MegaLights is a high-performance lighting system that enhances real-time rendering in both the Standard and Lumen rendering modes. When MegaLights is enabled, Twinmotion can efficiently process a large number of dynamic, shadow-casting lights by using a scalable, clustered lighting and shadowing technique.
Using MegaLights is beneficial in large complex scenes that have light-dense environments and multiple shadow-casting lights, such as night-time city scapes, airport or automotive scenes, event staging, infrastructure projects, and cinematic sequences.
Shadow-casting lights are artificial light sources that you place in your scene and on which you enable shadows, such as the lights in the Lights category of the Twinmotion Library.
Complex scenes with a large number of shadow-casting lights can lead to performance drops, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) memory exhaustion, and visual artifacts. MegaLights provides a scalable hardware-accelerated path that resolves these issues automatically and with minimal configuration.
MegaLights offers the following advantages:
All the shadow-casting lights in the scene will cast shadows.
Visual quality is maintained.
Light and shadow evaluation is optimized and reduces the GPU load.
Fewer crashes and stability issues.
Frame and rendering times are improved.
Performance costs in complex scenes are lowered.
Shadow behavior becomes predictable, eliminating unexplained flickering.
Hardware Requirements
The MegaLights feature is supported on computers with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards, and on Apple Silicon Mac M4s or higher. If your computer does not meet these requirements and your scene contains a large amount of shadow-casting lights, Twinmotion relies on the fallback system described below.
Fallback System
To ensure stability and prevent crashes in scenes that contain a large number of shadow-casting lights, Twinmotion uses a fallback system that limits the number of lights that cast shadows. By default, the limit is set to 50. This limit is applied to the viewport (whether you are working in or out of Media mode), and to the media you export, including images, panoramas, videos, and sequences.
If the number of shadow-casting lights in a scene exceeds the limit, and MegaLights is not enabled or your computer does not meet the hardware requirements mentioned above, a warning message appears and asks if you want to enable MegaLights. If you do not enable MegaLights, only a subset of the shadow-casting lights in the scene will cast shadows. The number of lights that cast shadows may update dynamically based on the distance of the viewport camera.
The fallback system is enabled by default. In the Preferences panel (Ctrl + P) under Settings > Lights, you can enable or disable it, define the maximum number of shadow-casting lights, and enable or disable the warning message.
For more information on the fallback settings, see Lights under the Settings section in the Twinmotion Preferences page.
Enable MegaLights
You can enable MegaLights on an entire project, and also on a per-media basis when you work in Media mode.
To enable MegaLights, complete the following steps:
Open the Properties panel by clicking Properties in the footer.
In the Ambience panel, select the Render tab, and click Shadows to expand the section.
You can enable (or disable) MegaLights on an entire project, or only on the media you select.
To enable MegaLights on only one (or on multiple) media, select the media in the Media dock, and then click the MegaLights button.
To enable MegaLights on an entire project, click the MegaLights button.
Limitations
Enabling MegaLights may alter the appearance of the water when the Ocean option in the Ambience panel > Env tab is enabled.
Subsurface materials are not compatible with MegaLights due to a technical limitation.