Unreal Engine 5.5 megalights

[Legend]

We are Mega excited about this in particular ????

MegaLights, a new experiential feature in 5.5, enables artists to use orders of magnitude more lights. They are movable and dynamic, with realistic area shadows, and can light volumetric fog. See this capture of our live, real-time… pic.twitter.com/H3SL04CRH8

— Unreal Engine (@UnrealEngine) October 1, 2024

How does this fit with lumen? I didn't bother googling it.

[nnodley]

This just works hand in hand with lumen. But it's also not coupled with it to the point it can't be used with other GI solutions. Like SSGI.

Actually pretty crazy to be able to use 1000s of shadow caster realtime lights. Obviously it's still gonna be heavy and require pretty high end hardware. But considering this kind of lighting would absolutely tank performance before UE5 this is insane

My biggest peeve with lumen is the GI accumulation artifacts. It's so hard to remove sometimes.

I wish they would build a full game using these tools to show it's fully capable. Tech demos are nice but we know things can be faked fairly easily if they want to. Even just a cool little game like astros playroom as a small demo people can play

And of this exact graphical representation. I don't expect many games to be this fully detailed for another 3 to 5 years. Maybe double that

I'm gonna have to download 5.5 preview and try mega lights out.

[Legend]

I couldn't find any technical details online. I assume this is screenspace based? If not that or raytracing, I don't know how they could pull it off unless there are a bunch of hidden tradeoffs.

[nnodley]

I couldn't find any technical details online. I assume this is screenspace based? If not that or raytracing, I don't know how they could pull it off unless there are a bunch of hidden tradeoffs.

I'm pretty sure lumen is screen space. So I'm assuming mega lights are the same.   I don't really dig too much into the technical aspect. I just watch the magic happen when I'm making some in unreal. lol


Or I guess lumen is kind of a mix of both depending on scene and project settings