Epic Games launches Unreal Engine 5.2

Epic Games has proclaimed the introduction of Unreal Engine 5.2 (UE 5.2). With this iteration, they have further broadened the pioneering toolkit of UE5, maintaining their commitment to providing the most open and cutting-edge real-time 3D creation tools. Apart from refinements in functionality and enhancements in stability, Unreal Engine 5.2 pushes the boundaries of an out-of-the-box experience that creators anticipate, offering a plethora of new features.

Despite the past controversy over the game “Fortnite” leading to a three-year-long legal battle between Epic Games and Apple, it hasn’t deterred the new version of Unreal Engine from supporting the Apple platform. With Unreal Engine 5.2, Epic Games has for the first time offered native support for Apple’s proprietary chips, encompassing the M1 and M2 series. This implies that Unreal Engine no longer relies on Rosetta technology as an intermediary layer and can fully leverage the performance of the M1 and M2 series chips.

In Unreal Engine 5.2, Epic Games has incorporated a new feature called “Substrate.” This innovative material creation method replaces the fixed shading model suite with a more expressive and modular multi-tiered framework. It offers a wider range of surface appearances and an extensive parameter space to work with, allowing developers to exert more profound control over the appearance and texture of real-time application items in the game.

Moreover, Unreal Engine 5.2 provides a new procedural content generation framework, and an improved suite of virtual production tools, and has integrated new ML Deformer examples to more lucidly understand how to implement muscle and limb-driven cloth deformation simulations.