Game developers have big expectations for Unreal Engine 6, the next major evolution of Epic Games' real-time engine, but so do filmmakers and VFX artists. Now an early glimpse at a new tool shows one of the ways that it could change the game.
The main Unreal Engine 6 news so far has been around the convergence of the standard engine with the Unreal Editor for Fortnite and the controversial decision to gradually phase out Blueprints and the traditional C++ Actor system in favour of Verse, a new text-based programming language built for a unified metaverse and Scene Graph architecture.
Now we've got a first glance of an experimental new reference mode for Lumen, Unreal's global illumination and reflection system. Apparently added to Unreal Engine's UE6-Main branch, it looks set to take cinematics artists closer to the ability to use only emissive sources instead of fake lights.
As shared by VFX artist and Unreal Engine supervisor Dylan Browne in the YouTube video above, LumenRef appears to be a reference-quality Lumen, "somewhat per pixel", that gives a "stunning pathtraced feel to deferred renders but orders of magnitude faster than using the full path tracer".
The scene above in the demo has no lights, Dylan says. It's lit only by those emissive signs, with almost pixel perfect lighting and reflections through the scene. "This is an absolute game changer for rendering cinematics in Unreal," the artist says.
Each frame takes around 30 seconds to render (in this case in 8K with 64 temporal samples on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7975WX and Nvidia RTX 5090).
The new Lumen mode appears to be for cinematics rather than games for now. Dylan says it does run realtime but is very noisy. Nevertheless, this is an early prototype that's almost certain to evolve.
Alas, there are still well over two years to go before the full release of the next-generation platform. Unreal Engine 6 is expected to get an Early Access release in late 2027 and a full launch 12 to 18 months later.
In the meantime, check out our guide to the best game development software. You might also need one of the best laptops for game development and the best graphics cards.
