Behind-The-Scenes Look At UE5.5's MegaLights Demo

MegaLights, an experimental feature introduced in the freshly released Unreal Engine 5.5, offers an entirely new direct lighting path, allowing artists to place significantly more dynamic and shadowed area lights than was previously possible.

Designed to support current-generation consoles, MegaLights leverages ray tracing to deliver realistic soft shadows from various area lights and supports Volumetric Fog. In addition to reducing the cost of dynamic shadowing, it lowers the cost of unshadowed light evaluation, making it possible to use expensive light sources, such as textured area lights, on consoles.

To showcase this feature in action, during Unreal Fest Seattle 2024, Epic presented a demo where a character navigated a scene illuminated by over 1,000 shadow-casting lights in real-time, running on a PlayStation 5:

Dan Woje, who led the art direction, revealed that the project was completed on a tight schedule, with a turnaround of just around two months. Given the small team size, everyone contributed to nearly every aspect of the scene at some point.

Principal Artist Wiktor Öhman posted some renders from this project, sharing that MegaLights gave him the same sense of excitement and innovation he felt when he first tried Nanite, describing it as a huge leap forward in creating visually stunning projects.

In this demo, Wiktor Öhman was responsible for environment art and asset creation. His work involved building and set dressing various areas of the world, as well as creating both animated and still 2D graphics. He also designed and modeled the small flying bots featured in the scene and the organic-looking shroud around the teleporter in the final room.

Take a look at some shots below:

As a Senior Environment Artist, Jakob Keudel's tasks involved set dressing and level design. However, given the need for rapid iteration and flexibility, he also took on the responsibility of developing Master Materials and shader solutions, ranging from creating general material functions to crafting fully custom solutions for dynamically weathered architecture and individual assets. Additionally, he handled basic FX, texture calibration/look development, custom asset creation, and a re-texturing pipeline specifically tailored for the scanned metallics.

With years of experience working with lighting in Unreal Engine, Senior Lighting Artist Isac Crafoord described MegaLights as a game changer, comparing its impact to that of Lumen when it was first released a few years ago.

For this demo, his primary responsibilities included set dressing the area with the stairs and a section of the bazaar buildings, as well as managing the media texture setup for the old demos. Additionally, he oversaw the lighting, atmospherics, exposure, and post-processing across the project.

The team relied on several elements from KitBash3D, modifying them to integrate seamlessly with their own assets with Senior Environment Artist Saga Alayyoubi responsible for quite a lot of custom modeling and sculpting of the ornate Arabic architectural elements, as well as creating various props and trinkets scattered throughout the level. Additionally, he was heavily involved in overall lighting and Sequencer work, including animating the drones as they ascended the central tower in the hero shot.

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