News
November 12, 2025
Unreal Engine 5.7 is now available
Unreal Engine 5.7 is here, bringing you the tools you need to build expansive, lifelike worlds filled with rich, beautiful details, and cleanly render them in real time at high fidelity on current-generation hardware.
With this release, you can procedurally generate dense, lush foliage and other content at massive scale; author complex layered and blended materials with true physical accuracy; and use a magnitude more lights than ever before to illuminate your worlds with complete artistic freedom.
You’ll also experience more powerful and intuitive animation and rigging workflows; deeper and more flexible MetaHuman integrations; and expanded virtual production possibilities—all while getting expert guidance along the way from the new in-editor AI assistant.
Let’s dive into the details.
With this release, you can procedurally generate dense, lush foliage and other content at massive scale; author complex layered and blended materials with true physical accuracy; and use a magnitude more lights than ever before to illuminate your worlds with complete artistic freedom.
You’ll also experience more powerful and intuitive animation and rigging workflows; deeper and more flexible MetaHuman integrations; and expanded virtual production possibilities—all while getting expert guidance along the way from the new in-editor AI assistant.
Let’s dive into the details.
What’s new in Unreal Engine 5.7
Advanced open world creation
The Procedural Content Generation framework (PCG) is now Production-Ready! PCG enables you to quickly populate environments, introduce natural variety, and deliver more engaging game experiences in less time. This release delivers a number of enhancements that make it even easier and more efficient to create unique, large-scale worlds that are both dynamic and visually rich.Case in point, the new PCG Editor Mode offers a library of customizable tools built on the PCG framework, including the ability to draw a spline, paint points, or create a volume. Each tool is linked to a PCG Graph, giving you real-time parameter control, standalone executability for asset workflows, and the ability to create new tools to expand your library against your project needs—without writing a single line of code. It’s a great way to get familiar with the framework and understand its full potential.
Scalable high-fidelity rendering
Creating highly detailed foliage is one thing; rendering worlds densely populated with it efficiently is quite another.This release introduces Nanite Foliage, an Experimental new geometry rendering system designed for performance, robustness, and scalability. With Nanite Foliage, teams can create and animate dense, high-detail foliage-heavy environments for large open worlds that efficiently render on current-gen hardware.
This massive breakthrough utilizes Nanite Voxels, which automatically and efficiently draw millions of tiny, overlapping elements that read as a solid mass at distance—such as tree canopies, pine needles, ground clutter, and much more—at stable frame rates without cross fades, pops, or the need to author LODs. Nanite Foliage also leverages Nanite Assemblies, reducing storage, memory, and rendering cost, and Nanite Skinning, which determines dynamic behaviors such as wind response.
As well as using the system to render Nanite Foliage-compatible meshes from PVE, you can import trees from external applications via USD.
Another powerful toolset reaching Production-Ready status with this release is Substrate, Unreal Engine’s state-of-the-art modular material authoring and rendering framework that offers inherent support for layered and blended materials.
Substrate empowers creators to combine multiple material behaviors—such as those found in metal, clear coat, skin, and cloth—with true high-quality physical accuracy, making effects such as realistic multi-layered car paint, oiled leather, or blood and sweat on skin readily achievable. And with fine-tuned support for custom shading behaviors, teams can define their own materials logic without hacking the engine.
Substrate is cleanly integrated within Unreal Engine’s lighting pipeline, delivering stunning, high-quality results across every material type, and is built to scale all the way down to mobile, ensuring consistent performance and visual fidelity across all UE5 target platforms.
Substrate empowers creators to combine multiple material behaviors—such as those found in metal, clear coat, skin, and cloth—with true high-quality physical accuracy, making effects such as realistic multi-layered car paint, oiled leather, or blood and sweat on skin readily achievable. And with fine-tuned support for custom shading behaviors, teams can define their own materials logic without hacking the engine.
Substrate is cleanly integrated within Unreal Engine’s lighting pipeline, delivering stunning, high-quality results across every material type, and is built to scale all the way down to mobile, ensuring consistent performance and visual fidelity across all UE5 target platforms.
MegaLights is moving from Experimental to Beta in this release. It enables you to add a magnitude greater number of dynamic shadow-casting lights to your scene, yielding effects such as realistic soft shadows from complex light sources like area lights. This more scalable lighting workflow means you can work more playfully and build bigger, richer, and more complex worlds than ever before.
This release also delivers a big boost to visual fidelity, with new support for directional lights, translucency, shadow-casting for Niagara particles, and more accurate shading and shadowing on hair. There’s also better out-of-the-box performance, improved noise reduction, and less need to manually optimize lights.
This release also delivers a big boost to visual fidelity, with new support for directional lights, translucency, shadow-casting for Niagara particles, and more accurate shading and shadowing on hair. There’s also better out-of-the-box performance, improved noise reduction, and less need to manually optimize lights.
