Unreal Engine 5.4: Finally got the features we were waiting for!

The new version of Unreal Engine is now out with many new improvements compared to the version 5.3. Unreal Engine 5.4 is finally available for everyone. In particular, we want to mention the new Motion Matching, a very important tool to make in-game character movements more realistic!

At Epic are working hard about many new improvements for Unreal Engine 5.4 such as lightweight emitters for Niagara particle system, local Fog Volumes, variable rate Shading for Nanite, an improved Parallelism in Rendering. But today I wanna mention other major features that are destin to finally let’s make us incredible in-engine animations and realistic behaviour for our characters.

Motion Matching

A more accurate and sophisticated locomotion animation system which works just selecting the best frame from its database based on the character position and action. Motion Matching based on the Epic introduction, replaces the old StateMachine where everything has to be manually set.

As always Epic has also released an example project with a library of more than 500 AAA motion capture animations also compatible with MetaHuman character rig.

In-Engine Animation System

Finally another big goal has been achieved with this new version. You may know how it is complicated and hard sometimes to animate an entire cinematic scene for instance in Unreal Engine. The entire rigging system is now completely re-developed. Further, many new other tools like the Sequencer has been improved to help the in-engine animation workflow.

Some of the best improvements fro my opinion are:

• Nanite Displacement: now even the displacement polygons will be processed by Nanite technology.
• Heterogeneous Volume Shadows: wonderful for advanced realistic VFX.
• Procedural Content Generator: The fully in-engine Procedural Content Generation Framework has significant improvements, too.

Projects at K Storm Studio

We are so excited about these new features in Unreal Engine 5.4! To be honest, we were waiting for that. Especially in the case of motion matching technology. “The Source” game absolutely needs the implementation of these new technologies. We do believe, as the Epic says, that motion matching will replace the old state machine. Even the new insider rigging system in Unreal Engine 5.4 will be crucial for our development.

Out experience with Motion Matching

We started using motion matching and yes, it is really amazing as expected. However, it is not so intuitive but I think this is because of the lack of animations. At the moment every developer is using the Lyra project animations set but the new motion matching requires to have even more animations to choose from. Epic planned to release a pack of more than 550 animation files in June, so we will update our major asset to have a better TPS gameplay experience for our upcoming 3D games!…

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