RetroRender

RetroRender is a retro rendering suite for Unreal Engine 5 that recreates the PS1 / N64 / PS2 / CRT look — low-poly geometry, pixelated point-sampled textures, reduced color depth, ordered dithering, vertex wobble and CRT scanlines. It ships as editor tooling + a material-based look, with almost no content to provide (the whole effect is code and materials).

Drag the handle to see a scene go from a modern render to the PS2 preset:

PS2

Original

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At a glance

• Engine: Unreal Engine 5.2 → 5.8
• Category: Rendering
• Type: Editor tooling + runtime material look (the baker/utility are bake-time; the look runs in your game)
• Module: RetroRenderEditor (editor-only) + plugin content under /RetroRender

The three pillars

RetroRender is built from three independent pieces you can mix freely:

Pillar	What it does	Where it lives
A. Retro Look	The look: pixelate, color reduction, dithering, vertex snap, CRT scanlines. Material functions + post-process + master materials, driven by a Material Parameter Collection.	Content (/RetroRender)
B. Decimate Baker	Bakes low-poly copies of your meshes (the PS1 silhouette) using the engine mesh-reduction backend. Offline, zero runtime cost.	RetroRenderEditor
C. Texture Utility	Batch-applies point sampling / no mips / resolution clamp to textures. Non-destructive and reversible.	RetroRenderEditor

Each pillar is optional. Use the whole stack for a full PS1 conversion, or just the look for a lightweight retro post effect.

What you get

• A RetroRender panel (Tools → RetroRender) with three tabs: Bake, Textures, Look.
• A Decimate Baker: reduce meshes by percent or to a target triangle count; landscape → mesh supported.
• A Texture Retro Utility: crisp point-sampled, low-res, no-mip textures — with one-click revert.
• A material look: MPC_Retro, material functions, PP_Retro post-process, M_Retro_Opaque / M_Retro_Masked masters.
• Four presets: PS1, N64, PS2, CRT.
• A Blueprint / Python API (URetroRenderLibrary) so you can script the whole pipeline.

Design philosophy

Everything the baker and texture utility produce is deterministic and offline — no runtime hitches, no custom scene proxies, compatible with every platform. The look is pure materials, so it is portable across engine versions. The only things duplicated on disk are the baked meshes; textures and materials are reused as-is.

Continue with Installation, then Getting Started.