Check Out Unreal Engine 5.6's Lumen With Ray-Traced Refraction Demo

If you're curious about Unreal Engine 5's upcoming features, take a look at this video by Jim Bachalo, in which he experimented with Lumen and new ray-traced translucency. The developer credits Dylan Browne, who has also been exploring the latest UE5-Main releases and recently highlighted that Epic is working on a new ray-raced translucency feature that uses hit lighting for both reflections and refraction and integrates with depth of field. Though it's still in the early stages, it's already showing promising results.

This new approach differs from the "old" ray-raced translucency that you enable via post-process settings. Instead, it's a method activated through CVars for now. The key advantage of this method is that it utilizes hit lighting, resulting in much cleaner, more accurate refraction that aligns with the scene. Unlike the previous methods, which essentially created a separate ray-traced scene with no control over it, this new system offers a more cohesive and controlled experience.

Take a look at a few of Dylan Browne's Unreal Engine 5.6 experiments and follow him on LinkedIn for more:

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