Epic Games Publishes Unreal Engine 5.3 Roadmap

[Carlosan]

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The upcoming release is set to feature support for orthographic rendering, an experimental Skeletal Editor, an updated ML Deformer, and more.

Epic Games has recently revealed a public roadmap for Unreal Engine 5.3, an upcoming update to their renowned game engine. Featuring tons of new features and improvements, the release is set to enhance the software's rendering, world-building, PCG, animation, virtual production, simulation, and modeling pipelines, upgrade its audio tools and UI systems, and more, refining nearly every aspect of the engine.

One of UE5.3's most notable additions, as per the roadmap, is the experimental support of orthographic rendering. According to the team, "multiple areas of the engine have been fixed to achieve parity between perspective and orthographic projections", making it compatible with many of UE5's features, including Lumen, Nanite, Shadows, and TSR. 

Another cool feature revealed by Epic is the upcoming Skeletal Editor, which is set to enable its users to create skeletons and edit mesh skin weights directly in the Unreal Editor. The tool allows for the addition of bones to the assets and the deformation of Static Meshes, converting them to Skeletal Meshes without having to import any skeleton data.

Furthermore, the next update will also enhance the engine's ML Deformer, first introduced in Unreal Engine 5.2, adding a masking system for Local Neural Morph Model, improving the Nearest Neighbor model UI and workflow, removing NNI framework dependency, and more.

Unreal Engine 5.3 will also feature:

• Improvements to the software's Lumen, Nanite, and Path Tracer.
• New tools for grooming hair and fur.
• Updates for large landscape import/export.
• New world-building tools.
• Hierarchical generation.
• Rule processing from external data.
• Multi-Process Cook.
• The ability to use data outside of the Control Rig graph to procedurally create and modify the rig. 
• The ability to browse for Level Sequences from the virtual camera.
• The ability to simulate and train cloth in the engine using the Experimental Panel Cloth Editor.
• Updated Niagara Fluids toolset.
• New modeling tools.
• Enhanced audio tools.
• And much, much more.

You can check out the full list of new features and improvements here.