Get cracking, future coders.
Epic Games today released Unreal Engine 4.16, which brings dramatic improvements to the way developers can create content across PC, console, mobile and VR platforms.
Amongst the updates are new rendering and animation features, significant performance improvements for mobile and console platforms and tons of quality of life enhancements.
Unreal Engine 4.16 ships with volumetric fog which enables realistic fog and smoke effects with consistent lighting, even at very large scale. Artists have been experimenting with this new feature in early access and achieving stunning results.
Animators now have greater control of the flow of character movement using Animation Modifiers, the new spline IK solver and an updated Pose Driver with new lightweight rigid body and low level cloth simulation tools.
Support for the Nintendo Switch is now also fully-featured and ready for development with 4.16! Epic Games has teamed up with Nintendo to release the full UE4 source code for Nintendo Switch to approved developers for free. Learn more by visiting the Unreal Engine blog here.
Physically-realistic bloom post-process effects can now be created with the new image-based (FFT) convolution feature Epic developed during the making of “The Human Race” collaboration with Chevrolet. FFT Bloom empowers artists to use custom bloom kernel shapes with complete control to match desired results.
Additionally, interfaces and workflows for VR Mode (formerly known as VR Editor), Animation, Sequencer cinematics and other tools have been updated to make developing in Unreal a more streamlined and enjoyable experience than ever before.
Along with the hundreds of new updates from Epic, more than 160 improvements submitted by the Unreal Engine developer Github community are shipping with today’s 4.16 release.
Here’s the full scope of the release in the Unreal Engine 4.16 release blog post.
