Karim Yasser, Senior Lighting Artist at MBC Game Studio, who worked on Dune: Awakening, Gears of War: E-Day, and 1348 Ex Voto, demonstrated his work on a UE5 plug-in for painting light and shadow inside the engine, similar to 2D drawing. The process is real-time and non-destructive.

The tool is aimed at taking full control over lighting in a scene and art-directing the lights and shadows easily, which can then be stored in textures to preserve control after finishing the painting. It features options like Paint, Smudge, Flatten, Smooth, Noise, Gradient to fill in bigger areas, and Lasso. The artist plans to add more custom shapes.

Artists can still apply Gobos using different presets, while Spot Lights are supported for both global and local lighting setups. The plugin is part of a larger toolset designed to address Unreal Engine's lighting limitations and speed up artists' workflows. It is currently in development, with an early access version planned for release soon.

Before, we featured Yasser's practice for gameplay lighting with a new style of post-war lighting, a lighting setup for a picturesque canyon, a demonstration of the capabilities of Nanite tessellation in Unreal Engine 5, and a breakdown of different lighting scenarios for a Victorian street scene. Check out below and learn more on the artist's LinkedIn:

If you are interested in lighting, explore some of the breakdowns and works we shared with you before, such as Aleksander Goryachev's explanation of a lighting setup for a gloomy scene, passivestar's trick to use decals as lighting sources, and Léo Forestier's breakdown of a cinematic lighting study:

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