Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available - Unreal Engine

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_p:first-child:last-child]:d_contents [&&_em]:font-style_italic" style="--cosmos-gradient:linear-gradient(225deg, #f1b8dd 0%, #868afd 100%);--color:#ffffff">Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available<br>Animation

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UE 5.8

Virtual Production

With Unreal Engine 5.8, you can push performance and customization further, thanks to advanced worldbuilding and terrain creation tools, high-quality real-time vegetation authoring, and simplified lighting workflows.

You’ll also discover faster in-engine character and animation creation tools, advances in virtual production, high-fidelity full-body performance capture, accelerated content creation with integrated LLM workflows, and much more.

UE 5.8 is the last planned major Unreal Engine 5 release on our roadmap as we ramp up work on UE6. We will continue to support UE5 for bug fixes and regressions, and may add another official release if circumstances warrant it. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the 5.8 details.

What’s new in Unreal Engine 5.8

Create expansive open worlds

Build larger, feature-rich worlds faster with Mesh Terrain, unlock advanced open world editing and customization with the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework, and streamline vegetation authoring directly in the editor.

Mesh Terrain is our brand-new Experimental 3D-mesh-based system for authoring larger, more complex terrains.

Unlike our existing Landscape tool and other traditional 2.5D heightfield systems, Mesh Terrain is a true 3D mesh model , enabling you to create arbitrary shapes such as overhangs, floating islands, and tunnels. You can create the mesh directly in the Unreal Editor, or start by importing a mesh or heightmap from an external application.

Nondestructive modifiers make it easy to make changes to your scenes. For example, if you move a landscape feature, the terrain will regenerate automatically. The system is also fully interoperable with PCG .

Tightly integrated with World Partition and One File Per Actor (OFPA) , Mesh Terrain offers all the advantages of automatic distance-based streaming and data management, as well as enabling collaborative workflows.

With PCG, it’s now possible to make manual edits on top of procedurally generated content without breaking the proceduralism , so you can art direct the system’s results while continuing to adjust upstream parameters.

There’s also new support for complex attribute types —including arrays, structures, sets, and maps—as well as new example PCG graphs designed for spatial operations. Together, these features make it possible to generate elements such as buildings, city streets, and much more .

The Experimental Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE) now enables you to grow high-quality, biologically correct, Nanite-ready vegetation from scratch . Trees are able to react symbiotically, competing naturally for light and forming clusters. They’ll even grow around external meshes, and you can also art direct nature with basic sculpting tools and the ability to add or remove branches.

You can also now import meshes from different external sources, such as DCCs, and convert them to PVE-compatible assets complete with extracted skeletons. In addition, you can use 2D sketches and photographs as input to move faster from concept or real-world reference to production.

PVE also benefits from PCG’s new ability to create embedded subgraphs . Technical artists can create custom vegetation tools for artists to use in production, hiding the real complexity in the subgraph and exposing just the parameters that artists need to create variations.

We continue to add more Quixel Megaplants species to get you started faster . Check out the full new collection now available to download from Fab.

If you saw The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo at last year’s State of Unreal, you witnessed the Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin in action. The Experimental plugin—which enables you to rapidly load static, non-gameplay assets for massive, seamless open worlds—now delivers multiple improvements to speed, stability, and use case support .

Streamline character and animation workflows

New features and enhancements to the in-engine rigging and animation toolsets mean you can create more in the editor.

There’s now better support for in-editor sculpt-driven facial workflows and shot sculpting . This includes updates to the sculpting brush toolset, new options for mirroring and flipping targets, weight locking, and more—strengthening blend shape authoring for stylized characters, custom skeletal meshes, and MetaHumans, as well as for pose corrections.

Control Rig Physics moves to Beta , featuring enhancements for both riggers and animators. It’s great for anything from fully dynamic ragdoll animation, such as a character falling down stairs, to subtle secondary...