Unreal Engine 5 Documentation
Welcome to the official Unreal Engine 5 documentation. Find guides, API references, tutorials, and samples to help you build stunning real-time 3D experiences.
What is Unreal Engine 5?
Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) is the latest generation of Epic Games' industry-leading real-time 3D creation tool. Released in April 2022, UE5 introduces groundbreaking rendering technologies that fundamentally change how games, films, and interactive experiences are built.
UE5 supports all major platforms — PC, console (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S), mobile, VR/AR — and comes with a full suite of integrated tools for art, animation, audio, and gameplay programming.
This documentation covers Unreal Engine 5.4. Features may differ in earlier or later versions. Check the release notes for version-specific changes.
Key Technologies
UE5 introduces several landmark systems that deliver next-generation visual fidelity:
Nanite
Virtualized micropolygon geometry system. Render film-quality assets with billions of polygons in real time — no manual LOD authoring required.
Lumen
Fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system. Light propagates through the scene in real time, reacting to geometry, sky, and emissive surfaces.
World Partition
Automatic streaming system for large open worlds. Divide any map into a grid of cells that load and unload dynamically based on proximity and relevance.
MetaSounds
High-performance audio rendering system. Build procedural audio graphs with full signal-processing control — the "Material Editor" for sound.
Chaos Physics
UE5's built-in physics engine supports rigid bodies, soft bodies, cloth simulation, destruction, and ragdoll dynamics at scale.
PCG Framework
Procedural Content Generation graph-based tool for creating large-scale environments automatically — scatter foliage, roads, buildings with rules.
Motion Warping
Runtime animation adjustment system that aligns root motion animations to target positions and rotations without custom code or re-animation.
Blueprints Visual Scripting
Node-based visual programming system. Create gameplay logic, UI, and tools without writing a single line of C++ code.
Nanite Virtualized Geometry
Nanite is a virtualized geometry system that enables rendering of extremely high-detail meshes with cinematic polygon counts. It works by automatically calculating the correct level of detail for any mesh at any distance, only streaming and processing the triangles that are actually visible.
Traditional game development required artists to manually create multiple LOD levels for every asset. With Nanite, you can import source assets directly from digital content creation (DCC) tools like ZBrush, Houdini, or RealityCapture without any LOD workflow.
Nanite currently does not support skeletal meshes, deforming geometry, or translucent materials. Use it for static, opaque environment art.
Lumen Global Illumination
Lumen is UE5's fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system. Unlike baked lightmaps, Lumen responds in real time to changes in geometry, lighting, and the sky. Interior spaces darken appropriately, emissive surfaces cast colored light, and reflections accurately portray the surrounding environment.
Lumen uses a combination of Software Ray Tracing (SRT) for broad GI and Hardware Ray Tracing (HRT) for high-accuracy reflections on supported GPUs. SRT runs on all modern hardware using a hierarchical mesh distance field representation.
Start Learning
New to Unreal Engine 5? Follow this recommended learning path:
- Install UE5 via the Epic Games Launcher.
- Read Getting Started to create your first project and learn the editor UI.
- Study Actors & Components — the fundamental building blocks of every UE5 project.
- Learn Blueprints to add gameplay logic visually.
- Explore the rendering pipeline via Materials and Lighting.
- Finally, Package your project for your target platform.
Unreal Engine 5 is free to download and use. A 5% royalty applies when your product launches commercially and earns more than $1 million USD in revenue.