Unreal Engine 5 has dramatically improved the quality of real-time lighting through its implementation of real-time global illumination, through the new Lumen lighting engine. However, there remain myriad lighting tools, techniques and workflows that must be well understood to fully maximize one's experience designing and optimizing the lighting in a scene or level. In this fundamental overview of Unreal's lighting system, Charleston Silverman demonstrates his production proven processes that will be critical to any artist aspiring to master Unreal's lighting toolset.

This workshop covers a range of tools, from static lighting techniques to fully dynamic lighting techniques such as RTX, and Lumen. Charleston walks through some of the more advanced tools in Unreal that are essential to know, including the Light Mapper and Path Trace Render, as well as Volumetric Lighting, Particle Lights, Light functions, IES Profiles, Reflections, skylights and HDRI backdrops, and post-processing techniques. Additionally, Charleston covers his workflow for improving the optimization, quality, and performance of UE5 projects.

This tutorial is designed to offer valuable insight, tips, and techniques for those new to Unreal Engine, or those migrating from UE4 to UE5. Project files provided with this workshop include Charleston’s chamber/cave Unreal project.

For a comprehensive look at UE5’s Material System, check out Charleston’s Unreal Engine 5 Material System Overview workshop.