Unreal Engine 4.26 released

In Unreal Engine 4.26, you can author and render realistic or stylized skies, clouds, and other atmospheric effects with full artistic freedom, thanks to a new Volumetric Cloud component that is able to interact with Sky Atmosphere, Sky Light, and up to two directional lights. The atmosphere can receive volumetric shadows from meshes and clouds; lighting and shadowing updates in real time to reflect time-of-day changes. In addition, there’s a new Environment Lighting Mixer window that enables all components affecting atmosphere lighting to be authored in one place.

This release also sees the introduction of a new Water system, enabling you to define oceans, lakes, rivers, and islands using splines. You can adjust and visualize the depth, width, and velocity of rivers along their lengths, and the wavelength, amplitude, direction, and steepness of waves on oceans and lakes. The system includes a new Water Mesh Actor that uses a quad tree grid to render detailed surfaces up close, smoothly transitioning to simplified ones at distance. Built-in fluid simulation enables characters, vehicles, and weapons to interact with the water; the fluid also responds to Terrain, such as reflecting ripples off the shore, and reacting to river flow maps. 

Introduced in Unreal Engine 4.25, the Movie Render Queue enables you to create high-quality frames with accumulated anti-aliasing and motion blur for film and television, cinematics, and marketing, and extremely high-resolution images for print.
In this release, it’s now possible to output render passes, including matte IDs, camera motion vectors, Z-depth, ambient occlusion, reflections, and more from the Movie Render Queue, enabling you to refine your images in a downstream compositing or photo editing application. 

In Unreal Engine 4.26, Hair and Fur is production-ready, featuring a new Asset Groom Editor for setting up properties, and compatibility with features such as DOF and Fog. LOD generation is built in

It’s now possible to create animations in Sequencer by blending animation clips such as motion-captured data; the workflow will be familiar to animators who’ve worked in other nonlinear animation editors.

Download Unreal Engine 4.26