The Gnomon Workshop – Cinematic Lighting in Unreal Engine 5

This advanced 2-hour workshop covers the Unreal Engine 5 lighting workflows that Naughty Dog Lighting Artist, Ted Mebratu, uses to achieve cinematic results.

Unreal’s Lumen is a very powerful Global Illumination system. However, when comparing it to static/baked methods, it can take some of the artistic control that Lightmaps make available to lighting artists. In addition, due to performance constraints of current hardware, there’s a limitation to how many runtime light sources you can place within a given scene using Lumen. With Lightmaps, however, this budget is practically infinite.

This workshop teaches both workflows to arm you with the skills that make the most sense for you. Starting with Lightmaps, the first portion of this video guide details the process of lighting an environment for two different scenarios — night and day — using baked/static Lightmaps (GPU Lightmass). Through these first chapters, Ted covers the different tricks and techniques he uses to craft baked direct and indirect lighting. He explains how to effectively use reflection probes to achieve believable results and walks through how to achieve realistic fog and atmospheric effects using static volumetric fog.

The workshop then dives into the process of creating a full multi-camera cinematic using Unreal 5’s Sequencer tool. Demonstrating using an ornate cathedral in Unreal, Ted showcases different techniques for shot lighting a cinematic sequence utilizing Lumen’s real-time GI system. He reveals how to create a full master cinematic sequence from scratch, featuring his top techniques for arranging and editing cinematic shots. You’ll also discover Ted’s approach to achieving dramatic compositions.

By completing this workshop, you should gain a solid insight into lighting in Unreal Engine 5 and understand how to create cinematics using UE5. There are many helpful takeaways from Ted’s workflow shared throughout that you can incorporate into your own projects.