Unreal Engine 5.5: From SMPTE 2110 to MegaLights, What’s New and Noteworthy

At this year’s Unreal Fest, Epic announced all the new features coming in version 5.5, the fifth major update since Unreal 5 launched in 2022. Every new launch is eagerly anticipated, as users across numerous industries hope their most requested features are included. Considering Unreal 5.4 left early access and became official in April of this year, 5.5 is a very big update.  As has become the standard with Unreal Engine updates, there are too many improvements to mention. Some general improvements include better hardware raytracing performance in Lumen, path tracing, and light baking. 

Tools such as character animation, sequencer, and motion design all received several updates to improve usability and add features that bring them more in line with other DCCs. Unreal’s Procedural Content Generation tools continue to grow in functionality and even adds experimental GPU compute support. There are many more updates, but we’ll look at some of the more notable features that many of our customers will be interested in. If you want to dive deeper into all the coming updates, you can look at Epic’s roadmap to see what is being worked on.

SMPTE 2110 reaches Production Ready

In the world of virtual production, SMPTE 2110 has been a hot topic for quite some time. This IP video protocol promises numerous advantages and brings LED walls in line with existing media studio workflows. Unreal first brought SMPTE 2110 support with version 5.3 in an experimental format. According to Epic, that meant the feature was ready to be tested but not yet stable or feature-rich enough to be used in live production environments. Version 5.5 changed that and now has Epic’s stamp of approval to use as a final product. 

Version 5.5 also brings some improvements, such as OCIO support for 2110 media sources and the ability to use Precision Time Protocol (PTP) as a timecode provider instead of an external timecode generator. PTP is interesting as it could allow for computer systems without an NVIDIA Quadro SYNC II card to still be synchronized. Potentially, this could mean AMD GPUs would become an option for LED walls. The key here is that external devices, including the LED wall’s controller, the camera, and the motion tracking system, must also support PTP for proper synchronization. PTP isn’t a magic bullet, but opening up possibilities will help in the long run

Path Tracer is Feature Complete

Another feature reaching the “Production Ready” status is Path Tracer. Originally designed to get a ground-truth view to test lighting scenarios in Lumen, Path Tracer was rapidly adopted by those rendering cinematics using Unreal Engine. However, many features, such as decals, volumetrics, sky atmosphere, etc., were not supported. This was good enough to test your lighting, but it left much to be desired for those looking for an alternative to Redshift or V-Ray plugins for offline rendering. 

With 5.5, Path Tracer is now considered “fully featured” and finally supports atmosphere as well as volumetric clouds. Both of these can really elevate the look of any environment. Another major update is it now has a Spatio-Temporal denoiser, also called “Nonlinearly Weighted First Order Regression” or NFOR. The current denoiser tends to muddy high-detail areas and has no temporal solution to maintain results between frames. It will be interesting to see what quality this new denoiser brings and at what speed. 

Along with Path Tracer, updates to the Movie Render Graph, first introduced as an experimental feature in 5.4, are also available. Much like Blueprints, the Movie Render Graph is a node-based configuration editor, making it a bit easier to set up and control the Movie Render Queue. This also allows for custom variables to be set in the graph that can be called via the command line, which will be great for distributed rendering setups. 

Introducing MegaLights

Just like Nanite and Lumen fundamentally changed how scenes are built and rendered, MegaLights promises to do the same. This new feature, still classified as “experimental,” promises to allow thousands of real-time shadow-casting lights to be on screen simultaneously with minimal performance impact. Like Nanite and Lumen, this feature must be enabled in the project settings; it is not just an update to how Unreal handles lights. 

Beyond allowing for more shadow-casting lights, MegaLights also supports animated area lights. Area lights have always been a favorite of artists because they produce soft shadows and better represent large light emitters such as digital signs, screens, etc. However, they are somewhat computationally expensive. With Megalights, they are both cheaper to render and can also display an animated image and produce realistic lighting based on that image. This will improve lighting artists’ lives and produce more visually exciting scenes. 

MegaLights requires hardware ray tracing support, so NVIDIA RTX 2000 and later, AMD RX 6000 or later, and the most recent Xbox and Playstation consoles. The demo video shows this working on a PlayStation 5. It is worth noting that this was a very controlled demo, often relying on confined areas. Even on the show floor of UnrealFest, only Epic personnel were allowed to control the movements of the character. I look forward to the demo environment being released on FAB to get a deeper review of how it looks and performs on PC hardware.  

Also remember this feature is in the “experimental” status, meaning there are features that are not yet fully supported, quality might not be up to the standard they want, and stability may be an issue. So if you want to use this feature, be ready for unexpected issues, and unsupported features. For a good breakdown of the MegaLights demo, I suggest this video from Digital Foundry. 

Conclusion

Unreal Engine 5.5 will bring significant improvements, as well as a whole host of fixes and tweaks. This article barely scratches the surface of what is coming, but it highlights some of my favorite bits. The fundamental key feature of this update is MegaLights. This new lighting method has a lot of potential to make lighting scenes much more straightforward, with more natural results. A great quote from the presentation was that MegaLights “allows artists to work playfully without limitations.” This will be a huge benefit to every industry that uses Unreal Engine. Be it game development, virtual production, or ArchViz, Metalights will be the most popular new feature added to Unreal Engine since Nanite and Lumen.

Unreal Engine 5.5 is available as a Preview build via the launcher. Note that plugins available through the marketplace will not be supported until the full launch occurs. However, the plugin developers can update and publish on places like GitHub, so check with all your plugins before moving over. We don’t have an official release date, but it should be very soon.