Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview

[Dan_Hutnik]

Download Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview from the Epic Games Launcher, GitHub, or for Linux.

Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview prioritizes performance advancements, providing systems that are more reliable, scalable, and intuitive to support all project requirements.

This version introduces Mesh Terrain as an Experimental feature, providing a novel 3D-mesh-based architecture for constructing massive environments. It also works natively with PCG.

The Procedural Content Generation framework (PCG) has been improved, allowing for manual edits directly on procedural content while maintaining the underlying procedural logic, alongside several other iterative improvements.

Additionally, the Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE) has received significant enhancements, enabling you to create high-quality, biologically correct, Nanite-ready vegetation assets directly within the Unreal Editor. You can even import meshes from external DCC tools!

Populate real-time worlds with crowds of MetaHumans and scale from tens to thousands of characters with the MetaHuman Crowd plugin, and also transform any human mesh into a MetaHuman—now with simultaneous head and body conforming.

MegaLights moved into full production readiness, delivering faster, cleaner, and more scalable lighting workflows with greater performance on current generation consoles and handhelds.

Unreal Engine’s face rigging and morph target editing tools have been expanded to better support in-editor sculpt-driven facial workflows and shot sculpting. These improvements strengthen blend shape authoring for stylized characters, custom skeletal meshes, and MetaHumans, as well as pose corrections.

Control Rig Physics moves to Beta in this release, with a number of enhancements for both riggers and animators. This update also includes Direct Mesh Controls (DMC), an Experimental new system that enables Control Rig controls to be represented directly on sections of the Skeletal Mesh.

This is just a brief overview. Beyond these highlights, UE 5.8 contains much more to explore. This includes advancements in Production Rendering and Virtual production workflows, Dataflow and Chaos Physics, alongside Mobile workflow enhancements designed to boost iteration speed and improve Android. onboarding and setup.

Check-out the UE 5.8 Public Roadmap for more information.

Please keep in mind that 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 you make a copy of your projects for testing these builds, rather than converting your projects.

If you discover any issues with this Preview release, please report them using these guidelines: How to Report a Bug

[Bizanator]

You always release new stuff right when I need it Can’t wait to try the new any mesh into MetaHuman as this is literally what I’ve been working on this week. Spent yesterday fighting CC and the new Face plugin there, hopefully the MetaHuman pipeline in Unreal Direct can handle our characters. Is there any way to get it to conform to hard edged geometry, our characters are a stylized low poly with hard edges and plans for muscles but have extra deformation and softness to the skin and joints, so they move like modern characters but look more low polish. Everything we try ends up over softening them and normals can’t bring enough of the look back.
Either way already downloaded and looking forward to trying it out, I’ll post back more as I find.

[myasga]

Thank You Will be testing Mesh Terrain:)

1. Doesnt work in packaged build

2. 16K size take a long time to load vs landscape

3. EXR format for Heigthmap is not supported (would be cool for document what data types are accepted)

4. I does not load all the tiles in play mode 16K level size (45k triangles each tile x256)

5. [FIXED] How to Apply Automaterial for all terrain?

   
   

Material are in Definition

[Kafan]

I prey sirs fixed the bone to bone motion match issue applying looped root animation with updated transform in distance

[Krabworks (CG_Krab)]

Great. Were the issues with Procedural Vegetation Editor baking non-nanite foliage fixed?

In 5.7, the PVE meshes converted to Static Meshes break when Nanite is disabled. Similar issue when any PVE foliage SKM is converted to a SM and Nanite is disabled, foliage either disappears or breaks into random tris. PVE is a great tool but this prevents any external software from being used with the generated meshes, so it’s not that practical until this is fixed.

Reported the issue twice, but not sure if anything was done to fix it.

This can be easily reproduced in an empty project with the Quixel PVE demo assets (e.g., Yoshino cherry).

[krz9000]

sounds like an intended protection mechanism to my ears

[Krabworks (CG_Krab)]

Probably a technical error. Intentionally preventing developers from using your engine tools would be quite silly. Being able to make non-nanite meshes is also important for UE projects that have nanite disabled, so this doesn’t really make sense.

