New release from Epic Games introduces new forward shading renderer, native automatic LOD generation, multiple static lighting scenarios, built-in support for NVIDIA Ansel Photography, and more.
Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 4.14, which is packed with hundreds of updates from the team at Epic, along with 71 contributions from the amazing developer community via GitHub. This release introduces a new forward shading renderer with MSAA, native automatic LOD generation, multiple static lighting scenarios, built-in support for NVIDIA Ansel Photography, and more.
Unreal Engine 4.14 introduces a new forward shading renderer optimized for VR, enabling crisp multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA) in games and applications. This is the same renderer Epic has written for use in VR projects, including the studio’s own upcoming game, Robo Recall. Leveraging options for Robo Recall, specifically, the forward renderer is about 22% faster than the deferred renderer on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970.
New contact shadows render beautifully detailed shadows for intricate objects, as seen in Epic’s MOBA, Paragon. UE4 now also ships with built-in automatic LOD generation for static meshes, and this new feature does not require any third-party library.
The team has also streamlined the animation tools to help users be even more productive, and added many new features to Sequencer, UE4’s non-linear cinematic tool, as well as improvements to vehicles, clothing and animation Blueprints.
For mobile developers, Vulkan API support is now available to use on compatible Android devices, and various new mobile rendering features have been added, including reading from scene color and depth, and the ability to draw 3D objects on top of user interfaces.
On the Windows platform, C++ programmers can now use Visual Studio “15” for development, and Visual Studio 2015 is still supported.
In addition, Unreal Engine 4.14 includes improved per-pixel translucent lighting, pictured below. In the deferred renderer, the new forward shading functionality can now be used on translucent surfaces to get specular highlights from multiple lights and image-based reflections from parallax-corrected reflection captures.
Source: Epic Games