Extended MetaHuman integration
MetaHuman continues to see deeper integration with both Unreal Engine and with other tools in your pipeline.First off, there’s now support for the MetaHuman Creator Unreal Engine plugin on both Linux and macOS, enabling users on those platforms to enjoy all the benefits that Unreal Engine integration brings. MetaHuman Animator support for Linux and macOS is planned for a future release.
With this release, you can now automate and batch process nearly all editing and assembly operations for MetaHuman character assets using Python or Blueprint scripting interactively in Unreal Editor or offline on a compute farm.
We’ve also added the ability to conform meshes in varied poses, offering the option to use UV space vertex correspondence between the conform template and model meshes, supporting mesh round-tripping with external DCC tools via FBX.
When it comes to getting things moving, you can now generate animation in real time and record performances from an external camera connected to an iPad or Android device using Live Link Face, opening the door for more pocket-sized, budget-friendly real-time facial capture solutions.
We’ve also added the ability to conform meshes in varied poses, offering the option to use UV space vertex correspondence between the conform template and model meshes, supporting mesh round-tripping with external DCC tools via FBX.
When it comes to getting things moving, you can now generate animation in real time and record performances from an external camera connected to an iPad or Android device using Live Link Face, opening the door for more pocket-sized, budget-friendly real-time facial capture solutions.
And last but not least, there are two new highlights on the hair styling front:
- You can now author and control hair guides and strands using joint-based deformation, painting, and mesh-based manipulation in Unreal Engine, blending between simulated hair physics and art-directed animation.
- The latest MetaHuman for Houdini update now offers a guide-driven workflow for creating hairstyles using pre-authored data. The tool comes with a number of adjustable preset hairstyles for artists to use as starting points.
Enhanced in-editor animation toolset
Following significant improvements in the in-editor rigging and animation authoring toolset in Unreal Engine 5.6, this release adds a refactored Animation Mode that streamlines workflows and optimizes the use of screen real estate.As animators know all too well, selecting multiple controls within a rig or across multiple assets can be fiddly and time-consuming—especially when you have to do it repeatedly—so we’ve added the ability to create Selection Sets and do just that with a single click. The feature includes the ability to automatically create mirrored copies for both sides of a character and to hide or show sets for better focus. Sets can also be shared between team members.
Expanded virtual production workflows
Unreal Engine 5.7 also brings several features that offer new possibilities for virtual production.If you’re working with motion capture, take a look at the new Dynamic Constraint Component for Props—there’s an example implementation provided in the Mocap Manager. Props now automatically attach to hand positions, interpolating smoothly for natural-looking results, even for complex actions like juggling. You can also override the function in Blueprint to implement your own dynamic constraint logic and create customized behaviors.
Then there’s the new Live Link Broadcast Component, which enables Unreal Engine itself to act as a source of animation data across your network. This opens the door to a variety of multi-machine VP and mocap stage workflows—such as offloading retargeting work to another Editor session and broadcasting the results to your main scene. Simply add Actors to your level and turn them into Live Link subjects, streaming Transform, Camera, and Animation roles directly from the Editor.
Also of note, this release introduces a new and improved version of Composure, Unreal Engine’s built-in real-time compositing tool. Now more accessible, Composure handles both live video input and file-based image media plates, and can deliver real-time results for film or video shoots at 24 fps. Updates include new shadow and reflection integration, enabling the seamless marriage of live-action and CG elements, and enhancements to the keyer.
Instant help at your fingertips
This release introduces a new AI assistant, offering helpful guidance on Unreal Engine directly in the Editor—it’s like having an experienced UE dev on your team ready to help you at any level of detail. A dedicated slide-out panel enables you to ask questions, generate C++ code, or follow step-by-step guidance, all without leaving the Editor—so you can stay focused on the task at hand.As well as typing questions, you can access the AI assistant as easily as you would a tooltip, by moving your cursor over an interface element and pressing F1; this will automatically start a conversation with the AI assistant around that topic.
You can also now access essential resources such as tutorials, documentation, news, and forums, as well as your recent projects, directly from the new Unreal Editor Home Panel. And if you’re completely new to Unreal Engine, you can jump right into an interactive Getting Started sample that launches directly in the Unreal Editor.
You can also now access essential resources such as tutorials, documentation, news, and forums, as well as your recent projects, directly from the new Unreal Editor Home Panel. And if you’re completely new to Unreal Engine, you can jump right into an interactive Getting Started sample that launches directly in the Unreal Editor.
And there’s more…
These are just some of the new features and enhancements in Unreal Engine 5.7. Check out the release notes to see the full feature list.Join the community
Join the Unreal Engine 5.7 conversation on the Epic Developer Community forums, where you can share your insights on the update.Some features are Beta or Experimental, and should not be considered production-ready. See the release notes for details.