[Juanmilanese]

Two questions on the 5.8 Preview:

1. Lumen Medium Quality (Beta)
   The roadmap mentions a new Irradiance Fields + Probe Occlusion path, separate from Screen Probes. What CVar enables it? Is it routed through sg.GlobalIlluminationQuality Medium, or is there a dedicated toggle?

2. MetaHuman Creator Core Data
   The MetaHuman Creator plugin asks to install Core Data via the Epic Games Launcher, but it doesn’t seem to be updated for 5.8 Preview yet? (I wanted to test the new MH crowd stuff)

Thanks!

[Rawalanche]

https://portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/c/2359-editor-preferences-improvements

Do editor preferences finally save between projects?

If not, what is the point of improving their UI when there’s no point of customizing them when they don’t actually save?

No one wants to dig through, tinker with and customize hundred, possibly thousand+ knobs just to have to do the all over again anytime they open a different project.

[EddieChristian]

Great!! Now fix your Launcher on Windows 11. It’s been broken for months. It won’t properly associate Projects, You can’t download plugin updates. And half the stuff in the library only works from the FAB page.

[Krabworks (CG_Krab)]

I did finally have a chance today to look at the procedural vegetation editor using the Quixel Megaplant samples.

(1) The examples seem to be broken right out of the box, the Gravity Nodes for PVE which work in 5.7 now break the meshes in 5.8 preview. Disabling gravity re-connects the pieces of the tree here so I suspect these nodes are now broken. I am not sure how this got away with being in this state because opening up any of the sample projects for this plugin in 5.8, it is immediately obvious that it doesn’t work. If it’s a migration issue then it means PVE from 5.7 is not forward compatible. Either way, not good.

(2) Make Static Mesh from Procedural Vegetation SKMs is still broken. In the Skeletal Mesh Editor from any procedural vegetation made with PVE, click “Make Static Mesh” and the resulting mesh is this mess:

Again, this is straight out of the box in a fresh project with default settings using the PVE sample assets.

(3) Let’s try creating a Non-Nanite foliage, since there’s a checkbox here for this, and see if the options in the Procedural Vegetation Editor are working. I’m using Export directly from the PVE asset this time and all I did was Uncheck the Nanite Box:

Ok so…that generated a mesh with Nanite Enabled? It took an extremely long time to export, but when it finished it made a Nanite mesh despite having this option turned off in node graph.

However turning off Nanite did seem to work once turned off directly in the mesh (but not through PVE)

So…what to say about this really. Many things are broken.

The new Gizmo is very nice though and much more consistent than the previous one.

[DomiOh]

The “Forward Looking” tab/section is gone again
Is that intended?

[Aresias]

They never updated it even before 5.7 and it was the same with the content tab so it’s not surprising that they’ve deleted both from the roadmap.

[Sikotik13]

For 2. Empty blueprint-only test project did not close cleanly for me (left an editor and crash report process running in Task Manager, twice each in my case, for two cases of opening and closing the same test project). Converted to C++, the same project closes cleanly. Once everything was actually closed/force-killed in Task Manager, the launcher stopped hanging the initializing phase when trying to download the MetaHuman Creator Core Data. In case you were still stuck on this.

[The_Distiller]

Did Lumen support for hair not make it into 5.8? I remember seeing a IrradianceFieldGather integration commit at the end of March.

[ConverseFox]

The new gizmo annoyingly can’t be alt clicked when editing a spline. You can still press alt after clicking the gizmo as a workaround for now at least

[Sarlack]

When I hit play in editor, the sound cracks like the Hz are mismatched. Then there is no sound at all. When I click out the editor while PIE is running to windows taskbar it cracks again and then when I click back on the editor it cracks again. Is anyone else having issues with the sound in 5.8? I have no issues with 5.7.4.

EDIT: It wasn’t the editor, it was Ultra Dynamic Sky’s audio glitching it out. I opened a new level and It is OK.

[Kazuma_Sempai]

On version ue5.7, at some point in the game, all 2D sounds stopped working. The code is fine, but the sounds don’t play. The error occurred about an hour into the game, when it was already packaged. Has this been fixed?

[Kazuma_Sempai]

Have you found a way to fix this problem?