We’re excited to announce that Unreal Engine 5.6 is now available for download. You can check out the release notes here!
With this release, one of our key goals was to empower you to build super-high-fidelity, large-scale open worlds that run smoothly at 60 Hz on current-generation hardware. We’ve also made major strides toward a truly engine-first animation and rigging workflow, reducing the need for DCC round-tripping. Plus, MetaHumans can now be authored directly within the engine, unlocking a more streamlined and efficient creative process.
Beyond that, Unreal Engine 5.6 is packed with enhancements designed to help you work faster and smarter. You’ll find quicker access to essential tools, better asset organization, and significant updates to our procedural and virtual production toolsets—all designed to help you get to production faster.
Let’s dig in!
Rendering
The Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) system enhancements deliver even greater performance for Lumen Global Illumination. Eliminate key CPU bottlenecks to author more complex scenes while maintaining 60 Hz frame rates.
There are significant improvements to overall Unreal Engine performance when streaming static content in and out at runtime. With the Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin (Experimental), a greater amount of immutable static geometry will load faster with constant frame rates. There are also further improvements to content streaming such as asynchronous physics state creation and destruction.
Device profiles are now optimized for 60 Hz and tailored for current-generation consoles and desktop platforms, making it easier to meet performance targets, minimize setup, and deliver smoother high-fidelity games to players.
Animation
This release brings the biggest update yet to our in-editor animation toolsets, enabling you to animate with greater speed, precision, and control.
Animations can be edited visually and intuitively with the complete redesign of Motion Trails. Unified for both Actors and Character Controls, the updated feature enables you to adjust arcs and spacing directly in the viewport; choose from styles like Dashed, Time-based, and Heat/Speed mode; and access features that include pinning, offsets, and spaces for even more precision.
With revamped Tween Tools, you can now quickly fine-tune animation on controls or selected keys. New Hotkeys control the sliders indirectly, toggle between different slider types, and switch into Overshoot mode. We’ve also added a new Time Offset slider which allows for greater control when creating and editing.
Sequencer updates include the new ability to navigate complex hierarchies with the Sequencer Navigation Tool, and to sync animation, dialogue, and effects using real-time Audio Scrubbing. Sequencer will scale relatively based on localized audio, enabling sequences to match the timing from different languages.
We’ve also introduced new Experimental solutions to enable more in-editor rigging workflows.
Skeletal Mesh Editor now enables you to create and sculpt morph targets directly in the editor. Leveraging Unreal Engine’s built-in modeling tools, you can edit pre-existing morph targets and sculpt blend shapes during PIE (Play-in-Editor).
Control Rig Physics (Experimental) adds procedural physics motion to character rigs for more dynamic movement. We’ve also added an Experimental new built-in ragdoll physics feature within the rig to create more lifelike responsive animations.
MetaHuman
We’re really excited to announce that MetaHuman is leaving Early Access, with this release bringing new licensing options and integrations that dramatically extend MetaHumans’ reach, as well as major new functionality across the board.
Now embedded in Unreal Engine, updates to MetaHuman Creator include the ability to blend between body shape presets similarly to faces, and a new Unreal Engine Outfit asset that enables you to generate complete outfits for MetaHumans that automatically resize against characters’ body shapes. MetaHuman’s database of real-world scan data has been significantly expanded, enabling the creation of a more varied range of higher-fidelity characters.
MetaHuman Animator now can generate animation in real time from actors’ performances captured on most webcams and many smartphones, as well from audio.
And you can now expect to see MetaHumans in more places, with new licensing options in the Unreal Engine EULA that enable MetaHumans to be used with any engine or creative software; see the MetaHuman licensing page for more details.
To learn more about all of the new enhancements to MetaHumans, check out the MetaHuman website.
UX/UI
We’ve updated the editor to deliver faster workflows, smarter content organization, and quicker access to the tools and settings to stay efficient.
The Content Browser has been redesigned to enhance the organization and viewing of assets, with smoother thumbnail resizing. In addition, it now works seamlessly in both horizontal and vertical orientations.
The redesigned Viewport Toolbar’s Section Menus and Quick Access Controls give faster access to essential tools. The toolbar now resizes dynamically to show relevant tool options, with dedicated controls for Selection and Modeling modes, and a consistent look across Asset Editors.
Developer iteration
You can now accelerate your workflows and deliver content faster across target platforms and devices with developer tools designed for faster iteration.
The redesigned Project Launcher UI (Beta) improves usability and efficiency, making it faster to create and manage device launch profiles. The streamlined interface enables quick selection of the builds, cooking, and device deployment configurations.
Zen Streaming is now Beta; the feature enhances productivity by eliminating the time-consuming steps of full packaged builds and copy/install deployments, streamlining content iteration and testing on your target platform.
And you can speed up cooking times with Incremental Cook (Experimental), which analyzes asset changes and cooks only updates, helping iterate faster on target devices.
PCG framework
The PCG framework has been enhanced to help you create worlds and manage complex scenes more efficiently with better GPU-driven performance.
The Node Graph UX has been updated to support inline constant, making it easier to create, drag and drop, and manipulate elements. The new 3D viewport allows for previewing points, textures, and meshes directly in the viewport, and customizable graph templates with node filtering help streamline workflows with faster in-context iteration.
Major improvements to GPU performance boost stability, particularly in managing instances within dense, complex scenes. By reducing CPU overhead, the system now enables smoother and more efficient GPU-based spawning at runtime, giving greater flexibility and precision when working with instancing.
The overall PCG performance has also been improved with multithreading support, enabling the system to distribute workloads more efficiently across multiple cores for faster processing, smoother interactions, and a more responsive experience, especially in complex or large-scale environments.
Finally, creating and updating Biomes is now faster and more intuitive with the PCG Biome Core v2 plugin, where new features like per-biome blending and biome layering support give greater control to build rich, organic environments more efficiently.
Cinematic captures
A suite of new integrated tools offers better control of production pipelines, including streamlined performance capture and cinematic rendering.
Mocap Manager (Experimental) is a new end-to-end solution for visualizing, recording, and managing performance capture, all within the Unreal Editor. It speeds up creation by walking through asset management, mocap stage setup, performer/character configurations, Live Link data previewing, and more.
Capture Manager (Experimental) is now integrated with Live Link Hub, offering precise control over ingesting and processing MetaHuman Animator takes from mobile devices, video files, and stereo head mounted cameras (HMCs). This facilitates the management and distribution of multiple facial performances with third-party facial capture systems across the Unreal Engine and MetaHuman ecosystem.
The new pipeline-friendly Cinematic Assembly Toolset (CAT) (Experimental) works alongside integrated tools like Take Recorder and Movie Render Queue to assist with swappable project configurations, customizable naming tokens, and reusable cinematic templates.
The new Quick Render (Beta) feature accelerates rendering workflows by rendering stills and sequences from viewport and selected cameras to disk with a single click, using the settings defined in Movie Render Graph.
New templates
There’s been a major update to the templates in Unreal Engine 5.6, designed to help you hit the ground running. Templates have been significantly reduced in size, helping decrease engine download times while also increasing the number of features in each template. A brand-new option, Variants, extends templates for specific types of gameplay. Whether you’re prototyping a sidescrolling platformer, building an open world racing game, or crafting a top-down strategy title, Variants offer a more specific tailored starting point to help bring your vision to life.
