BREAKING NEWS: Unreal Avalanche is now Motion Design in 5.4!

Another new feature is the Motion Design Viewport which is a huge game-changer for motion artists. It includes:

1. 2D Grid and Rulers: These visual aids are perfect guides for precise content placement.

2. Snapping: Elements effortlessly lock into place making everything quicker and more precise.

3. Pan and Zoom: Enhance your view and focus on specific details with the new pan and zoom.

4. Canvas Borders Beyond Camera View: Extend your canvas beyond the camera view. This lets you to visualize the entirety of your design.

5. Drag and Drop Workflow for 2D Shapes: Simplify your design process with a user-friendly drag-and-drop workflow for 2D shapes.

6. Transform Panel for Quick Access: Efficiently manage and adjust elements with the transform panel.

7. Viewport Background Images or Solid Colors: Customize your design environment with background images or solid colors in the viewport.

8. RGBA – Preview Modes: Preview your design with precision using RGBA modes.

You have tons of creative power unlocked with the new and  intuitive Cloner and Effector system. Cloners are built on top of Unreal Engines’ powerful Niagara particle system. You can quickly experiment with infinite variations and let your designs come to life. The cloner includes these options: grid, sphere uniform, sphere random, circle, line, mesh, spline and honeycomb.

The cloner also comes with a bunch of new Effectors Features. With this you can procedurally animate clones with a radius and falloff system, Animate position, scale, rotation, use custom falloffs and easing types. You can also use forces like orientation, vortex, curl noise and gravity.

In motion design, procedural animation is imperative, and this update introduces procedural forces like Vortex, Orientation, Noise, and Gravity in the unreal effector system. Now, manipulating numerous clones  becomes a painless process and you can experiment with infinite creative possibilities.

The Material Designer is a new and easy to use layer stack, so you can quickly build complex and unique materials. You will feel right at home with familiar blend modes, opacity controls, and masking features. This material designer gives you the ability to quickly build super intricate materials. Features include dockable UI panels, layer system for stacking textures, blend modes, clamping, mirroring, toggling options with no recompiling, creating dynamic materials, the ability to use keyframes and the ability to pan, scale and rotate textures with a simple UI.

New layer effects open up possibilities for blur, color correction, and distortion effects. You can build endless shader effects within the Unreal Engine. New filters and FX include Blur/Dilate/Erode, Color Hue/Sat/Luminance, Levels, Distortion, Pixelate and Sharpen.

If you need to comply with a grid-based system, you need awesome alignment tools. These tools let you have precision and consistency in design layouts.

A versatile set of new tools for creating a wide range of shapes. These are interactive and dynamic tools that enable real-time adjustments directly within the viewport.

3D Shape:

• Sphere – Options for Start Latitude, End Longitude, Start Latitude, Latitude Degree, Sides

• Cylinder – Sides, Top Radius, Angle Degree, Start Degree

• Cube – Bevel, Bevel Count, 

• Cone – Sides, Top Radius, Angle Degree, Start Degree

• Torus – Slice, Sides, Inner Size, Angle Degree, Start Degree

• Cog / Gear – Slice, Sides, Inner Size, Angle Degree, Start Degree

Each shape can have Bevels, Caps, and have the ability to apply materials to the bevel edges

2D: Shapes:

• Rectangle – Left Slant, Right Slant, Global Bevel Size, Global Bevel Smoothness, TL, TR, BL, BR

• Polygon – Points, Inner Size Amount, Bevel, Bevel Smoothness

• Line, Circle, Star, Arrow and Chevron

Motion designers want to procedurally modify geometry. You can now do this easily with procedural modifiers such as Booleans. Users can easily enable or disable these modifiers and rearrange their order. Geometry Modifiers are built on top of the Unreal Engine Geometry Scripting Functions meaning the system can be further expanded in the future.

Geometry Modifiers include:

1. Extrudes – Ability to extrude a piece of geometry in depth. The designer needs the ability to scale the UVs across the front caps, back caps, rounding, and sides.

2. Bevels – The ability to add a bevel to any piece of dynamic geometry.

3. Booleans – Subtract, Add and combine based on the channel.

4. Outline / Stroke – The ability to add an outline or a stroke to any 2D shape. There should be an option to expand the width from 0px to 20px for example.

5. Mirror – The ability to flip or mirror a piece of geometry easily with a modifier. XYZ options are needed. This should also respect the pivot.

6. Patterns – The ability to replicate the geometry in patterns, grid, circle, etc.

7. Normals – Recalculate normals.

Deformations:

1. Bend – Broadcast designers need the ability to bend or deform a piece of geometry.

2. Taper – Broadcasters need the ability to taper geometry over the length of an object.

The new SVG importer is designed to generate 3D geometry from any SVG file while keeping the material colors intact. Options include: SVG Actor, Swap SVGs on the Fly, Copy & Paste SVG – XML to generate geometry, Extrude, Bevels, Caps and UVs.

Font and text workflows are near and dear to the heart of us as designers. These new tools simplify the process of navigating through and testing fonts which will help you create faster and more efficiently. Features include:

• Preview fonts with out importing

• Favorite Fonts

• Font Categories

• Import Fonts into the project

• Max Width

• Max Height

• Scale Proportionally

• Dynamic Material

• Dynamic Gradients

• Custom Materials

Create highly specific hierarchies for grouping objects in your motion graphics workflow. This new feature provides designers with tons of control when organizing, displaying, and managing scenes. Outliner Features include:

• Non-Alphabetically sorted actors

• Easy Grouping of actors under null objects

• Per-Actor Visibility states

• Layer Coloring for organization

• Modifier system for geometry, animation, and remote control

• Filtering system for easy displaying only needed actors or modifiers

• Options to not auto-expand actor hierarchies

• Copy and paste modifiers. Geometry, animation, remote control.

• Moving the pivot and group actors with hotkeys

• Batch Renaming actors

Another super important part of motion design is organization. This means proper naming conventions. In projects which can quickly become messy and overwhelming, this tool with help you batch rename actors and assets. This will let you keep an efficient, clean and organized workspace.

Outliner

• Actor Rename Selected

• Actor Rename Selected Class

Content Browser

• Asset Rename Selected Asset

• Asset Rename Asset Class

Features

• Base Rename

• Prefix – Add, remove, Numerate

• Suffix – Add, remove, Numerate

• Search and Replace

With this tool, motion graphics artists can add procedural animation to nearly any property. You can easily add dynamic effects such as wiggle, bounce, oscillation, and random animations. Animation Functions include: Sin, Cosine, Square, Inverted Square, Sawtooth, Triangle, Bounce, Pulse and Perlin.