Today, we’re thrilled to announce the release of Falcon 5.2! This release brings exciting updates to core under-the-hood Falcon functionality, unlocks more powerful Unreal Engine tools for simulation purposes, and enables more comprehensive collaboration for the entire product suite. Let’s dive right in!

Key Updates:

Migration to Unreal Engine 5.5
Expanded collaboration tools in FalconCloud
New versioning capabilities
Improved weather support in Capture Sensor

Unreal Engine 5.5

Duality AI is upgrading Falcon from Unreal Engine 5.3 to 5.5 to take advantage of critical performance enhancements and simulation features that directly benefit AI training and digital twin generation. UE 5.5 delivers:

Higher fidelity environment twins with improved Nanite performance: adds support for masked materials, foliage rendering, and improved performance with large, complex scenes.
Enhanced rendering with Lumen: includes faster and more stable global illumination, improved support for translucent surfaces and thin geometries, more accurate reflections, and better handling of large-scale dynamic scenes.
Greater memory optimization: reduces sensor memory consumption and boosts real-time sensor performance.
Better GPU utilization: more efficient rendering pipelines and better parallelization across rendering tasks, leading to smoother performance in complex scenes.

Together, all these improvements allow Falcon to render complex environments with greater realism and speed. More importantly, they enhance the fidelity of synthetic data and significantly reduce the time needed to simulate diverse scenarios and edge cases—accelerating robust AI and robotics model training across sectors, from defense to industrial automation.

*Local Fog Volumes enables fast and simple control over local fog variations (image source: Epic Games).*

Duality’s technical artists are already taking advantage of a host of new features, including:

Large World Coordinates: Build more massive environments and with improved digital twin placement accuracy and orientation precision.
Local Fog Volumes: Quickly and efficiently create local variations of fog.
New Volumetric Cloud Material: Intuitively and precisely configure the appearance of clouds of different types and shapes.

All of these features are available in FalconEditor starting today and are already contributing to environment twins like the new, publicly available Seeley Creek site twin (Pleasant Grove, North Carolina):

*Seeley Creek site twin, Pleasant Grove, North Carolina, with the 2018 Toyota HiLux system twin.*

FalconCloud Catalog

The Catalog is the backbone of collaboration in Falcon—making it easy to share digital twins, simulation-ready scenarios, and session datasets. With this release, we're extending its capabilities with versioning and buckets, enabling complete simulation workflows without the need for external management tools or third-party storage solutions.

File Sharing (Bucket)

Falcon’s pro users can now access a new bucket functionality which enables them to upload, store, and share any relevant project files—such as reference images, scripts, documentation, and more—directly in FalconCloud. For teams working with Duality's forward deployment engineering and within larger enterprises, bucket facilitates smoother collaboration—reducing the need for external file-sharing tools and ensuring that teams have easy access to supporting assets throughout their simulation workflows.

Versioning

With Falcon 5.2 we’re starting the roll out of enhanced versioning tools for all users—a feature that allows users to view and download previous versions of their files and digital twins. This capability enhances collaboration and traceability by enabling teams to track changes over time, revert to earlier states, and maintain a comprehensive history of digital twin development. Such functionality is particularly beneficial for iterative design processes that can affect quality of synthetic data and subsequent AI training results. Versioning is enabled for Bucket starting today, with digital twin versioning coming soon.

Furthermore, all users can now select digital twins optimized for multiple versions of Falcon, making it easier to align all assets no matter which Falcon release their organization is currently using.

‍Greater Control of Weather Data

Atmospheric weather conditions (such as rain, fog, or snow) affect visibility and lighting, and are closely tied to sensor performance. These conditions are critical for simulating adverse conditions and testing AI model robustness in low-visibility scenarios. The ability to tune virtual sensors to match the output of their physical world counterparts is crucial. Falcon 5.2 features Integrated Niagara buffer control into the Capture Sensor rendering pipeline, enabling fine-grained exclusion or inclusion of particle effects per sensor type. The weather effects based on Niagara, will now be visible in the color sensor.

New Digital Twins

Our catalog of free-to-use, publicly available digital twins is always expanding. Here is a small sample of recent additions, that include new item, system, and environment twins: