Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 5.7 with new features aimed at building and rendering large-scale, high-fidelity, and real-time worlds.
For any studio working on digital twins, simulations, or blockbuster games, the maths has always been difficult. Creating expansive and detailed environments is a manual, costly slog, and rendering that complexity in real-time brings even the best hardware to its knees. Unreal Engine 5.7 is Epic’s attempt to finally fix these core production hurdles with better automation and smarter rendering.
The impact of procedural generation
The biggest news for production pipelines is that the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework is now officially production-ready. This system is Epic Games’ direct answer to the enormous cost of populating massive worlds. Instead of artists placing every tree and rock by hand, PCG lets teams quickly populate environments, introduce natural variety, and deliver more engaging game experiences in less time.
A new PCG Editor Mode gives artists a library of customisable tools controlled simply by drawing splines or painting points. With real-time parameter control and the option to build new tools without writing a single line of code, the work shifts away from engineering and back to design. Artists can iterate on huge worlds on their own. The framework is also much faster on the GPU thanks to new optimisations.
Balancing fidelity and performance with Unreal Engine 5.7
Of course, creating all that content is useless if you can’t render it. Unreal Engine 5.7 introduces Nanite Foliage, an experimental new geometry rendering system built for performance and scalability. The goal is to let teams create and animate dense, high-detail foliage-heavy environments that efficiently render on current-gen hardware.
It works using Nanite Voxels, which draw millions of tiny, overlapping elements at stable frame rates. It does this without cross fades, pops, or the need to author LODs. Getting rid of manual LOD (Level of Detail) creation is a massive time-saver for any art team.
The Substrate material framework also moves to production-ready status. This is a modular system for building complex and layered materials, such as realistic multi-layered car paint or blood and sweat on skin, with true high-quality physical accuracy. For businesses with cross-platform needs, Substrate is built to scale all the way down to mobile, which should ensure consistent visuals across devices.
Epic Games is tackling production headaches
Unreal Engine 5.7 also tackles some of the day-to-day headaches that slow down production.
The Animation Mode has been refactored to streamline workflows, but the real time-saver might be the new Selection Sets feature. It lets animators save and re-apply complex rig selections with one click to cut out a mind-numbing and repetitive task. For debugging, a new Dependency View provides a clear node-based graph to help technical artists debug or optimise complex control setups without pulling their hair out.
Automation gets a boost, too. Teams can now automate and batch process nearly all MetaHuman character assets using Python or Blueprints. This means the heavy lifting can be offloaded to an offline compute farm, which is essential for large-scale production.
And to help teams get up to speed, Epic Games has baked a new AI Assistant right into the editor. It lets developers ask questions or generate C++ code without having to Alt-Tab to a browser.
Unreal Engine 5.7 is built to change the economics of large-world creation and developers should make some appropriate considerations:
- Re-evaluate content budgets: With a Production-Ready PCG framework, the budget for manual environment art can shrink. That money should be reallocated to higher-value, bespoke assets that procedural tools can’t build.
- Audit your technical pipelines: Tools like MetaHuman batching and the Live Link Broadcast Component are only useful if a studio’s pipeline is mature enough to handle them. Messy pipelines won’t see the benefit.
- Assess technology risk: Experimental features like Nanite Foliage look great, but stability is paramount for long-term projects. Teams need a clear plan to test these features in R&D before betting a production milestone on them.
- Use the new onboarding tools: The in-editor AI Assistant is there to cut down the time it takes for new developers to become productive. Use it.
With the release of Unreal Engine 5.7, Epic Games is handing studios the tools to build bigger. The real test will be which teams are mature enough, in both pipeline and process, to actually use them.
(Image credit: Epic Games)
See also: Visual Studio 2026 and .NET 10: AI-native tools, quantum security
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