Designing Visuals, Rendering, and Graphics

Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections

Take a look at a high-level overview of Lumen's dynamic global illumination and reflections features.

Lumen Technical Details

Dive into the technical details of using Lumen's global illumination and reflections features with software or hardware ray tracing.

Nanite Virtualized Geometry

Learn about Nanite's virtualized geometry system and how it achieves pixel scale detail and high object counts.

Virtual Shadow Maps

Learn about the high-resolution shadow techniques designed with film-quality assets and large dynamically lit open worlds in mind.

Substrate Materials

Topics and reference about using the Substrate Materials framework.

Path Tracer

Learn about the Path Tracer and how you can use it to render high quality images for final shots and ground truth comparisons against the real-time rendered scenes.

GPUDump Viewer Tool

A multi-platform command that dumps intermediary RDG textures and buffers to disk for investigating and debugging rendering issues.

Render Dependency Graph

An immediate-mode API which records render commands into a graph data structure to be compiled and executed.

Textures

Topics that discuss how and where texture assets are used.

Materials

Controlling the appearance of surfaces in the world using shaders.

Physically Based Materials

An overview of the primary physically based Material inputs and how best to use them.

UV Editor

Overview of the UV Editor interface and tools.

Lighting the Environment

Topics that demonstrate features and tools for lighting scenes.

Global Illumination

A collection of topics on the global illumination options available to choose from.

Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections

Take a look at a high-level overview of Lumen's dynamic global illumination and reflections features.

Lumen Technical Details

Dive into the technical details of using Lumen's global illumination and reflections features with software or hardware ray tracing.

Virtual Shadow Maps

Learn about the high-resolution shadow techniques designed with film-quality assets and large dynamically lit open worlds in mind.

Heterogeneous Volumes

Use the Heterogeneous Volume component to render volume-domain materials that sample from Sparse Volume Textures.

Sparse Volume Textures

An asset that stores baked simulation data representing volumetric media, such as smoke, fire, and water.

Hardware Ray Tracing and Path Tracing Features

Explore topics for setting up and using real-time hardware ray tracing and path tracing to render scenes using ray-traced lighting features.

Direct Lighting

An overview of the various properties and features that lights support.

Light Types and Their Mobility

The available types of lights to choose from and how their mobility settings affect lighting in the scene.

Environmental Light with Fog, Clouds, Sky and Atmosphere

Components and tools that enable users to build immersive worlds with environment lighting from fog, clouds, sky and atmosphere.

Mesh Distance Fields

An overview of Mesh Distance Fields and its available features that you can use when developing your games.

Reflections Environment

Systems for how reflections are captured and displayed on reflective surfaces.

Shadowing

An overview of available shadowing methods and the properties they support.

Rendering Components

Outlines different types of Rendering Components, including Particle Systems, Decals, and Billboards.

Skeletal Mesh Rendering Paths

A high-level overview of the rendering paths available for Skeletal Meshes.

Rendering High Quality Frames with Movie Render Queue

A how-to guide for configuring the Unreal Engine Movie Render Queue feature to get high-quality cinematics—particularly when using ray tracing.

Landscape Materials

A reference guide to Landscape Materials and how to use them with your terrain.

Creating and Using LODs

How To Create and Use LODs.

Understanding Lightmapping in Unreal Engine

Techniques and guidelines for setting up lightmap UVs for Static Meshes.

Generating Lightmap UVs

An overview of generating your own lightmap UVs in Unreal Engine.

Post Process Effects

Learn about the effects that can be applied through placed-volumes and cameras. These art-directed effects can define the look and feel of your scenes with coloring, tonemapping, lighting, and more.

Creating Visual Effects

Use Unreal Engine's Niagara visual effects system to create and preview particle effects in real time.

Forward Shading Renderer

Describes the advantages of using the Forward Shading Renderer.

Orthographic Camera

An overview of setting up a camera with Orthographic projection.

Optimizing and Debugging Projects for Real-Time Rendering

Concepts and approaches to optimizing and debugging your projects for real-time rendering with features and tools available in Unreal Engine.

Nanite Virtualized Geometry

Learn about Nanite's virtualized geometry system and how it achieves pixel scale detail and high object counts.

Anti-Aliasing and Upscaling

A high level overview of the Anti Aliasing options available in Unreal Engine.

Temporal Super Resolution

A high-level overview of the Anti Aliasing options available in Unreal Engine.

Virtual Texturing

An overview of the available virtual texturing methods in Unreal Engine.

Visibility and Occlusion Culling

An overview of available visibility and occlusion culling methods.

Using RenderDoc with Unreal Engine

RenderDoc is a standalone open-source graphics debugger that you can use to perform single-frame captures and inspect them.

GPUDump Viewer Tool

A multi-platform command that dumps intermediary RDG textures and buffers to disk for investigating and debugging rendering issues.

Texture Streaming

System for loading and unloading textures into and out of memory during gameplay.

Render Resource Viewer

A tool to assist in identifying resources and their assets allocated to GPU memory.

Mobile Rendering Features

Learn about Unreal Engine's mobile rendering path and its support for graphics features.

Mobile Previewer

Previewing your games inside the Unreal Engine is based on the selected Mobile Platforms.

Path Tracer

Learn about the Path Tracer and how you can use it to render high quality images for final shots and ground truth comparisons against the real-time rendered scenes.

HDRI Backdrop Visualization Tool

A Blueprint tool to quickly set up product visualization using an HDR image projection with real-time lighting and shadowing.

Sun and Sky Actor

A tool that provides a time of day system that is geographically accurate for location, date, and time.

Geographically Accurate Sun Positioning Tool

A tool giving you fine control over the Sun's geographic location based on latitude, longitude, date, and time.

Third-Party Rendering Tools and Plugins

A listing of third-party tools and plugins that are available.

FShaderCache

The FShaderCache provides mechanisms for reducing shader hitching in-game.

Mesh Drawing Pipeline

Guide to adding custom mesh passes and understanding Unreal Engine's mesh drawing performance characteristics.

Graphics Programming Overview

Information for graphics programmers working with the rendering systems and writing shaders.

Parallel Rendering Overview

An overview of parallel rendering.

Render Dependency Graph

An immediate-mode API which records render commands into a graph data structure to be compiled and executed.

Shader Development

Information for graphics programmers writing shaders.

AsyncCompute

AsyncCompute is a hardware feature that interleaves different GPU tasks to improve efficiency.

Shaders in Plugins

Information on creating and using shaders in plugins.

Overview of Shaders in Plugins

Going over creating shaders in Plugins.

Creating a New Global Shader as a Plugin

Creating and setting up a new Global shader via a Plugin.

Threaded Rendering

Information for graphics programmers working with the threaded renderer.

Large World Coordinates Rendering Overview.

An overview of Rendering Large World Coordinates.

Neural Network Engine

A collection of topics related to using artificial intelligence through Unreal Engine's neural network engine.