Exploring Lumen — Unreal Engine 5’s dynamic global illumination and reflections system

June 11, 2021
After last week’s in-depth look at Unreal Engine 5’s new virtualized geometry system, Nanite, this week on Inside Unreal, we continued to explore key features of UE5 Early Access by shining the light on Lumen—UE5’s dynamic global illumination and reflections system.

On the stream, Epic’s Daniel Wright (Engineering Fellow, Graphics), Galen Davis (Evangelist, Quixel), Chance Ivey (Senior Technical Product Designer), and Victor Brodin (Community Manager) walked viewers through what Lumen is, how to enable it, and what it provides. Plus, they gave a high level overview of how it works while taking a look at some early content from the community.
 

In case you missed them, we invite you to check out the recent livestreams for a deeper understanding of Unreal Engine 5 Early Access. We also invite you to jump into the forums for further discussion and join us on our Twitch or YouTube channels for future episodes in this livestream series as we cover additional key features including World Partition, Motion Warping and Full-Body IK, MetaSounds, and more.

Here's the full UE5 Early Access livestream schedule:

05/27 - Welcome To Unreal Engine 5 Early Access
06/03 - Nanite
06/10 - Lumen
06/17 - New World Building Features
06/24 - Motion Warping and Full-Body IK
07/01 - SUMMER BREAK
07/08 - SUMMER BREAK
07/15 - MegaAssemblies
07/22 - MetaSounds and Quartz
07/29 - Game Feature Plugins
 

    Get Unreal Engine 5 Early Access

    If you’re an existing Unreal Engine user, you can get UE5 Early Access and the Valley of the Ancient sample project from the Epic Games Launcher. If you’re new to Unreal Engine, we suggest getting to know UE 4.26 as a first step.