQ. |
| UE-234115 | Opening Landscape mode in a blank template project freezes the Editor |
| UE-231277 | RBAN Debug draw is rendering in viewports where it hasnt before. |
| UE-231272 | Enhanced input enabled with Common UI legacy depreciates all previous input data dables |
| UE-231285 | Crash saving a Motion Design Scene with Mask modifier on an Actor without Mask component |
| UE-231263 | [ASIS] Touch events does not works on full screen |
| UE-231221 | Fix hair light leak due to incorrect voxel traversal |
| UE-231195 | MegaLights doesn’t support lighting channels |
| UE-231385 | World Partition - Missing Assets for Level Instances |
| UE-231369 | //UE5/Main - Build DDC Win64 - File listed as RuntimeDependency in DatasmithCADWorker.target does not exist |
| UE-231281 | Copy over fixes for override instance data duplication to 5.5 hotfix |
| UE-231295 | [Interchange] fbx blender armature bone with transform is not import correctly |
| UE-231279 | Camera transitions aren’t correctly taken into account with composite camera rigs |
| UE-231282 | Interchange - Asset import - Morph and bone transform animation not merged |
| UE-231271 | Plugins marked both experimental and beta will now appear as experimental in the plugin browser, even if they were beta in past releases |
| UE-231256 | //UE5/Release-5.5 - UE.EditorAutomation(RunTest=Audio) Linux_ASan vulkan - AddressSanitizer: heap-use-after-free on address |
| UE-231771 | Interchange - FBX import - Rigid body animation reimport broken |
| UE-231113 | LumenShortRangeAOHardwareRayTracing needs raytracing SBT layout because it can be part of the material RTPSO |
| UE-231105 | Motion Design Rundown Editor Crash when adding a page to a page view |
| UE-231058 | Visualization of non-particle data is hidden randomly if the playback has data recorded after the last solver stage |
| UE-231024 | Curve Editor minor grid lines do not render correctly |
| UE-231643 | [Interchange] Time zero bind pose do not support multiple bind pose for the same bone |
| UE-231754 | [Interchange - FBX] In 5.5 only material are imported |
| UE-231747 | [Interchange] The Source Timeline animation range behavior is not doing the right thing |
| UE-231203 | Inconsistent performance in level when playing out |
| UE-231756 | Skeletal Editor - create new skeleton option fails to create new skeletal asset |
| UE-216512 | Orthographic Cameras don’t support Aspect Ratio Axis Constraint |
| UE-215794 | When closing the Mac Editor during a debugging session on XCode the User will hit a Crash |
| UE-219244 | Motion Design - Restore of RC controlled value to default/template does not change the value in preview |
| UE-222783 | Blueprint Templates on Windows always attempt to connect to the default IP when building Remotely for iOS |
| UE-225254 | Grammar doesn’t properly deal with stochastic choices with repeatable tokens |
| UE-230183 | Motion Design - Cloner grid constraint by texture is not considering Texture compare mode |
| UE-230180 | Cloth Asset - Normal import on skeletal mesh and static mesh nodes are partially broken |
| UE-230029 | Boolean modifier failing with spaced Text3D glyphs |
| UE-229894 | LiveLinkHub users cannot enable Marketplace plugins |
| UE-229765 | Animation loop indicator not drawing in the correct location |
| UE-230591 | Batch Retarget dialog doesn’t show Animation Blueprints that use same skeleton as selected Source Skeletal Mesh |
| UE-230484 | [PCG] Fix GPU CopyPoints overwriting attribute values when Attribute Inheritance is set to SourceFirst or TargetFirst |
| UE-230485 | Sequence does not play back in reverse through the Sequencer Playlist |
| UE-230435 | Sim Cache Writes for NDC Write DI do not work for GPU emitters |
| UE-230398 | Nanite Meshes are broken in BigCity level in CitySample |
| UE-230629 | CPU Lightmass no longer works as expected on Mac |
| UE-230599 | OverrideSettings can still try to load objects on other threads |
| UE-230494 | Interchange: Remove redundant keys option skip the first key. |
| UE-230469 | Translucent sort priority is not incrementing value when in outliner mode |
| UE-230453 | [Path tracer] Reference sky atmosphere has a different look than in 5.4 |
| UE-230419 | GitHub 12547 : Added support of the analysis-paths flag in integration with PVS-Studio |
| UE-230292 | NDC Islands do not function correctly with reading systems placed in the level. |
| UE-229753 | [Interchange] Bone name space are replace with underscore, legacy fbx rename with dash |
| UE-229764 | MacOS 15 Sequoia and Xcode 16 Warnings building unreallightmass |
| UE-229541 | Get Actor Data from input is not tracking dynamically if the input is an attribute set |
| UE-229540 | Get PCG Component Data is duplicating data if there are multiple components on the actor |
| UE-229813 | [PCG] GPU SM Spawner - After altering the seed and generating small % of instances are missing when using weighted spawning |
| UE-229796 | SDI Video Input Freezes When Video Timecode Format is set to Auto |
| UE-229628 | DMX - Blueprint Load DMX Librairies Synchronous node does not always return an array of DMX librairies available in the project |
| UE-229568 | EOS: Mac does not support project binary mechanism |
| UE-229508 | [PCG] GPU SM Spawner - some small percentage of instances missing when using weighted spawning |
| UE-229520 | Boolean modifier tools intersection causes unwanted faces on target mesh |
| UE-229482 | OCIO - Missing UE Emulation Option for Tone Curve Without Expand Gamut |
| UE-229191 | [NavMesh] Fix Added an oversized dirty area warnings occuring even if using the disabled threshold value when using invokers. |
| UE-229189 | Only register generated navlink proxies if bGenerateNavLinks is enabled. |
| UE-229488 | Floating Properties: Properties are being displayed at the top-left of the viewport instead of being added to the main property stack |
| UE-229849 | MegaLights alpha masking doesn’t work |
| UE-228246 | [Wire |
| UE-228165 | Remote Control DMX: Masked properties could generate an indistinguishable attribute name when created without signatures |
| UE-228068 | PCG Node Errors not clearing when expected. |
| UE-228063 | Generating PCG Graph with invalid generation task id into level fires ensure |
| UE-229090 | MRG -Using Burn in node fails to output Media and returns Ensure error spam |
| UE-229028 | [PCG] Fix attribute function captures breaking for nested functions |
| UE-228884 | Circularly referenced blueprints cause stack overflow in a package game without IOStore |
| UE-228844 | Interchange - Import - Build scale doubled in some generated LODs when Nanite enabled |
| UE-229476 | Certain Array Constants are created with no pins, and attempting to add a pin causes an ensure |
| UE-229467 | Chaos Visual Debugger shows the incorrect landscape tile if the world is loaded and unloaded rapidly |
| UE-229321 | [PCG] Remove linebreak support from Custom HLSL node attribute function regex |
| UE-229285 | Interchange - FBX import - Rigid body animation not imported with example |
| UE-229284 | Add the new iPadMini7 profile |
| UE-229319 | [PCG] GPU Spawner - some primitive component flags in mesh descriptor don’t work like CastShadow |
| UE-227638 | [CrashReport][Assert] UnrealEditor-HairStrandsCore!ComputeBoneTransform(FNDIHairStrandsData const *) [Engine/Plugins/Runtime/HairStrands/Source/HairStrandsCore/Private/Niagara/NiagaraDataInterfaceHairStrands.cpp:939] |
| UE-227254 | Random children selection ignores last state in the AI StateTree |
| UE-236964 | Collision profiles are reset when blueprint is loaded |
| UE-239029 | Foliage on Static Mesh disappears when added to Level Instance. |
| UE-230270 | LiveLink OpenVR - input mapping set is incomplete |
