This week Unreal Engine 5.7 finally exited Preview and is now available for everyone.

For those who missed it I've uploaded a short video over on YouTube that covers the top features artists should be aware of.

But before we take a look at those updates, here's the weekly roundup of changes in tools and technology that are shaping the future of worldbuilding and creative work.

NEW TECH UPDATES

Weekly Roundup

1. Marble by World Labs

World Labs has released a platform called Marble which turns text, images, panoramas, or rough 3D layouts into persistent, editable 3D worlds which can be exported as Gaussian splats or meshes.

The project is backed by $230 million in funding and the startup claims this will be the next big leap in “spatial intelligence”.

We’ve seen many similar promises from different 3D-AI tools over the past couple years but this one does seem to be catching a different kind of attention, including traditional creators like Unreal Sensei:

Check out the official blog post.

2. Blender Labs Announced

Blender has announced the launch of Blender Lab: an innovation space designed for designers, developers, and researchers to collaborate on forward-thinking and experimental projects. Blender Lab enables the community to work on future-facing ideas that may not fit the regular release cycle, such as advanced input technologies (touch, pen, VR/XR), volume rendering, light transport, and AI/ML integrations. All lab activities will be visible on ​blender.org/lab​, including project progress and builds for user feedback.

My takeaway: The initial set of in-progress labs aren't that exciting to me personally, though the two listed as "Requires funding and stakeholders" very much are.

1. USD authoring stands out because it lets Blender work more smoothly with USD files, making it much easier to exchange complex scenes with other big tools in animation and VFX.

2. The MCP Server lab is interesting as it would explore ways to bring AI into Blender (for better/worse) so users can interact with the program using natural language.

Check out the announcement.

3. ZBrush UI Overhaul

During last week's ZBrush Summit, Maxon announced and showed off new tools for retopology, a dedicated UV editor, and most interestingly a completely UI overhaul set to unify the design of the app with what they offer on iPad.

You can check out the full 9 hour live stream on ​Maxon's YouTube channel​.

My takeaway: As someone who has always bounced off of ZBrush's UI/UX and kept mostly to Blender for my light sculpting needs, I'm very excited to give it a fresh try with this update. I imagine those who have heavily customized their interfaces and hotkeys might resist this "streamlining" of the interface but either way it's unlikely to roll out until next autumn's 2027 update.

THIS WEEK’S HIGHLIGHT
New Video Live

Unreal Engine 5.7 dropped this week, moving from preview to stable release.

For 3D artists and worldbuilders, this is one of the more significant releases in a while, not because of flashy new features (though there are a few of those), but because a few of the exciting tools that have been previewed throughout the various 5.0 versions over the years are finally stabilizing.

The big one: PCG (procedural generation) is production-ready. It's also nearly 2x faster than 5.5, and there's a new editor mode that lets you work directly in the viewport instead of jumping between graphs. For solo creators and small teams trying to build larger environments, this is great news.

Substrate is now the default material system for all new projects. Instead of picking from rigid shading models (Standard, Subsurface, Cloth, etc.), you get one physically-based system that lets you layer complex materials.

Nanite Voxelized Foliage is experimental but worth watching. Epic showed 20,000+ trees running at 60fps on a base PS5 in the Witcher 4 tech demo at Unreal Fest.

There's also a new Procedural Vegetation Editor (very limited right now), MegaLights moved to Beta, and an AI Assistant plugin that's... inconsistent but might save you some documentation trips.

I put together a walkthrough covering what's actually production-ready versus still experimental, and which updates matter most if you're building worlds or working with materials over on YouTube.