So UE5 Lumen is not archviz(interior design) friendly??

Development Rendering
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Hi All,

Creating this post to discuss the lighting method for Archviz(inteiror).

  • Lights with their Mobility set to Static are not supported because Static Lights are stored completely in lightmaps and their contribution is disabled when Lumen is enabled.

My understanding is Lumen work well with Nanite and directional light, sounds like it is perfect for game design especially open world game, I saw many Hollywood-quality home made game and really enjoy and excited.

However when I do interior design rendering such as an office and restaurant, these models have lots of static mesh and static lightings, so for us who use UE5 for interior design we have to change Lumen to None (or others) and all other GI method result are bad, so bad I’d rather use 4.27 gpu baking.

this is a big issue stopping me moving from UE4 to UE5 because most of my scenes are interior where have lots of spot lights and will not survive in UE5.

In that case, is UE5 yet to ready for archviz(interior)? Any advises are welcome :slight_smile:

Leo

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Greetings @leoletsrock !

Just so you’re aware, this topic has been moved from the International forum category to the Development - Rendering forum category.

Just remember, when posting, please review the categories to ensure your topic is posted in the most relevant space.

Wishing you the best of luck with your project,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Moderator :smiley:

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If UE5 is ready for your archviz projects depends on the desired quality / realism, scale and how you want to use the result. For me it is but I’m mainly doing houses / villa’s.

Epic’s GPUlightmass creates nice results for static lighting in 5.1 (if you use the github version due to a bug in the launcher 5.1). Great for VR.

Lumen is still new tech and requires objects to be split up in smaller chunks. For VR the framerate using lumen is quite a bit lower but its still really wonderful to be able to design and evaluate your scene without baking lights in between changes.

In my work as an architect I use three methods side by side and the switch between them is controlled by the post process volume & streaming levels with lighting scenarios.

  1. Lumen during design, fine tuning the scenes and when evaluating in VR
  2. GPUlightmass for finalizing with increased quality and VR with clients. Lightmaps have more detail and the surfaces don’t ‘flicker’ like Lumen can do on bright surfaces.
  3. Pathtracer for creating more high quality stills.

See an example of Lumen & GPUlightmass day & night for a small house here (recorded from VR).

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Hi Maxbrown,

I think thats very smart mix use of cpu and gpulightmass in your case. I havent do any VR scene yet cant response yet.

You also reminded me the Luoshuang GPU lightmass plugin, i though it was a UE4 thing didnt know they keep updating for UE5 too.

I use Luoshuang most of the time, the rendering i do using GPU lightmass is much nicer than the CPU does.

Sadly all the Luoshuang gpu dropbox link are down now, dont know why, will give it a try once I get the files.

Leo

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Lumen does well with archviz type scenes with a lot of natural lighting, but quickly becomes less stable and low quality the more closed off it is.

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There are 2 versions of the Luoshuangs plugin these days;

  1. the original/old plugin he made that has been updated since then by some people (and maybe also Luoshuang). You used to dowload it from Dropbox.
  2. a new plugin Luoshuang made once he was hired by Epic. For this one, just open ‘plugins’ and enable GPUlightmass plugin. It has some different settings but it works quite nicely.