Hello everyone, I’m Dağhan. Last week, I started talking about our new game engine, Unreal Engine, and its technologies that were effective in our preference. This week, I want to continue from the same place without slowing down. The new technology I want to talk about this week is “Lumen”.

Before I start talking about Lumen, I want to talk very briefly about lighting in rendering. The thing that brings both 3D modeling, games and all other 3D animations and movies closer to realism has always been the lighting of the environment. Although different methods have been developed over time, the most common one today is Ray-Tracing technology. Ray-Tracing is a graphic creation method that draws the image of a scene by considering how it moves by following the path of light, with a logic opposite to what light does in the real world. In the real world, light rays emerge from a light source and illuminate objects. Light reflects off objects or passes through transparent objects. Reflected light hits our eyes or camera lens. It can take forever to trace the rays in a scene, as most of the reflected light rays do not reach an observer. In Ray-Tracing, performance is increased by ignoring these unused rays. Making these calculations are called ‘baking’ and the mapping that emerges as a result of these calculations are called ‘lightmap’.

Lumen has taken this system one step further. The feature of Lumen technology is dynamic global illumination. With this global lighting technology, the rays coming from the light source can illuminate the environment by reflecting on the objects many times. While doing this, there is no need to bake the lighting or use a pre-calculated lightmap. This real-time calculation can affect reflections and ambient lighting depending on the light situation. In this way, not only the environment, but also any dynamic light to be used by the users in the space will be included in the scope of Lumen and will adjust in accordance with global lighting.

In this way, processes that take long hours and tire the performance will be shortened, as well as we will be able to reach a photo-realism that I could never reach before. We will be able to feel the effects of this feature the most when we are inside our translucent or glazed structures, so that users will be able to feel the atmosphere of the outside better even if they are inside the buildings, and at the same time, they will be able to integrate with the ambient atmosphere even more thanks to the lighting.

As this week ends, I want to approach to a different topic for the next week, and I want to start sharing our newly designed UI with you. See you next week!