As usual, Dylan Browne is keeping us updated on the latest additions landing in Unreal Engine's active development trunk on GitHub. He has previously showcased features such as Mesh Terrain, ray-traced translucency, and Nanite Foliage, and now he's moving on to Unreal Engine 6, with Unreal Engine 5.8 currently planned as the final major release in the UE5 lifecycle.

According to Dylan, a new experimental Lumen mode called LumenRef has been added to Unreal Engine's UE6-Main branch, which appears to be a reference-quality version of Lumen, "somewhat per-pixel, giving an absolutely stunning, path-traced feel to deferred renders but orders of magnitude faster than using the full path tracer."

The demo above has no lights at all: it's lit entirely by emissive signs, producing near-pixel-perfect lighting and reflections. "This is an absolute game changer for rendering cinematics in Unreal," commented Dylan. He also noted that each frame takes around 30 seconds to render, which is incredibly fast considering the quality. The scene was rendered in 8K with 64 temporal samples on an RTX 5090.

Details on Unreal Engine 6 remain limited for now, but what we've seen so far has already sparked plenty of debate among developers and legal professionals. In the meantime, you can catch up on the latest Unreal Engine 5.8 features, including DMC, MetaHuman crowds, Zebra Sample, and more. And don't forget to check out William Faucher's EasyWaterscape while you're at it.

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