Unreal Engine 5.4 is now available, and it’s packed with new features and improvements to performance, visual fidelity, and productivity. With this release, Epic Games says it is delivering the toolsets they’ve been using internally to build and ship Fortnite Chapter 5, Rocket Racing, Fortnite Festival, and LEGO Fortnite.

According to the company, this release sees substantial updates to Unreal Engine’s built-in animation toolset, enabling users to quickly and easily rig characters and author animation directly in engine, without the frustrating and time-consuming need to round trip to external applications.

With an experimental new Modular Control Rig feature, user can build animation rigs from understandable modular parts instead of complex granular graphs, while Automatic Retargeting makes it easier to get great results when reusing bipedal character animations. There are also extensions to the Skeletal Editor and a suite of new deformer functions to make the Deformer Graph more accessible.

Meanwhile, Sequencer—Unreal Engine’s nonlinear animation editor—gets a significant makeover, with better readability and improved usability in several aspects of the Sequencer Tree. Among other new features in this release, Epic Games has also added Keyframe Scriptability, which opens up further potential for the creation of custom animation tools.

Watch the video below to see some Unreal Engine 5.4 highlights.

Motion Matching, previously introduced as an experimental feature, is now production-ready. Motion Matching is an expandable next-gen framework for animation features. Instead of using complex logic to select and transition animation clips at runtime, it relies on searching a relatively large database of captured animation using the current motion information of the character in game as the key.

Nanite—UE5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry system—continues to receive enhancements, starting with an experimental new Tessellation feature that enables fine details such as cracks and bumps to be added at render time, without altering the original mesh.

This is just a short summary of all of the updates to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. To view a more comprehensive list, click here.

Unreal Engine 5.4 is now available to download, with a host of new features and improvements for all creators. Visit the licensing page to see options for getting the update.