Unreal Game Engine Technology

Eye-popping Lighting and Shadows

Illuminate your world with Unreal Engine 3’s advanced game lighting and shadowing system, screen space ambient occlusion and Unreal Lightmass, the global illumination solver yielding high-quality static lighting and effects. Unreal Engine 3 supports all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques as well as custom, artist-controlled per-material lighting models.

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Unreal Lightmass

Unreal Engine 3 features the newest and most advanced game lighting and shadow features, including global illumination from Unreal Lightmass. All these features are easily added to your creation through Unreal’s Game Editor.

• Illuminate
  • Unreal Engine 3 gives you all the options to perfectly light any scene. Ambient occlusion, per-pixel lighting, fill lighting and fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections are all possible.
• Unreal Lightmass
  • Unreal Lightmass is an advanced global illumination solver, custom built to fully take advantage of all Unreal Engine 3 has to offer. Light your world with a single sun, giving off soft shadows, and let the diffuse interreflection (color bleeding) do the work.
• Detailed Shadows
  • Advanced shadowing with support for four techniques:
    • Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows.
    • Ultra high-quality and high-performance pre-computed shadow masks.
    • Directional light mapping with static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting. An unlimited number of lights can be pre-computed and stored in a single set of texture maps.
• Unreal Engine 3 supports Deferred Rendering to render a vast amount of light efficiently (Direct3D 11 only). Translucent objects are rendered with the forward rendering pipeline.
• Unreal Engine 3 supports Billboard reflections (Direct3D 11 only) which allows complex reflections even with static and dynamic shadows with minimal CPU overhead.