Epic Games released Unreal Studio 4.22 with many new interesting features that make it faster and easier to create stunning photo-realistic visuals and interactive applications. The release provides new features both in the Unreal Engine core and in additional toolkits, such as Datasmith, which is part of the free Unreal Studio beta.

Key features

Real-time ray tracing (early access)

Unreal Engine 4.22 leverages the power of NVIDIA RTX graphics and Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR) infrastructures, so it becomes easy to achieve subtle, authentic effects that promote realistic scenes, such as physically accurate reflections, soft shadows from local light sources, ambient occlusion, transparency, Sky light and image based lighting.

Datasmith Improvements

Datasmith is a framework for translating and optimizing data. In the new version, the accuracy of data transfer has been improved and the need to redo the same action several times has been minimized.

• 3ds Max: basic animation support, improved performance with Forest Pack Pro and RailClone resources, better matching of light intensity and more.
• Revit (early access): the exporter is still offered as a function of early access, but its stability and performance have been improved.
• CAD: improved performance when importing large scenes, added NURBS stapling options and more control over the tessellation of Rhino files.
• GlTF (early access): support for animation of objects, basic light sources and PBR materials, as well as a non-destructive re-import process.
• MDL / AxF: improved importer, visual accuracy and accelerated iterations.
• VRED / DELTAGEN: support for using options from files in Variant Manager.

Advanced parameters of rendering output

Improved rendering settings for more realistic results.

• Rendering Layers (Early Access): Composure, the layout module built into the Unreal Engine, now has a UI that allows you to easily organize objects into separate rendering layers for further processing in image editors such as Photoshop.
• nDisplay: improved support for nDisplay, thanks to which you can display different viewports on multiple displays from a single Unreal Engine instance, which makes creating immersive environments more efficient.
• HoloLens: Microsoft's HoloLens support has been added. In addition, HoloLens 2 support is planned after its release.

Improved usability of Unreal Editor

Improved UI in the Unreal Editor to simplify working with fully assembled scenes that can contain thousands of objects of different sizes, and to improve the usability of the mesh editing toolkit and Variant Manager.

• General Unreal Editor: added option to rotate around selected faces, adaptive mouse wheel and pan sensitivity depending on the size of the selected object, the ability to switch the visibility of several layers in one click and more control of the selection when working with hierarchies.
• Mesh editing toolkit: added ability to choose whether back-facing triangles will be selected, as well as improved their display.
• Variant Manager: added support for drag-and-drop and the ability to select and edit several objects at once with the new Blueprint trigger.

Epic Games also recently released Unreal Engine 4.22 with new features that expand the boundaries of photo-realistic and cinematic rendering quality in real time.