Lighting

Set up lights, sky light, shadows, global illumination and volumetric fog, and build lighting.

What it’s for

This area controls how a level is lit. Your assistant can add and set up lights and a skylight, and change the settings that set the mood of a scene: shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination, auto-exposure and volumetric fog. When baked lighting matters, it can run a full lighting build.

Use it to light a level or change its look without clicking through the editor. Typical requests: add a sun and a skylight to a fresh map, switch global illumination to Lumen, turn on volumetric fog, or bake lighting at production quality before a capture. It can also tidy a scene, for example by reducing duplicate sky lights to one.

The older sun and skylight brightness controls and the physically based sky, cloud and reflection capture actors live in Sky, fog and time of day. To keep a global illumination change after an editor restart, also ask for it in Renderer settings, which writes it to DefaultEngine.ini.

Things you can ask

Light a fresh level with a sun and a sky

You get a directional light for the sun and a sky light for ambient fill.

You: Add a directional sun light and a sky light to this level.

Added a directional light named Sun at intensity 8, angled down at 45°, and a sky light.

Switch to Lumen and turn on volumetric fog

Global illumination switches to Lumen and the scene gets volumetric fog.

You: Use Lumen global illumination and add some volumetric fog.

Switched global illumination to Lumen and turned on volumetric fog with a 6000-unit view distance.

Bake lighting at production quality

A full lighting build runs for the current level.

You: Bake the lighting at production quality.

The lighting build finished at production quality.