Unreal Engine 5.7 Preview: New Frontiers for Digital Creativity

Epic Games has released the Unreal Engine 5.7 Preview, and the updates do not disappoint: from optimized tools to new features and enhancements to existing plugins, this release marks another step toward increasingly powerful and smooth workflows for developers, artists, and studios of all sizes.

Procedural Content Generation: now Production-Ready

The Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is leaving the experimental stage and officially entering production. In addition to greater stability, it brings:

• Performance doubled compared to version 5.5.

• GPU parameter overrides, allowing dynamic control of different parameters in GPU nodes.

• New PCG editor mode, with dedicated tools (spline drawing, volume brush, standalone graphs).

• Improved scalability and cross-platform support, including integration with FastGeo.

In short, PCG becomes more flexible and ready to integrate into real projects while remaining under active development.

Procedural Vegetation and Nanite Foliage

Another feature that will excite artists is the Procedural Vegetation Editor (Experimental): a PCG node-based plugin for creating trees and forests in real time directly within the editor. Key features include:

• Modeling trees with gravity and scaling.

• Customizing leaves and branches.

• Exporting as static or skeletal meshes.

• Generating infinite Nanite-ready vegetation variations.

At the same time, Nanite Foliage debuts as Experimental, combining three advanced systems to render and animate dense, high-detail foliage at 60 fps on current-gen hardware without sacrificing performance.

Lighting, Materials, and Rendering

The UE 5.7 Preview also brings further improvements to rendering systems:

• MegaLights (Beta): now compatible with directional lights, Niagara particle lights, translucency, and hair grooms.

• Substrate materials: moved to full production, offering a modular material approach with support for advanced effects and physically accurate layering (metal, clear coat, skin, cloth, etc.).

MetaHuman and Animation

There are also significant updates for characters and animation:

• MetaHuman Creator plugin is now available for Linux and macOS.

• Python and Blueprint API support for scripting nearly all operations.

• Live Link Face on iPad and Android for real-time animation (in the full release).

On the animation side, UE 5.7 introduces faster, more native tools:

• Selection Sets for managing multiple controls without external tools.

• Redesigned panels for a cleaner interface.

• New Constraint UX window.

• Rigging improvements including morph shapes, sculpting, physics collisions, and a Dependency View for debugging.

Looking Ahead: Epic Developer Assistant

Finally, attention turns to the new Epic Developer Assistant, which will be available in the full UE 5.7 release. Integrated directly into the editor, it will provide:

• Instant answers and guidance.

• C++ code generation.

• Support without needing to open a browser.

For now, it can be tried via the Epic Developer Community with support for Unreal Engine 5.6.