With Unreal Engine 5.4, Epic Games has introduced a new business and subscription model for Unreal. This does not affect Pixotope’s products: all licensing of Unreal is handled by Pixotope on behalf of our customers.
We're excited to announce our newest iteration of Pixotope, featuring Unreal Engine 5.4.1 and bringing multiple improvements to your workflow!
Unreal Engine 5.4
We have now updated to Unreal's version 5.4.1 which brings very relevant improvements to virtual production. Here are some highlights:
- Designing motion and production graphics can now be done directly in Unreal
- Unreal Engine 5.4 introduces a new Motion Design mode, equipped with specialized tools for authoring complex 2D motion graphics.
- Developed in conjunction with production testing and feedback from leading broadcasters and vendors, this dedicated mode is engineered to provide an elevated user experience and sustained productivity for motion designers. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools, including 3D cloners, effectors, modifiers, animators, and more.
For Animators, there is a large list of new and exciting features
- Motion Matching, is an expandable next-gen framework for animation features. Instead of using complex logic to select and transition animation clips at runtime, it relies on searching a relatively large database of captured animation using the current motion information of the character in game as the key.
- Character rigging, with Modular Control Rig, Automatic Retargeting, Skeletal Editor, Deformer Graph
- For animation authoring, new Gizmos, reorganized Anim Details, improvements to the Constraints system; and a new Layered Control Rigs
- And a lot of nice improvements to the Sequencer
- Nanite now supports dynamic tessellation, enabling fine details such as cracks and bumps to be added at render time.
- Nanite also supports spline mesh workflows—great for creating roads on landscapes, for example and AnimToTexture now works with Nanite geometry.
- You can expect significant rendering performance improvements in Unreal 5.4, from refactoring the systems to enable a greater degree of parallelization, as well as adding GPU instance culling to hardware ray tracing.
- Heterogeneous Volume Rendering provides for integrated rendering of volumetric phenomena such as fire, smoke, and fluids driven by Niagara Fluids or Open VDB files. In 5.4, Epic focus was to provide shadow-casting support for Heterogeneous Volumes and integration with existing rendering passes, such as translucent objects.
And much more
Unreal Engine 5.4 - Roadmap
Unreal Engine 5.4 - Release notes
Color pipeline
Setting up a color pipeline is no easy task. Spaces, profiles, linear, log, gamut, HDR…, it is easy to get lost in terminology and theory. With this update we have simplified the setup, but at the same time handle the complexity under the hood for you.
We have also included a checklist and did a complete overhaul of our color documentation demystifying the key concepts, covering the whole production pipeline.
Calibrating delays
Calibrating the delays between video and tracking can be cumbersome. For your convenience, we have added the ability to do automatic delay detection. You then only have to move the camera and we figure out the delay.
Bringing the AR and XR machines in sync could also be challenging. For this, we have introduced a new XR syncing display mode helping you get them to sync in no time.
Video keyer
When producing for hybrid studios where there are transitions between VS (green screen) and AR (physical set), it is essential that these transitions are smooth. The new Chroma Screen actor lets you define in which area the keyer will be active, ensuring a seamless transition.
Together with the improvements to the color pipeline the keyer can now be used regardless of the color space you are in or transitioning to.
Adjustments 2.0
Making changes while you are running Live is very important. However, the way adjustments originally worked was not transparent and could lead to inconsistencies between render engines. So we reinvented it. We now store Live changes centrally. This way any render engine will always have the latest changes. Even the ones joining late.
If your workflow requires one or more render engines to deviate and have different settings, we introduce the concept of Group overrides. Group overrides allow you to override a setting running on a specific render engine or a group of engines.
XR/video wall improvements
Even though XR gives you the ability to render everything perfectly in 3D, there are cases where a simple 2D media playback is needed in addition. We have now added an option allowing you to map media inputs directly onto specified areas on the LED wall.
When creating the Digital Twin from a highly detailed geometry which was imported, you can now manually merge XR walls to reduce their count and making the Manual Twin easier to handle.
For cases where the curvature of the LED wall is not regular, you can now use the Spline Twin tool to generate a Manual Twin based on a spline, also giving you granular control of its details.
And XR color matching now allows limiting the LED color profile to a specific mapping.
Asset Hub
There are times where you need to be picky. With this release you can be as selective as you want. Not happy with the changes you made, just discard them. Only want to pull a single file? Go for it.
And then there are times where you want to draw on abundant resources, not being limited to the size of the installation drive. Now you have the ability to move the Synced storage folder to a different location giving you the flexibility and space you need.
Tracking
With the Tracking Data SDI Embedder for Pixotope Tracking, you can embed tracking data directly into an SDI audio channel together with the video feed. This allows you to run a single SDI cable without the need for a separate network infrastructure for tracking.
And inside Pixotope Graphics the de-embedding is now supported natively!
New Pixotope Products
Pixotope Broadcast Graphics
The Unreal Engine's Motion Design Mode is an environment meticulously crafted to empower motion graphics designers. Equipped with specialized tools for the 2D canvas and an enhanced world outliner it provides a comprehensive suite including 3D shapes, cloners, effectors, modifiers, animators, and features for non-linear animations. This dedicated mode is engineered to elevate the broadcast graphics design experience, offering a robust and user-friendly platform to bring your creative visions to life.
Together with Erizos, our partner, we offer a full broadcast graphics solution based on Erizos Studio. With its full support for Pixotope AR, VS, XR as well as Unreal Motion Design, it allows broadcasters to control any amount of engines and multiple aspects of their show simultaneously. It integrates with various Newsroom control systems using the MOS protocol and offers support for automation driven playouts. You can use any external data, and of course it comes with the ease of use and reliability which you are used to with any of our products.
Read more about our Broadcast Graphics solution.
Data mapper
Want to use live data from external sources? With our new Data mapper, you can easily set up, and link external sources to any destination inside Pixotope. Whether you are dealing with RSS feeds, public APIs or Google sheets. We handle them all.
Automatic server failover
"You shall not fail." We understand the pressure you are in and want to bring you peace of mind. Even though our server infrastructure is built for reliability there are always cases of unforeseen events. For this we are introducing the option to run an additional server failover which seamlessly takes over in case the main one does not respond anymore.
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