Unreal Engine 5
My introduction to Unreal Engine 5 was through the tutorials by William Faucher, Joe Garth, and Unreal Sensei. I was fascinated by the new features and enhancements it provided, especially for lighting. As a user of Unreal Engine 4, I am always curious about the latest innovations in real-time lighting technology and workflows.
Unreal Engine’s default projects now enable “extend default luminance range”, which supports physically accurate values. I firmly advocate that physical values are the optimal starting point for lighting, and I wanted to learn about the systems behind Unreal Engine 5’s shift toward this workflow.
Lumen amazed me with its speed and no-bake times, which enable a quick iteration process. It also helps to effectively create and improve the initial lighting look. However, I also have some concerns about artistic freedom, as every object is part of a dynamic global illumination system and the high expense of real-time GI. It is crucial to use the lights smartly and track the lighting budget. Thankfully, Epic offers a comprehensive set of Lumen and content debugging tools and visualizers to help with this. I am also impressed with the Virtual Shadow Maps, the high-resolution shadowing system that supports Nanite geometry and large open worlds with minimal performance cost.
UE5 has many lighting tools and plugins that make it easier and faster to light a scene, such as:
- Environment Light Mixer: A tool that allows you to customize and fine-tune the lighting elements of your scene, such as the sky, the clouds, the atmospheric lighting, and the skylight just in one window.
- HDRI Backdrop: a plugin that quickly sets up product visualization using an HDR image projection with real-time lighting and shadowing.
- Ultra Dynamic Sky: an amazing plugin that allows you to create fully dynamic lighting, with customizable clouds, moon, stars, and weather settings with lots of presets.
- EasyFog: a plugin that allows you to add a lot of realistic fog cards and push your scene quality a way better with it.
