After weeks of preview release, the final release of Unreal Engine 4.11 is here. This release brings a large number of new features and improvements including:
- performance and multithreading improvements
- realistic hair shading
- realistic eye shading
- improve skin shading
- realistic cloth shading (shown right)
- capsule (soft) shadows
- particle depth of field
- dithered opacity mask
- dithered LOD crossfades
- improved hierarchical LOD
- VR instanced stereo rendering
- fast physics simulation for characters (Anim Dynamics)
- live animation recording from gameplay
- higher quality depth of field
- platform/sdk updates (Oculus Rift, Steam, nVidia, PlayStation, etc)
- improved DirectX12 support and DX12 for Xbox One support
- Metal rendering on MacOS
- Fast lighting builds
- Lightmass portals
- animation pose copying
- LOD bone reduction tool
- particle cutouts
- stereo spatialization
- sound focus (sound positioning angles)
- sound occlusion
- sound concurrency options
- marker based animation syncing
- curve blending for animation montages
- hierarchical LOD outline
- complex text rendering (experimental)
- advanced blueprint searching
- VR head mounted display camera improvements
- VR Stereo Layers
- improvements on animation sequencer
- much, much more.
You can read the full release notes here. As always, the newest version can be downloaded using the Epic Game Launcher.
