Unreal Engine 4.15 is here

The most changes in Unreal Engine 4.15 focus on overall stability, enhancements to developer workflows, and improvements to runtime performance. Although there are some changes that should affect how your arch-viz scenes will look like.

New: Physically Based Default Post-Processing Settings

The default tonemapper now provides a more film-like color and tone response.

The filmic tonemapper matching the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) is now on by default. This tonemapper also enables the engine to target multiple display types including HDR displays. Bloom settings have been updated to provide a more physically correct result by default.

The filmic tonemapper will look different than the tonemapper in previous versions of the engine. You can switch the tonemapper back by adding r.TonemapperFilm=0 to the SystemSettings section of your project's DefaultEngine.ini. The old tonemapper will be removed in a future versions of the engine.

New: Improved Texture Streaming

• The Texture Streaming system has been optimized to reduce CPU usage, memory usage, and load times while eliminating low resolution artifacts and automatically handling limitations of varying memory budgets of different platforms.
• Texture Memory Usage Improvements - The texture streaming system now handles per component visibility and computes (smaller) per material bounds for static geometry resulting in as much as a 40% reduction in texture memory usage.
• Texture Loading Time Improvements - Texture load times are 2 to 3 times faster due to tracking visible mips, enabling the streamer to focus on visible textures followed by prefetch data and forced load data.
• CPU Time Reduction
  • Game thread update time is reduced by 50% by moving dynamic component processing and other tasks to the async texture streaming task, enabling them to occur in parallel with other game thread tasks.
  • Texture processing stalls for streaming levels are reduced up to 98%s due to amortized processing.
• Low Resolution Artifacts Reduction - Mesh UV densities are now computed per material instead of per mesh and take into account LODs. Texture streaming is also now supported on a wider variety of Component types, including Particle Systems and Instanced Static Meshes.
• Automatic Memory Budgeting - The Texture Streaming system now automatically adjust its behavior to deal with varying memory budgets without making manual tweaks. The system selects which textures need to be reduced using a variety of heuristics to maintain visual quality.

New: UI Blur Rects

You can now blur other UI and the 3D scene in UMG using the new Background Blur widget. Background Blur widgets also have a content slot which can be used to add widgets that will not be blurred. Usable for making scene description and user interface elements.

New: Material Editor Reroute Nodes

Reroute nodes are now available in the Material Editor to enable better organization of your Material graphs! They function identically between Blueprints and the Material Editor and are purely visual so they should have no impact on the final instruction count of your Materials.

To add Reroute nodes in the Material Editor: Under Utility in the Material Palette, Drag Add Reroute Node to the graph. Double-click on a connection spline to insert a new Reroute node inline.

New: Sequencer Animations in Blueprints (Experimental)

The new Actor Sequence plugin - which adds an Actor Sequence Component - makes it possible to embed Sequences into Actor Blueprints! This enables reuse of Sequences by binding the animations to the Blueprint instance and triggering them using the Event Graph. You can also add an Actor Sequence Component to any Actor in the world to add animations to a single instance of an Actor.

New: Content Hot-Reloading (Experimental)

We have significantly improved support for reloading packages from disk on the fly with the new Content Hot-Reloading feature.

With this feature, all of the in-editor source control operations are more stable when dealing with loaded assets. You also gain a "Reload" option under "Asset Actions" that forcibly reloads the asset from disk, which is extremely useful if you've made unsaved changes to an asset and want to revert it back to the on-disk version.

To enable this feature, go to your "Editor Preferences", and enable "Content Hot-Reloading" under the "Experimental" section.

Other improvements

Compile times for programmers are drastically reduced - by as much as 50%.

New: Color Grading Controls: added all new controls for the Color Grading properties in Post Process settings that provide a more intuitive experience and more precise control.

More information and download on www.unrealengine.com