Unreal Engine 5.7 is now rolling out to developers, and it is very clearly a lighting- and world-building focused update. Epic is leaning hard into the idea that modern games need huge, dense environments lit by complex, dynamic lights, while also trying to calm long-running fears about performance and PC stutter. 
The headline additions are MegaLights moving into Beta, experimental Nanite Foliage powered by Nanite Voxels, a production-ready Procedural Content Generation framework, and a smart new AI Assistant that lives directly in the Editor. Together, these features push Unreal Engine further toward film-like visuals and more automated workflows.
MegaLights is the star of the lighting story in Unreal Engine 5.7. Previously marked as Experimental, it is now promoted to Beta, signaling that Epic thinks it is ready for serious production testing. MegaLights lets developers place far more dynamic, shadow-casting lights in a scene than traditional methods would allow, without instantly blowing up performance budgets. That means area lights, neon strips, hanging lanterns, or dense city streets can all cast soft, believable shadows that react in real time as the player moves. Support now extends across directional lights, translucency, Niagara particle shadow casting, and more accurate shading and shadowing on hair, giving characters a far more grounded, cinematic look in close-ups.
Epic also claims that the MegaLights workflow is more scalable and intuitive. Instead of wrestling with a fragile mix of dynamic and baked lights, developers can keep more of the scene fully dynamic and rely on improved noise reduction and better default settings to get clean results more quickly. Out of the box, UE 5.7 should need less manual light tweaking to avoid grain, flicker, or shimmering shadows. That said, many PC players have not forgotten the shader compilation stutter and uneven frame pacing that have plagued some Unreal Engine 4 and 5 releases. While Epic talks about better performance and less need for hand optimization, a portion of the community will be watching closely to see whether these new lighting tricks actually arrive without adding new hitching on real-world hardware.
On the geometry side, Unreal Engine 5.7 finally tackles one of the biggest requests since Nanite was introduced: foliage. Nanite revolutionized how high-detail meshes are rendered, but for a long time it could not be used for trees, bushes, or ground clutter, forcing developers back to traditional billboards and hand-authored LOD chains. The new Nanite Foliage system, currently marked Experimental, changes that by introducing a geometry rendering approach powered by Nanite Voxels. Millions of tiny, overlapping elements such as tree canopies, pine needles, leaves, and grass are automatically aggregated into a solid-looking mass from a distance, then smoothly reveal more detail as the camera gets closer.
Crucially, this voxel-driven approach is built to keep frame rates stable. Rather than relying on aggressive cross-fades or hard LOD pops, Nanite Foliage manages detail continuously, so forests do not shimmer or snap as the player moves through them. Developers do not need to author multiple LOD versions of every tree or shrub, which saves a huge amount of art time and avoids the very visible transitions that have long betrayed game environments. Nanite Assemblies help compress and organize this foliage data to reduce storage, memory, and rendering costs, while Nanite Skinning is used to drive dynamic behavior such as wind animation, subtle branch movement, or interaction when a character pushes through dense bushes.
The implications are big for open-world titles, survival games, and anything that leans on dense natural scenes. Thick forests, overgrown ruins, or littered battlefields can now be lit by large numbers of dynamic lights and populated with more foliage than would have been realistic in older pipelines. For players, that should mean fewer obviously tiled textures and fewer obviously repeated plants. For developers, it means spending less time hacking together LODs and billboards, and more time on composition, art direction, and gameplay moments that actually make use of the world’s richness.
Beyond foliage, Unreal Engine 5.7 also promotes the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework to a production-ready status. PCG is Epic’s answer to the growing need to fill huge maps with meaningful content without placing every rock or crate by hand. In this release, the framework gets better GPU performance and a new PCG Editor Mode that makes it easier to visualize and customize procedural rules. Designers can define systems that automatically scatter foliage, props, points of interest, or even entire encounter templates across a landscape, then override or sculpt the results directly inside the Editor. The idea is to mix algorithmic generation with human judgment, so large worlds stay coherent instead of feeling randomly generated for the sake of scale.
On the materials front, Unreal Engine 5.7 includes a production-ready version of Substrate. This system is designed for building complex, layered, physically accurate materials that behave correctly under all those new dynamic lights. Instead of stacking hacks, artists can define how metal, dust, mud, paint, and clear-coat layers interact within a single, consistent shading model. That becomes especially important when combined with Nanite Foliage and MegaLights, because the more detail and lighting complexity you have, the more obvious cheap material tricks become. Substrate aims to keep surfaces believable, whether they are wet cobblestones under neon signs or cloth armor lit by a flickering torch.
Epic has also rolled more quietly visible changes into other parts of the engine, including improvements to Metahumans and the animation toolset. Higher-quality hair shading and shadowing now ties into the broader lighting upgrades, which helps digital characters sit more naturally in a scene. Animation authoring continues to trend toward more non-destructive, node-based workflows, making it easier to iterate on movement without breaking existing content. These might not be as flashy as Nanite Foliage, but they matter for teams who are trying to ship full games rather than just tech demos.
Finally, Unreal Engine 5.7 continues Epic’s push into AI-assisted development inside the Editor itself. The new AI Assistant appears in a slide-out panel, ready to answer questions, generate C++ code snippets, or provide step-by-step guidance without forcing the user into a browser or external documentation. For newcomers, this can accelerate the learning curve; for experienced teams, it can reduce context switching by turning common “how do I do X in Unreal” searches into in-Editor conversations. As always, new features raise questions: will they genuinely simplify shipping well-optimized PC games, or just add more toys for developers to juggle? For now, Unreal Engine 5.7 clearly pushes the engine forward on lighting, foliage, tools, and AI-powered workflows, even as players keep asking for one more elusive upgrade: flawless, stutter-free performance on their own machines.