Unreal Engine 5.6 Preview

The UE 5.6 preview is now available! Download now on the Epic Games launcher, GitHub, and Linux. You can also check out the Public Roadmap!

5.6 brings:

  • Vast, high-fidelity open worlds with maximum performance, and consistent 60hz frame rates.
  • The biggest and most powerful update yet to the animation authoring toolset.
  • MetaHuman Creator is now available in-engine including blending and sculpting of MetaHuman bodies plus improved visual fidelity and new realtime workflows for MetaHuman Animator.
  • Faster creation with Content browser 2.0 and the new Viewport toolbar layout.
  • The ability to build expansive, high-fidelity worlds faster than ever with powerful procedural workflows

If you’re interested in learning more about what’s coming with 5.6, tune into State of Unreal, which we’ll broadcast live from Unreal Fest Orlando on June 3 - or attend the event in person!

As a reminder, preview releases are not fully quality tested, are still under heavy active development, and should be considered as unstable until the final release. We recommend that developers make a copy of their projects for testing these builds, not to convert their projects.

Known & Fixed Issues:

Unresolved issues in 5.6 Preview targeted to be fixed by the 5.6 Release
Unresolved issues in 5.6 Preview
Issues fixed in 5.6 (the fix may not be included in the current available Preview)

If you discover any additional issues with this preview release, please report them using the guidelines in the link: How to Report a Bug.

Where has the “Forward Looking” section gone at the public roadmap? Are all the ideas in the section scrapped? For example all the UI/UMG stuff mentioned there?

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will 5.6 include MegaGeometry for nanite mesh ?

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I’m glad this update has focused a lot on performance. This is specially necessary for the Switch 2 hardware! I hope this is followed for 5.7 as many devs both indie and AAA will be targeting this console.

I’ll be posting some performance comparisons between 5.5 and 5.6. I’ve been working with a custom build and I already know that Lumen performance has been improved in a non trivial manner.

Only thing that had me worry was a performance regression on the CharacterMovementComponent (that was with a DEV 5.6 build from 15 days ago), but I will re test this again to see how it looks on this snapshot of the engine.

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Can’t find announced templates. Where they are?

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i`m eager for it too, could not found nothing about it

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HLOD is still slow since version 5.5

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Your updates and efforts are beyond amazing guys.

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Another version without the component search in the details panel.
It was in UE4, why was it removed for UE5?

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I like to report these kinds of things, unfortunately my last report has been unprocessed for 30 days… This is worrysome.

There are already been 19 clicks to this scam link.. Wow okay, the link just updated to another hack right as I am writing this…

EPIC needs to do something about it. (EDIT: Apparently they did something! Yay!)

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am i missing something, or is this a bug?
it seems like gameplay camera component doesn’t exist in blueprints now. it can’t be added to an actor, even though camera assets/rigs/directors are all able to be created and modified in the content browser.


default third person template project, 5.6 preview. gameplay cameras plugin is enabled by default. toggling it and restarting doesn’t fix it. if i convert a 5.5 project that has a gameplay camera in it, it exists in that project, but i can’t add a new one once it’s been converted (gameplay animation sample project used for example)

these buttons also don’t seem to work correctly if you make a gameplay camera asset in a 5.6 project
image

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For those of you compling just a heads up that UMetaData seems to be deprecated or moved as I have a few plugins unable to resolve it right now as undeclared identifier. Might need some refactoring or taking a look at the release notes to see how to patch it

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Nice to test the new features.
I do run into this error ‘raytracing geometry always resident memory over budget (768/256MB)’. Any suggestions where to change this value to get rid of this error? VR quality is very bad but maybe related to this error?!
Edit: found a solution. Just increase the memory using a cvar r.RayTracing.ResidentGeometryMemoryPoolSizeInMB

Will there be an update for GASP (Game Animation Sample Project) with 5.6 ?

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This is gonna be very exciting. Can’t wait to see what more features is gonna be in store for 5.6 and seeing more improvements of it too. The biggest thing that I’m hoping to know and wondering that if megalights is gonna finally add support for hair strands in 5.6 version?. Because I really do not enjoy using hair cards all the time on metahumans while I’m using megalights in 5.5 with my projects that I’m doing to be honest

Commit f644927 deprecated UMetaData for FMetaData.

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Hey @Capsu1,

Yes that’s my fault, I didn’t catch that the BlueprintSpawnableComponent meta isn’t inherited until after the Preview 1 was cut. This is fixed for 5.6 final. In the meantime, for a local fix, you’d need to add that metadata to both UGameplayCameraComponent and UGameplayCameraRigComponent. Sorry for the trouble.

I don’t know about that, but I know some of the editor toolkit code was temporarily broken, so maybe that also escaped into Preview 1… note that the buttons would only be enabled if there are any “related” assets to navigate to.

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Can’t add Metahuman character to a project. I assume, the plugin on linux isn’t implemented yet?

is hardware ray tracing support on mac apple silicon a thing now?

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