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