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Usually 3DWorld mag doesn't feature much C4D but the latest issue was unexpectedly packed with it. Feature - Kitbashing - Character Development (page 36) 3D visual artist Florian Renaux delivers a guide to kitbashing compelling CG characters The Pipeline - Get started with the Cinema 4D camera (page 50) This tutorial, designed for users unfamiliar with Cinema 4D, will teach the starting points for camera control, enabling artists to show off their scene to the best of their ability The Pipeline - Model a mech with Cinema 4D (page 68) Learn the stages to building a VFX shot with our new series; in Part One, we focus on developing the CG hero character Artists Q&A - Your CG problems solved (page 73) How do I manage separate x-particles emitters in a single system? - Mike Griggs replies

The release is the first version of UE5 to be targeted officially at users working in markets outside game development, including previs, virtual production, visual effects and architectural visualization. Large World Coordinates: support for double-precision data for building very large virtual worlds New features in Preview 1 include the Large World Coordinates (LWC) system, intended for generating very large virtual worlds within Unreal Engine “without the need for rebasing or other tricks”. According to Epic’s blog post, the change involves moving to double-precision values for co-ordinates, plus “performance and memory optimization to help ensure that these changes have very little overhead”. Mass AI: new crowd AI system for large open worlds Other major new features include Mass AI, a new AI-based crowd animation system for open worlds capable of simulating “thousands” of agents. Crowd agents can interact with props and environment objects via a new Smart Objects system which packages the information needed for the interactions in the objects themselves. Agents can also avoid other agents and entities via Mass Avoidance, a new force-based avoidance system based on MassEntity, Mass AI’s framework “for data-oriented calculations”. Animation: new Blueprint templates, IK rig, retargeting, and pose warping Further updates to the character animation tools include Animation Blueprint Templates, for creating animation graphs that can be reused independently of specific skeletons or character assets. Other key changes include a new IK Rig and IK Retargeter, for pose editing skeletal meshes, and automatically transferring animations between characters with different bodily proportions. In addition, animators get new Distance Matching and Pose Warping systems intended to match the play rate of an animation and pose of a character to better match the motion of that character in-game. Pose Warping includes dedicated tools for common use cases, including foot placement and climbing stairs. Lighting and rendering: updates to Lumen and the Path Tracer render engine In the lighting and rendering toolsets, Lumen gets full hardware ray tracing support, support for landscapes, and final gather and glossy reflections on translucent materials. Path Tracer, Unreal Engine’s hardware-accelerated ray tracing engine, gets support for hair primitives, and Unreal Engine’s eye shader model. Niagara: experimental support for GPU ray tracing Niagara, Unreal Engine’s particle system, gets experimental support for using GPU ray tracing to calculate particle collisions, and updates to the Cascade Converter for automatically converting legacy assets. Virtual production: updates to nDisplay, and new OpenCV and Consolve Variables Editor plugins Users working in virtual production get updates to nDisplay, Epic Games’ system for displaying output from Unreal Engine on matrixes of multiple displays and very large displays like LED walls and dome projections. Users can now apply transform operations like rotation and scale to viewports directly in the Output Mapping panel of the nDisplay Config Editor; and can choose to overlay stats on a per-viewport basis. Other changes include overscan support for the inner frustum, and the option to visualise its border. In addition, open-source real-time computer vision library OpenCV is now available in Unreal Engine via a standalone plugin, rather than users having to integrate it manually. The plugin adds new Blueprint nodes for ArUco marker tracking and chessboard tracking. There is also a new Console Variables Editor plugin, intended to provide a central location to view and modify all of the console variables and commands set in a project. System requirements and availability Unreal Engine 5 Preview 1 is available now. The production release will be available “targeting 2022”. The current stable release, Unreal Engine 4.27, is available for 64-bit Windows, macOS and Linux. Use of the editor is free, as is rendering non-interactive content. For games developed with the engine, Epic takes 5% of the gross royalties after the first $1 million generated by a title. Anyone wanting to try the new functionality directly can download the project files for Valley of the Ancient, Epic Games’ new demo scene, which runs in real time on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. It makes use of several of the new toolsets covered in this story, including Nanite, Lumen, the new animation features, improved Chaos fracture workflows, and modular gameplay and level organisation.

What you are missing is that HappyPolygon has been 100% replaced by Unreal's MetaHuman Creator module with this official release. The human, formerly known as "HappyPolygon", is now a high-resolution AI avatar rendered in real time. The upside is that the real HappyPolygon accepted a 10-year deal from Epic to be replaced and is now residing in a beach side bungalow in Hawaii. The downside is that bungalow has no wifi, wireless or internet access so as to protect switch from human to AI across all social media platforms. Gotta go, Kim Libreri is calling me.😀 Dave