Unreal Engine 5.7 landed in late 2025 and it’s packed with upgrades that matter to improve the development and the realism to open-world projects and MetaHuman. Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights we’re most excited about.

Nanite Foliage & Skinning (Experimental)

Nanite now supports dense, animated vegetation through three new building blocks — Nanite Assemblies for efficient instance management, Nanite Skinning for dynamic motion, and Nanite Voxels for maintaining detail at distance. For open-world projects this is a game-changer: lifelike forests and fields that actually stay within performance budgets on current-gen hardware (PS5).

PCG Framework — Production-Ready

The Procedural Content Generation framework has is production-ready. Key additions include a dedicated PCG Editor Mode, GPU Fast Geo Interop for high-density static mesh generation, and a new Procedural Vegetation Editor that outputs directly to Nanite. This is the biggest workflow win in the release.

Substrate Materials — Now the Default

Substrate replaces the legacy material system as the default. It ships with two rendering paths — Adaptive GBuffer for advanced features and Blendable GBuffer for broad compatibility (backwards compatibility too) — giving artists a modular, physically-grounded foundation for material authoring. You can make all materials more (Un)real than before. UE allows great customization and stacking of layers of materials, which helps reaching new hights.

In-Editor AI Assistant (Experimental)

An AI companion baked directly into the editor. It can generate C++ code, provide step-by-step guidance on engine features, and surface documentation without leaving your workspace. Early days, but a promising productivity boost. Everything around us is using LLMs to boost the productivity and the quality of the products.

MegaLights Improvements (Beta)

MegaLights now supports directional lights, Niagara particle lights, translucency, and hair strands — with better noise reduction and performance across the board.

Animation Workflow Overhaul

The animation tooling got a serious refresh: a refactored Animation Mode UI, new Selection Sets for multi-control selection, blend-shape sculpting tools, and Control Rig World Collisions that let physics simulations interact with level geometry.

Full Body IK also got a ~20% performance improvement.

Other Notable Additions

• Incremental Cooking (Beta) — only re-cooks changed assets, cutting iteration time dramatically when working with bigger projects
• Motion Design is now production-ready with Text3D rich text and Ease Curve tools in Sequencer
• MetaHuman gains Linux/macOS support and Python/Blueprint batch automation. This is huge win for all LLM integration in the future.
• Audio Insights (Beta) — live audio profiling with scrollable event history
• Android 15 support with 16KB page compatibility, which is required by Google already. So, don’t wait but update your apps ASAP.

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UE 5.7 is a GREAT release — many experimental features are now production-ready, and the new Nanite Foliage system opens doors for immersive open-world experiences.

At Lunar Lizard we immediately started using this new version and we are embracing the new features introduced recently.

If you are curios what we are “cooking” feel free to reach us here.