Unreal Engine 4.24 sees Datasmith included for free

In November, Epic Games announced that, with the release of Unreal Engine 4.24, its Unreal Studio product is officially retired, and all features are rolled into Unreal Engine, where they will remain free for all users.

Unreal Studio was designed to augment the core Unreal Engine offering—originally conceived as a games engine—making it more applicable to industries like architecture, manufacturing, and product design. Since its release as a free beta program in March 2018, Unreal Studio attracted more than 370,000 registrants. 

Key among the features that were exclusive to Unreal Studio is Datasmith, a feature set that provides seamless data conversion from 3ds Max, SketchUp Pro, Cinema 4D, and a host of CAD and BIM products, including Revit, Rhino3D, SolidWorks, and CATIA. With Datasmith’s nondestructive re-import feature, users can continue to make changes to their assets in the source package without losing downstream changes.

Other features previously only available in Unreal Studio include mesh editing tools, like the ability to delete or flip selected triangles; optimization tools such as defeaturing and jacketing; basic UV projections and UV unwrapping; and a Variant Manager, which enables users to offer various different configurations of their asset in the Unreal Editor or at runtime. 

Simplified user experience and licensing options

With the incorporation of Unreal Studio features into Unreal Engine, the same product now applies regardless of the industry you’re working in—whether you’re a visualization specialist, a cinematographer, or a game developer. 

There’s simply a choice of license agreements, depending on whether you’re publishing a game or other off-the-shelf interactive product for consumers, or creating projects such as architectural visualizations or linear content. There are also custom licensing options available. You can find more details in the Unreal Engine FAQ.

Quixel Megascans library now free for all use with Unreal Engine

In a tandem announcement, Epic revealed that Quixel, creator of the world’s largest photogrammetry 2D and 3D asset library, was joining the Epic Games family. As a direct result, the company has been able to make the entire Megascans library of more than 10,000 materials free for all use with Unreal Engine. These extremely high-quality, production-ready assets cover the full gamut of architectural and landscape materials, from tiles, floors, and fabrics to grass, trees, and rocks, and so much more.

New environment tools

Talking of grass, trees, rocks, Unreal Engine 4.24 also offers some compelling new tools for creating realistic outdoor environments.

New nondestructive landscape creation and editing tools enable users to add multiple height maps and paint layers to a landscape, and to edit them independently of each other. Users can also create unique custom brushes through Blueprint visual scripting, such as one that automatically fits the height of the landscape to the bottom of buildings.

In addition, an enhanced Sun and Sky tool now offers the ability to create gorgeous atmospheric skies that can be viewed from the ground or from the air, and to dynamically change the time of day. With the new task-based project creation wizard, users can set up such a scene in a few clicks.

Productivity and pipeline enhancements

While automating data preparation workflows—such as setting up Lightmap UVs, substituting materials, and deleting or merging objects based on various factors—has long been possible through Python scripting, a new Visual Dataprep feature offers the same ability to non-programmers. The visual tool enables them to create a “recipe” of filters and operators that they can save and reuse on other scenes or projects. 

A continued emphasis on improving the user experience also sees enhancements to multi-display rendering for immersive visualization environments such as CAVEs, making the feature much easier to use out of the box.

New Archviz Interior Rendering sample project 

To help users take advantage of the real-time ray tracing functionality first released in Unreal Engine 4.22, a new sample project has been released. Set in a small apartment, the sample demonstrates how to create convincing effects using ray tracing that show off designs to their best advantage. Users can explore the scene, learn from the examples, and even reuse parts of the project in their own work.

The sample and accompanying documentation guides users through best practices, asset and material workflows, optimizations, and other techniques that show off designs to their best advantage in a real-time environment. 

 

The Archviz Interior Rendering sample project is available from the Learn tab of the Epic Games launcher.

These are just a few of the new features and enhancements in Unreal Engine 4.24. The full list of features can be seen in the product’s release notes.

Unreal Engine 4.24 is available now. Existing Unreal Engine or Unreal Studio users can download it from the Epic Games launcher, while new users can get started for free from the Unreal Engine home page.