Epic Games rolled out a new version of Unreal Engine 4. The update was the eighteenth large-scale update of the engine. Among the key innovations are three–dimensional maps, lighting and extensive AR support.
In total, the developers of the engine identify more than 30 key innovations. The full list of edits goes to hundreds. Let’s focus on the most interesting ones.
Volumetric lighting maps (Volumetric Lightmaps)
The light now falls not only on the pre-calculated components of the scene, but also on the introduced dynamic objects.
Roughly speaking, previously, in real time, the environment did not by default give a shadow to an object that was not calculated in advance as part of the scene. Now the shadow will fall on the object.
Volumetric lighting maps are designed to replace a bundle of pre-calculated lighting maps and indirect light caching. The main disadvantage of the innovation: a large load on memory.
ARKit iOS 11 Support
Full support for a set of tools for the development of augmented reality mobile applications from Apple. They say that with the existing functionality, you can already safely make working products. But so far, only the creation of games with a horizontal screen orientation is supported.
Support for the pre-release version of ARCore
On Unreal Engine 4, you can officially do anything for Google’s ARCore. But it should be remembered that this platform is still in early access. As stated on the ARCore website: “the preview is only the first step towards introducing AR support into the Android ecosystem.”
Among other key changes:
- a new tool for working with clothes;
- adding a global search to Blueprints without an editor;
- the appearance of the possibility of previewing localization in PIE;
- Unreal Engine 4 has a plugin for accessing the cameras of Android devices.
The full list of changes can be found at this link.