Using IBL and Lumen to light our scenes

This introductory chapter has covered the foundations of the PBR workflow that Unreal uses for its rendering pipeline. With that as our focus, we have already looked at several of its key components, such as different material parameters and Shading Models. However, we can’t dismiss the fact that the PBR workflow takes information from the lights in our scene to display and calculate how everything should look.

So far, we’ve only focused on the objects and the materials that are being rendered – but that is only part of the equation. One of the other parts is, of course, the lighting information. Lights are crucial to the PBR workflow: they introduce shadows, reflections, and other subtleties that affect the final look of the image. They work alongside the materials that we’ve previously applied by making sense of some of the properties we set up. Roughness textures and normal maps work in tandem with the lights...