Unreal Engine 4.18 is out with Native ARCore and ARKit support

Oct. 31, 2017, 5:26 p.m. By: Pranjal Kumar

Unreal Engine 4.18

One of the most popular video game development suite, Unreal Engine 4, has been released. The latest update comes with more than 100 updates and lots of improvement in the performance. The new edition of Unreal Engine 4 sees a huge step forward for augmented reality development with the native support for Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARKit. Unreal Engine 4.18 includes production-ready support for Apple ARKit in iOS11.

Jeff Wilson (Documentation Lead at Epic Games) said that the new version has more streamlined workflow because of existing framework components. Not only this, it also has an added robust handling of the passthrough camera and increased fidelity by improving performance and prediction. Because of so many changes in the new version, ARKit projects created using 4.17 will require updating to work in 4.18.

There are several other updates like the support for Desktop-class Forward Renderer used in the Wingnut AR demo at WWDC 2017. This technology will be supported on iOS devices with an A9 or later processor running iOS 10.3 or newer. The new rendering technology will bring better reflection, shading, lighting to the iOS devices. The demand for these features has increased a lot in recent times owing to the significant decrease in the price of AR and VR devices. But all is not good for developers as the new update lack some features like GPU morph-targets, Atmospheric Fog, GPU Skin cache and Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing.

Just like the ARKit, the new version also comes with the native support for ARCore. The new addition takes the advantage of common AR functionality in the engine and features improved handling of the passthrough camera.

Unreal Engine 4.18 also contains a default camera implementation for both raw views which includes late-update automatically handled by the engine and Camera Components. Also, latest SDK’s like macOS (masOS 10.13 High Sierra), Oculus VR (Oculus Runtime 1.17) and SteamVR (SteamVR 1.39) have been added in fully functional states. The High Sierra update will allow developers to adapt their VR titles for Mac format PC.

Users can get their hands on the updated version by downloading it from Unreal Engine Client.

4.18 Preview | Feature Highlight | Unreal Engine Livestream: