A significant part of building any virtual world is determining how it will be lit. This means being able to efficiently light small enclosed scenes with small lights to large worlds primarily lit by single dominant light source. The engine provides the tools and lighting options necessary to achieve the results your project's demand.
The topics in this page contains information on the the various lighting features and tools available to use, along with guides that create a learning path to the ins and outs of lighting a scene in Unreal Engine.
New UE5 Lighting Features
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.
Lighting Essentials
Light Types and Their Mobility
The available types of lights to choose from and how their mobility settings affect lighting in the scene.
Direct Lighting
An overview of the various properties and features that lights support.
Designing Visuals, Rendering, and Graphics
Rendering subsystem including lighting and shadowing, materials and textures, visual effects, and post processing.
Lighting Features and Tools
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.
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.
Mesh Distance Fields
An overview of Mesh Distance Fields and its available features that you can use when developing your games.
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.
Shadowing
An overview of available shadowing methods and the properties they support.
Virtual Shadow Maps
Learn about the high-resolution shadow techniques designed with film-quality assets and large dynamically lit open worlds in mind.
Reflections Environment
Systems for how reflections are captured and displayed on reflective surfaces.
Lighting Tools and Plugins
Lighting Tools and Plugins
A collection of tools and plugins that are useful for lighting scenes.
Contact Shadows
An overview of using screen space shadowing to harden shadow contact points.
Capsule Shadows
Information on using phsyics capsules for dynamic soft shadowing of Skeletal Meshes.
General
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.
Volumetric Fog
An overview of the volumetric fog and lighting options available with the Exponential Height Fog Component.
Light Shafts
An overview of using Direcitonal Light to simulate light scattering through the atmosphere.
Using Transparency in Materials
This page explains how to use transparency in your Materials.
Using Bump Offset
Guide for using the Bump Offset node in your Materials.
IES Light Profiles
An overview of setting up and using IES textures with lights.
HDRI Backdrop Visualization Tool
A Blueprint tool to quickly set up product visualization using an HDR image projection with real-time lighting and shadowing.