The world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool

Build bigger worlds

Think big, really big. Unreal Engine 5 provides the tools and assets you need to create truly expansive worlds for your players, participants, and stakeholders to explore, using content that scales. 

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Leverage game-changing fidelity

Bring incredibly immersive and realistic interactive experiences to life with groundbreaking features like Nanite and Lumen that provide a generational leap in visual fidelity, and enable worlds to be fully dynamic.

Animate and model in context

Artist-friendly animation authoring, rigging, retargeting, and runtime tools—together with a continually expanding modeling toolset—reduce iteration and eliminate round-tripping, speeding up the creative process.

02KEY FEATURES

Everything included out of the box

No matter which industry you're in, Unreal Engine 5 includes all the tools you need to deliver stunning real-time content and experiences, with no hidden extras. 

NANITE & VIRTUAL SHADOW MAPS

Massively detailed worlds

Create games and worlds with massive amounts of geometric detail with Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and Virtual Shadow Maps.

Directly import and replicate multi-million-polygon meshes while maintaining a real-time frame rate—even at 60 fps—without any noticeable loss of fidelity.

These systems intelligently stream and process only the detail you can perceive, largely removing poly count and draw call constraints.

LUMEN

Dynamic global illumination and reflections

Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination and reflections solution that enables indirect lighting to adapt on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day or opening an exterior door. 

With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; what you see inside the Unreal Editor is what you get on console. 

TEMPORAL SUPER RESOLUTION

Quality or performance? Why choose?

Players of next-generation consoles expect frame rates of 60 fps or more on high-resolution displays, putting an enormous strain on rendering resources.

Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), a built-in, platform-independent, high-quality upsampling system, enables the engine to render at much lower resolution but with similar output pixel fidelity to frames rendered at a higher resolution.

WORLD PARTITION

Bigger, better Open Worlds

Easily manage your levels with World Partition, a system that automatically divides the world into a grid and streams only the necessary cells. 

Team members can simultaneously work on the same region of the same World, thanks to a One File Per Actor system, while with Data Layers, you can create different variations of the same World—such as day and night versions—as layers that exist in the same space.

CHARACTERS & ANIMATION

Animation in context

With UE5’s built-in artist-friendly animation authoring toolset, you can iterate faster and more accurately, with less need to round-trip with DCC tools.

Quickly create rigs in Control Rig and pose and animate your characters in Sequencer, or retarget existing animations. You can even use machine learning to achieve high-quality real-time deformations. 

Then, dynamically adjust animations at runtime to compensate for different gameplay scenarios, such as varying speed or terrain.

MODELING

Asset development on the spot

Unreal Engine 5 includes an extensive and constantly expanding built-in modeling toolset, including mesh editing, geometry scripting, UV creation and editing, and baking and mesh attributes.

With these tools, artists can develop and iterate on assets—including dense meshes, such as those generated using photogrammetry tools or by kitbashing—directly within the Unreal Editor, saving time and reducing the potential for errors. 

METASOUNDS

Procedural audio design

MetaSounds is a high-performance system that offers complete control over audio DSP graph generation of sound sources, letting you manage all aspects of audio rendering to drive next-generation procedural audio experiences.

Analogous to the Material Editor, the system is fully programmable, bringing benefits such as dynamic data-driven assets, the ability to map game parameters to sound playback, huge workflow improvements, and much more.