| UE-229981 | Installed Build command with console support fails with error |
| UE-229986 | Deadlock between FMacApplication & FMacWindow when opening LyraGame |
| UE-229988 | Nullptr exception when selecting a new Default Editor map in Project Settings on Mac |
| UE-230744 | Interchange - FBX - Import - Animation - Animated time not working |
| UE-230445 | Blend Stack: Blend profiles don’t work on bone containers that aren’t identical to the ref skeleton |
| UE-230404 | GeneratePsyms fails with installed builds due to missing dymp_syms tool and incorrect path space handling |
| UE-230145 | Preview Platforms are greyed out when using Vulkan on Windows with a AMD GPU |
| UE-230763 | Modular Control Rig Content Fixes |
| UE-230734 | Can’t compile version 5.5 if root is 49 chars - HierarchyTableBuiltinUncookedOnly |
| UE-230696 | GitHub 12566 : Gpu skinning crash when precaching PSOs |
| UE-231278 | Component Velocity is not reset |
| UE-230969 | MRG subsample accumulation incorrectly frees accumulators before all spatial subsamples have finished |
| UE-231645 | Fix deadlock between sk component and sk build or import |
| UE-231578 | Adding a camera rig to a camera asset crashes if the asset doesn’t have a proxy table |
| UE-230982 | Possible memory corruption in evaluation hook system |
| UE-230022 | Effector linked to cloner are unlinked in rundown when playing level due to not being initialized |
| UE-230983 | Outliner view items always get invalidated |
| UE-230860 | [Interchange] Animation names from FBX files are different between legacy imports and interchange |
| UE-228717 | GitHub 12453 : Fix min desired width getter for spinbox |
| UE-228515 | Set Sekeltal Mesh does not update on Blueprint construction |
| UE-228301 | [PCG] Large hitches trigged by component registration/AddGraph flow in property bag layout code |
| UE-228539 | Subdivide segment seed attribute doesn’t work as expected |
| UE-228394 | Importing groom from alembic doesn’t produce cache files |
| UE-228022 | Merging a mix of additive and override layers yields unexpected results |
| UE-227911 | LiveLinkHub assigns timecode source to a client regardless of if it’s enabled as timecode source |
| UE-227801 | Remote Control DMX: In some cases generated fixture types end up having the same attribute twice |
| UE-227824 | DMX: Fixture patches do not always increment their patch number when added from the add fixture patch menu |
| UE-229145 | Mobile Depth of Field blurry eveywhere |
| UE-229096 | MRQ -OCIO configuration is not applied on 8bit Media formats |
| UE-228761 | [PCG] GPU - attributes with name set to None not supported |
| UE-228989 | Rundown Server: Get Page Details is broken in packaged game |
| UE-228981 | Editor crash occurs due to fatal error: …\VulkanRHI\Private\VulkanMemory.cpp] Unable to find alternate type for index 0, MemSize 1048576, MemPropTypeBits 27, MemPropertyFlags 7 |
| UE-228842 | Interchange - LOD import - Only LOD0 gets the import build settings |
| UE-228738 | VR Template |
| UE-229353 | [Mac] Android not being seen as Valid Platform and Will not Package |
| UE-231892 | A crash occurs when a State Tree Parameter is set to a variable type also referenced in a STT |
| UE-232039 | Preview Crashes on Metal when using SM6 |
| UE-228677 | Groom cache (guide/strands) don’t work correctly with TriangleStrip |
| UE-227835 | DMX: Take recorder gets stuck in an ensureAlways recursion when starting to record fixture patches with identical names |
| UE-229701 | Display window of EXR files not respecting camera overscan when rendering shot in MRQ |
| UE-229019 | Text3D WrapAndScale not working properly with layout alignments |
| UE-228892 | [For 5.5 Hotfix] Depth of field recombination breaks with certain settings |
| UE-230355 | HLSL Point Processing node not generating expected data |
