A new water system and the creation of realistic hair: what appeared in Unreal Engine 4.26

Epic Games has introduced an update for the Unreal Engine. A number of significant changes have been added to the engine version 4.26, including a new system of water and clouds, as well as an editor for creating realistic hair and wool.

Epic Games announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.26 yesterday in its official blog. The new version of the engine is already available for download on the company’s website.

Main innovations

• Creating and rendering realistic hair, fur and feathers. The new Asset Groom editor will allow you to customize properties and compatibility with other functions, such as depth of field and fog.
• In Sequencer, you can now create animations by connecting various clips (including those obtained using motion capture technology).
• Advanced features of old tools and support for volumetric clouds to create realistic sky and atmospheric effects.
• A new water system that allows you to define oceans, lakes, rivers and islands using splines. The engine also has a built-in fluid simulation for the interaction of characters and other objects with the water surface.
• Support for NVLink technology, which allows you to quickly exchange data between two GPUs. In this case, one GPU can render the whole scene, and the other can process individual elements.

A full list of new features, some of which are also specially tailored for working on films, can be found here.

Also on the topic:

• Epic Games acquired Hyprsense, developers of real-time facial animation capture technology
• The game Everywhere from the former president of Rockstar North changed the engine to Unreal Engine
• Epic Games has published more than 3,000 assets from What Remains of Edith Finch for free