Unreal Engine MegaLights Art Blast
Thank you for exploring the MegaLights Art Blast! MegaLights is an exciting experimental feature in Unreal Engine 5.5 that empowers artists to use an unprecedented number of lights in their projects. With the ability to create over a thousand movable, dynamic lights that cast realistic area shadows and illuminate volumetric fog, we’re breaking new ground in real-time rendering on current-gen hardware.
This advancement has been a game-changer for our environment artists, allowing them to work more freely and creatively without the usual constraints and limitations of local light sources. With Megalights in our toolkit, the team was able to build a captivating world for Echo to explore. By leveraging Quixel MegaScans and KitBash3D assets, and a little handcrafted “salt” thrown in for good measure, we rapidly experimented with different environments until we found a look we loved.
What did this all mean for the art in practical terms? The team was able to work fast within a tight deadline. It was a pretty crazy day to day experience discovering just how much we could throw at the environment and were free to experiment with different ideas. We obviously still needed to keep best practices for environment creation and performance at the forefront of our thinking, but the liberties MegaLights afforded made building a unique environment a fun, creatively rewarding exercise.
We hope the world we’ve lovingly built inspires you as much as it has inspired us. We encourage you to dive into MegaLights, MegaScans, and KitBash3D to discover how they can enhance your own creative workflow.
Saga Alayyoubi – Senior Environment Artist
Wiktor Öhman – Principle Environment Artist
Jakob Keudel – Senior Environment Artist
