Found this thread via Google, came to rant. It’s really glitchy in enclosed areas where reflections have the chance to bounce around. It will become dancey and blotchy very fast. Unfortunately this applies to all sharp corners & other areas with semi-enclosed spaces where the ‘not ray tracing that definitely is some form of software raytracing’ can get trapped traces. This is why everyone that uses Lumen makes their scene bright and/or open af. If you want a darkish scene and/or have objects with sharp edges, or any kind of reflection in enclosed spaces, you’re SOL with Lumen. It’s realistic… at the expense of performance and quality, unless you’re rocking a high end GPU and can pump up everything to max.
Even with Lumen off things are rendered in an entirely different hue for some materials. Like I’m doing the " Unreal Engine 4 Beginner Tutorial - UE4 Start Course" video by Unreal Sensei and during the lighting section the the walls he uses in his tutorial that look like a baby blue in his video look like turquoise for me. The textures look baby blue, the video looks baby blue, but they render as turquoise. Even with Lumen off they look turquoise, and the only way to bring out the baby blue is to nuke the walls with light. I also can’t recreate the same washed out lighting affect he does with Lumen off.
Another thing is that this new Lumen system is tied together to the other built in assets. Like if you don’t include a SkyAtmosphere with your SkyLight then the GI from the SkyLight straight up doesn’t render. Your skybox material influences the lighting too.
Personally, I’m a 100% newbie to Unreal and I’ve wasted many hours over the past few days trying to figure out why logical things things weren’t working only to find out they’re tied to some new UE5 feature that’s connected to something else. Another example is the Niagra particle system that is completely different with seemingly a thousand settings right off the bat and makes all pre-5 tutorials nigh (maybe) impossible to follow. If you want a basic emitter you’d better know your stuff. To me, this doesn’t feel like a game engine so much as geared towards technical artists and big studios that hire technical artists. If you’re a game developer be prepared to Google a lot and make notes of the new tricks you are forced to do just to have control. This noob is going to download UE4. I’ll give up ‘fancy’ performance hog real time lighting for accurate baked lighting and a workflow I can actually control. /end rant