Designing Visuals, Rendering, and Graphics

Rendering subsystem including lighting and shadowing, materials and textures, visual effects, and post processing.

Unreal Engine's rendering system is the core of its industry-leading visuals for designing interactive real-time experiences. Here, you'll learn about the features, concepts, and tools used to design and develop your projects that can scale from cinematic film and television quality to next-gen console and mobile platforms with remarkable fidelity.

The topics below can help you in setting up and managing your textures and materials applied to surfaces, learning about conceptual lighting techniques that can be applied when building your virtual worlds, creating stunning visual effects, optimizing and debugging content for performance, and much more.

Unreal Engine 5 Rendering Features and Tools

LumenTopicImage.png

Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections

A high level overview of Lumen's dynamic global illumination and reflections features.

lumen-far-field.png

Lumen Technical Details

An overview of technical capabilities and specifications of the Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections system.

nanite-topic.png

Nanite Virtualized Geometry

Overview of Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry system to achieve pixel scale detail and high object counts.

vsm-topic.png

Virtual Shadow Maps

Overview of using high resolution shadowing designed with film-quality assets and large dynamically lit open worlds in mind.

substrate-topic.png

Substrate Materials

Topics and reference about using the Substrate Materials framework.

PathTracer.png

Path Tracer

An overview of the features of the Path Tracer rendering mode.

gpu-dump-viewer-pass-viewer.png

GPUDump Viewer Tool

A multi-platform command that dumps intermediary RDG textures and buffers to disk for investigating and debugging rendering issues.

setup-and-execute-timelines-with-and-without-rdg.png

Render Dependency Graph

An immediate-mode API which records render commands into a graph data structure to be compiled and executed.

Art Setup and Tools

texture-asset-editor.png

Textures

Topics that discuss how and where texture assets are used.

materials-topic-image.png

Materials

Controlling the appearance of surfaces in the world using shaders.

pbr-topic-image.png

Physically Based Materials

An overview of the primary physically based Material inputs and how best to use them.

RenderTargets_topic.png

Render Targets

Save high resolution screenshots using a Blueprint tool to bake results to textures.

RenderToTexture_Topic.png

Render To Texture Blueprint Toolset

Save high resolution screenshots using a Blueprint tool to bake the results to textures.

topic.png

UV Editor

Overview of the UV Editor interface and tools.

Lighting Concepts and Features

lighting_topic.png

Lighting the Environment

Topics that demonstrate features and tools for lighting scenes.

RAndG_TopicSmall.png

Global Illumination

A collection of topics on the global illumination options available to choose from.

LumenTopicImage.png

Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections

A high level overview of Lumen's dynamic global illumination and reflections features.

lumen-far-field.png

Lumen Technical Details

An overview of technical capabilities and specifications of the Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections system.

vsm-topic.png

Virtual Shadow Maps

Overview of using high resolution shadowing designed with film-quality assets and large dynamically lit open worlds in mind.

RT_Shadows_Enabled-3.png

Hardware Ray Tracing and Path Tracing Features

A collection of topics around the supported features of ray tracing and path tracing.

![](building-virtual-worlds\lighting-and-shadows\features-of-lights\precomputed-lighting-scenarios\PCLS_Header.png)

Features and Properties of Lights

An overview of the various properties and features that lights support.

LM_Topic.png

Light Types and Their Mobility

The available types of lights to choose from and how their mobility settings affect lighting in the scene.

RAndG_TopicFull.png

Environmental Light with Fog, Clouds, Sky and Atmosphere

Components and tools that enable users to build immersive worlds with environment lighting from fog, clouds, sky and atmosphere.

distance-field-topic.png

Mesh Distance Fields

An overview of Mesh Distance Fields and its available features that you can use when developing your games.

RTR_MultipleBounces.png

Reflections Environment

Systems for how reflections are captured and displayed on reflective surfaces.

source-radius-example.png

Shadowing

An overview of available shadowing methods and the properties they support.

General Rendering Features

RAndG_TopicSmall.png

Designing Visuals, Rendering, and Graphics

Rendering subsystem including lighting and shadowing, materials and textures, visual effects, and post processing.

skin-cache-topic.png

Skeletal Mesh Rendering Paths

A high-level overview of the rendering paths available for Skeletal Meshes.

placeholder_topic.png

Rendering High Quality Frames with Movie Render Queue

A how-to guide for configuring the Unreal Engine Movie Render Queue feature to get high-quality cinematics—particularly when using ray tracing.

topic-image.png

Landscape Material Layer Blending

Setting up materials to work with Landscape terrains

topic-image.png

Creating and Using LODs

How To Create and Use LODs.

placeholder_topic.png

Understanding Lightmapping in Unreal Engine

Techniques and guidelines for setting up lightmap UVs for Static Meshes.

topic-image.png

Generating Lightmap UVs

An overview of generating your own lightmap UVs in Unreal Engine.

Visuals and System Tools

ppe_topic.png

Post Process Effects

Effects applied to the whole rendered scene prior to being rendered.

creating-visual-effects-topic.png

Creating Visual Effects

Use Unreal Engine's Niagara visual effects system to create and preview particle effects in real time.

ForwardRenderingTopic.png

Forward Shading Renderer

Describes the advantages of using the Forward Shading Renderer.

Performance and Debugging

RAndG_TopicFull.png

Optimizing and Debugging Projects for Real-Time Rendering

Concepts and approaches to optimizing and debugging your projects for real-time rendering with features and tools available in Unreal Engine.

nanite-topic.png

Nanite Virtualized Geometry

Overview of Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry system to achieve pixel scale detail and high object counts.

aa-topic.png

Anti-Aliasing and Upscaling

A high level overview of the Anti Aliasing options available in Unreal Engine.

VT_Hero.png

Virtual Texturing

An overview of the available virtual texturing methods in Unreal Engine.

SceneView_ViewFrustumCulled.png

Visibility and Occlusion Culling

An overview of available visibility and occlusion culling methods.

RenderDocTopicImage.png

Using RenderDoc with Unreal Engine

RenderDoc is a standalone open-source graphics debugger that you can use to perform single-frame captures and inspect them.

gpu-dump-viewer-pass-viewer.png

GPUDump Viewer Tool

A multi-platform command that dumps intermediary RDG textures and buffers to disk for investigating and debugging rendering issues.

Overview_Topic.png

Texture Streaming

System for loading and unloading textures into and out of memory during gameplay.

rrv-topic.png

Render Resource Viewer

A tool to assist in identifying resources and their assets allocated to GPU memory.

Mobile Rendering and Visualization

placeholder_topic.png

Mobile Rendering Features

Learn about Unreal Engine's mobile rendering path and its support for graphics features.

MobilePreview_topic.png

Mobile Previewer

Previewing your games inside the Unreal Engine is based on the selected Mobile Platforms.

Visualization Tools

PathTracer.png

Path Tracer

An overview of the features of the Path Tracer rendering mode.

hdri-topic.png

HDRI Backdrop Visualization Tool

A Blueprint tool to quickly set up product visualization using an HDR image projection with real-time lighting and shadowing.

sunsky-plugin-topic.png

Sun and Sky Actor

A tool that provides a time of day system that is geographically accurate for location, date, and time.

sun-position-topic.png

Geographically Accurate Sun Positioning Tool

A tool giving you fine control over the Sun's geographic location based on latitude, longitude, date, and time.

Third-Party Tools

RAndG_TopicFull.png

Third-Party Rendering Tools and Plugins

A listing of third-party tools and plugins that are available.

Graphics Programming

Help shape the future of Unreal Engine documentation! Tell us how we're doing so we can serve you better.
Take our survey
Cancel