Introduction

Lighting in UDK is built around real-time requirements. Epic Games provides the neatest explanation of the features that UDK includes in terms of Rendering, Shaders, and "Eye-Popping Lighting and Shadows" on their front page at http://www.UDK.com/features.

• Illuminate

  UDK gives you all the options to perfectly light any scene. Ambient occlusion, per-pixel lighting, fill lighting, and fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections are all possible.

• Unreal Lightmass

  Unreal Lightmass is an advanced global illumination solver, custom built to fully take advantage of all that Unreal Engine 3 has to offer. Light your world with a single sun, give off soft shadows, and let the diffuse inter-reflection (color bleeding) do the work.

• Detailed Shadows

  Advanced shadowing with support for three techniques:

  • Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows.

  • Ultra high-quality and high-performance pre-computed shadow masks.

  • Directional light mapping with static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting...