Understanding lighting in Unreal Engine 5
In this section, we will learn how lighting works in Unreal Engine 5 and how to set up your project to use Lumen to illuminate your scene.
What is Lumen?
To understand the lighting process in Unreal Engine 5 we first need to understand what Lumen is and why it is so important.
Lumen is Unreal Engine 5’s fully dynamic global illumination and reflection system, which allows us to reproduce raytraced lighting via software. This is a game-changer feature not only for game projects that need to illuminate massive dynamic environments but also for everyone who wants to achieve high-quality images and videos without an extremely powerful graphics card.
In other words, Lumen allows us to simulate what raytraced global illumination does.
In the real world, when you switch on the light in your room, the light coming from the ceiling lamp hits the ground and then bounces infinitely onto other surfaces in the room. Thanks to this...