Improvements to Chaos Cloth, a new camera rig system, a new animation rig editor, and orthographic rendering. All this and more in the new Unreal Engine 5.3 update!
Epic just announced that Unreal Engine’s latest update 5.3 is now available to all users, the new update brings a host of improvements to existing features as well as brand new ones enabling new workflows. Last time we wrote about an Unreal Engine update it was after the huge Unreal Engine 5.2 release notes were revealed during the State of Unreal 2023 keynote. This time the update is humble by comparison but nonetheless still impressive and important.
Seemingly slanted a bit more towards the film and television production side of things, we’ve got things like Cine Cam Rig Rail which allows filmmakers to simulate more traditional camera rig movements along custom paths (rails) or dollies. We have for a long time been able to pre-program custom paths, and rotations for cameras in Unreal, but this new system simplifies making rigs with advanced choreography and features far more intuitive controls.
Along the same track there have been some additional enhancements for VCam, letting users view and manage takes directly on their iPad (no word if this will also include Android tablets now or in the future). Touted as a feature that will let filmmakers’ output to different devices for different team members while the “operator” is the only one with camera control. Should be a handy feature for brainstorming ideas.
On the experimental feature front, we’ve also got ‘Sparse Volume Textures’ (SVTs) and ‘Path Tracing for Heterogeneous Volumes’ together they allow for better advanced volumetric effects like smoke, fire and as you’ll see briefly in the video below, tornadoes. The system will allow for importing OpenVDB files which artists can create in other applications such as After Effects, Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D, Davinci Resolve, etc. But of course, Epic would very much like it if you used their Niagara solution.
Another experimental feature is the new Skeletal Editor, this is an Animation rig editing tool that would compete with the likes of Blender and Autodesk Maya and 3Ds Max, though it looks to be rather rudimental at the moment, it appears to be something that could one-day help enable developers to stay in Unreal for virtually all their art and development needs.
Another effort by Epic to bring as many workflows as possible under the Unreal Engine Umbrella, they’ve also added more updates to the Chaos Cloth system, adding the Cloth Panel Editor letting make cloth patterns akin to Marvelous Designer directly in unreal, and then paint skin weights directly on either the pattern or the simulated cloth. Of course, this wouldn’t be very performant in real-time, so they’ve added the ability to cache simulations for playback in-engine.
We’ve also got multi-process cooking letting developers utilize additional CPU and memory resources (such as might be available in a build farm) to speed up cooked outputs, no doubt useful for environment requiring constant testing and iteration.
Lastly, there’s also now Orthographic rendering, which architects and industrial designers have been asking for since UE5 became the industry standard. This rendering solution is useful for seeing precise lines and alignments, essentially what it does is render three-dimensional objects as if they were two dimensional appearing to “flatten” them and remove senses of depth, it has for a long time been supported in Unreal Engine via custom third party solutions, and it’s commonly used in 2D perspective games which still use 3D art and has been one of the big reasons 2D indie developers have preferred Unreal Engine’s biggest competitor Unity.
With all these exciting updates you might be wondering when you can expect to see the results in game, and while the reality is that many of these latest updates are more business and film focused than gaming, some like the particle effects and orthographic rendering could conceivably show up in as little as a year or two (given indie game development cycles) and when they do we’ll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, make sure to check out our guide for the best current and future Unreal Engine 5 games.
