At its annual State of Unreal event, Epic Games demonstrated the formidable capabilities of its creator tools, showcasing open-world updates in Unreal Engine 5.6 and moving the MetaHuman photo-real 3D character generator out of early access and into general availability — its character and animation output now able to be used in competing game engines Unity and Godot and in software packages including Maya, Houdini and Blender. Game studio CD Projekt Red, creator of the popular “The Witcher” series, joined Epic in demonstrating how Unreal 5.6 lets teams build large-scale open worlds that run smoothly on current-generation phones and PCs.

Unreal Engine 5.6 is now available for download and the tech demo with CD Projekt Red showed its new open-world features running on PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second with ray tracing and a quicker-loading Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin.

According to Epic’s State of Unreal news roundup: “Beyond open world features, we’ve made major strides toward a truly engine-first animation and rigging workflow,” eliminating the need for “DCC round-tripping,” a reference to the repetitive transfer of assets between Unreal Engine and external Digital Content Creation (DCC) tools like Maya, Blender and 3ds Max for iterative tasks,.

Epic has embedded MetaHuman in Unreal 5.6, making it possible to create MetaHumans “directly within the engine.” The company is also bringing MetaHuman’s face-authoring tools to bodies.

“Developers will be able to create faces and bodies with fine-tuned parameters for their games or applications” and will also be able to sell those creations on Epic’s Fab.com marketplace “so they can be used in other games or projects,” reports The Verge.

Developers can now use the MetaHuman Animator “to generate real-time animations and audio from almost any mono camera (such as webcams and most smartphones),” writes VentureBeat. “Any camera that works with Unreal Engine Live Link, including some Android phones, will be able to take advantage of these features.”

A separate VentureBeat article calls the joint presentation with CD Projekt Red “stunning” and includes a link to replay the official State of Unreal 2025 live stream.

“Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), which is the haven for user-generated content … has generated $722 million in revenue paid out to third-party creators to date in the past couple of years,” writes VentureBeat, adding that “the Epic Games Store has now paid developer and publisher partners over $2.1 billion.”

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MetaHuman Sizzle Reel: Unreal Fest 2025, Unreal Engine Video