Hi everyone 👋
Unreal Engine 5.6’s production is in full swing! In this letter I will showcase 2 big changes for us Unreal users.
Also in case you do not know I uploaded a new video teaching you how to create the textures and materials for any object for Unreal using Substance Painter! You can watch it here.
The most important window in Unreal is the viewport because it gives us a look into the 3D worlds we are creating. It is the editor window we see and interact with the most which is why UE5.6 is bringing a huge change with a new viewport toolbar. This is the first change to the viewport UI’s since 2013 when the Beta for UE4.0 released.
Dylan Browne showcases the change in this tweet. Gone are the floating transparent bubbles and now we have a more standard opaque bar that is across the screen. For the most part it is exactly the same besides buttons moving around, but now we have additional snapping options when moving meshes, like automatically snapping objects to a surface.
Honestly I will miss the floating bubbles but it makes sense to make Unreal look and feel like other 3D programs.
In this live stream by Epic Games they showed off several brand new templates that are coming in UE5.6. If you are like me and use templates heavily when starting a new project then this will change the way we create projects. Instead of having individual templates, Epic is introducing a new option when creating a project called template variants. Each template can have an additional variant of it that adds new specific features. For example you could just have a first person template with just the player character, or a variant of that which includes the shooting mechanics.
The templates are also getting updated with more complex features. It is a good learning example for beginners when trying to see the Epic way of programming specific features.
Until then next time!
Zach Hunter
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