Unreal Engine 4.5 features revealed

Epic Games posted a some notes on the Unreal Engine 4.5. This upcoming game engine will feature and further enhance visual effects in video games, some of them are ray-traced distance field soft shadows, screen-space subsurface scattering to create more realistic skin and other effects, and dynamic shadows on mobile. 

The upcoming 4.5 release includes eagerly-awaited features such as animation retargeting, automatic C++ hot reload, light map UV generation and streaming video textures. New real-time ray traced soft shadows allow for beautifully lit dynamic scenes, and screen-space subsurface scattering enables very realistic skin materials. Finally, creating user interfaces has never been easier now that Unreal Motion Graphics is ready to use!

You can read more about Unreal Engine 4.5 over here.

This release also contains a huge number of usability and learning enhancements, an all new tutorial system, and new game templates for Advanced Vehicles and Twin Stick Shooters.

More than 40 features and improvements were contributed by our amazing community of developers. 

RAY TRACED DISTANCE FIELD SOFT SHADOWS

There is a new dynamic shadowing method which works by tracing a ray through mesh distance fields to the light. This allows for soft area shadows with sharp contacts!

Directional lights can combine ray traced shadows with the usual cascaded shadow maps (CSM) to get the best of both approaches. Only nearby shadows are computed with CSM in this screenshot.

Point and spot lights work too. ‘Source Radius’ is used to control how large the light source is and therefore how large the shadow penumbras are.

These distance fields are the same data used by the Distance Field Ambient Occlusion feature. You can enable it with ‘Use RayTraced DistanceField Shadows’ on a light, in projects which have the ‘Generate Mesh Distance Fields’ project setting enabled.

SCREEN-SPACE SUBSURFACE SCATTERING

A new “Subsurface Profile” shading model has been added! You can use subsurface scattering to create realistic skin materials and other awesome effects.

Left: no subsurface scattering, Middle: realistic settings, Right: exaggerated settings