Unreal Engine 4.13 improves Sequence Recorder and adds rendering features

Epic Games has released the latest version of the Unreal Engine, bringing with it a number of major and minor tweaks and additions.

Capturing live gameplay using the Sequence Recorder has been improved through the new ability to automatically create a camera cuts track, as well as the option to record data to an actor possessed in the level and capture world space when an actor is attached but not recorded.

Rendering in UE4 has been improved across the board, with a healthy list of brand new features, including mesh decals, Blueprint drawing to render targets, GPU morph targets, refraction improvements and high quality, optimised noise functions.

In addition, shadow map caching has been enabled for movable lights, decreasing the resource cost for more static environments.

On the animation side of things, new Alembic support – albeit experimental for the moment – means that devs can now import complex vertex animations that they may have created offline, while the similarly experimental Physical Animation Component allows characters to react more realistically to physical forces by driving skeletal animation through either custom or pre-set motors.

Unreal’s support for VR has also been expanded, bringing compatibility for capsule shadows and optimised stereo instancing.

The engine’s VR Editor has also been upgraded thanks to the introduction of mesh and foliage painting, a transform tool and VR colour picking. Devs can also now jump straight from the editor into their VR game.