Unreal Engine 5 Lighting - Lumen Tutorial for Beginners

Just dragging this emissive sphere through the environment always looks so cool. Just casting that nice blue light all over the scene.

And there's not even a light attached to it, which is awesome. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to Polygon Academy.

My name is Tim, and it's actually been quite a while since I made a video, but I'm back.

And today is actually a super special day because Epic just released the hands-on version,

the early access of Unreal Engine 5. So, Epic just released an awesome new demo showcasing a lot of the new tools and features inside of Unreal Engine 5.

And I know there's a lot to dive into, but I really wanted to start with one of my favorite things that I saw ever since Unreal Engine 5 was announced and what they showcased, and that has to be Lumen.

As you guys know, my background is in environments and lighting, so as soon as I saw this in their first initial demo, I was stoked.

The less time you have to spend baking lighting and dealing with technical issues, the better.

This seems absolutely amazing for vizdeving on the fly and just focusing more of your time on being creative and artistic with your scenes.

So in this tutorial, we're going to be taking a quick look at how to get Lumen set up and working in your scenes.

If you are working with older content, the nice thing about Unreal Engine 5 is it's basically UE 4.27.

So you can port all of your old scenes and content into UE 5 and maybe relight them and start using Lumen to add that nice bounce light into your scene.

So we're going to be going on the first few steps to get that enabled and working. It is very plug and play right out of the box, which is great.

I was really worried that it was going to be something like a very technical artist kind of tool set, but it seems super artist friendly in the few hours that I've been playing with it so far.

I'm going to try and keep this super simple and straightforward. So regardless of whatever scene you're working with, it should be easy to follow along.

So if you're excited for more tutorials from me, hit that thumbs up button. It lets me know that you enjoy the content and let's dive right in.

All right, so here we are in this quick example scene I've created. It's a very kind of gray box world.

I find this midtone gray is actually going to be really useful for showcasing a lot of the features of Lumen, just because it's not going to be easy to get distracted by crazy textures or anything like that.

don't worry we will be jumping into some you know super nice gorgeous arted scene in just a few minutes where we'll take a look at some of the more other features in depth

but I think a scene like this is really going to help showcase exactly what

Lumen is doing under the hood and you're not going to get too distracted

by you know awesome gorgeous visuals it's going to be really focused

on just the lighting so in this super basic scene if you look at my world outliner I just have the most basic lighting setup you know I'm using the if I go outside the scene and let the exposure adjust.

I'm just using their sky atmosphere, the volumetric clouds, a skylight, a directional light, and the exponential high fog to get those nice volumetric rays coming through the windows.

And when I first loaded the scene up, it was actually completely black because Lumen wasn't working.

So the first thing you want to do to get Lumen working, I think with their brand new UE5 example scene, it should work right out of the box.

But if you are porting some older content, it might not actually be set up.

So what you're going to want to do is go to Edit, project settings, not the editor preferences, the project settings because Lumen is a project-based

thing you have to turn on. And if we scroll down on the left hand side here, what we're going to want to do is click on rendering.

And if you scroll down, scroll down right here, global illumination, you're going to want to set this to Lumen.

When I first opened the scene after updating it from a UE4 scene, it was set to none.

So I just hit this drop down, set this to Lumen, and it also actually

turns the reflection method to Lumen as well, because Lumen is also handling reflections now, which is really cool.

But you just want to have these both set to Lumen and you should be good to go.

I had one instance on a different project where it didn't turn on right away. And all I had to do was just restart the editor.

And next time I loaded up the scene, it worked fine. So that's pretty much all you have to do to get Lumen working. There is one other thing you're probably going to want to do.

If you are using a post-process like me, I have a post-process that surrounds this interior to kind of set the exposure properly.

You just might want to go into there and under global illumination, set this drop down to lumen.

You can see if I swap it back to the old screen space, that's not too good.

It doesn't look great because all the lighting is real time now, right?

So this defaults back to using just like the movable skylight and stuff like that. So you start to get some of these weird artifacts.

And then if I turn off global illumination completely, it just without the baked lighting, it looks terrible.

So we're going to fix that, just switch it back to lumen inside the post-process. And now you see we get this gorgeous, nice bounce lighting.

And if I fly around the scene, you can see the areas that aren't directly lit by the sun.

You can see the bounce lighting hitting the floor there and bouncing onto this corner.

But you can also see the areas that are more ambiently lit by the skylight have a cooler tone, which is really nice because you're picking up all of that nice color bounce from the more warm, saturated light from the sun.

On my directional light here, you can see if I turn this off, the scene goes pretty much black because it's no longer lighting up the actual sky atmosphere either.