Hey everyone,
I’m using Unreal Engine 5 to pre-visualize my lighting shows via DMX Live Control, and while the basic setup works, I’m really overwhelmed by all the features in UE5 — especially when it comes to achieving realistic lighting and scene rendering.
Here are some specific issues I’m facing:
- Lights continue to glow or fade softly, even though the DMX value is instantly set to 0 – almost like there’s a hidden fade time or soft dimmer behavior
- Shadows and light transitions appear soft, while I’d expect crisp, sharp edges (especially for fast lighting changes)
- Trusses flicker or sparkle strangely under daylight or intense lighting conditions
- Reflections often look wrong or behave unnaturally, especially with moving light sources or mirrors
- Strobe effects above 25Hz don’t look convincing — they don’t capture the fast, harsh “real-life” strobe look
I’m using some of the default DMX fixtures that come with UE5, but I also added third-party lighting assets (like Astera lights and other expansion packs).
So my question is:
Does anyone here have experience with realistic lighting/rendering setups for DMX in UE5?
Are there any good templates, presets, or workflows you’d recommend to improve realism?
Or would anyone be willing to give a quick crash course or best practices on lighting, performance optimization, or DMX rendering inside UE5?
I’d truly appreciate any help, tips, or links 
Thanks a lot!
Best regards,
Marten
Hey Marten, there is a lot to do with setting up live DMX in Unreal engine. I create a fixture pack in unreal engine and may be able to help.
Are you using your own fixture profiles in unreal engine? If so, it sounds like the shutter table may need to be created to match what the lighting console is sending, as it may be sending a default open value for that fixture that the default strobe table for an unreal engine fixture is interpreting as a slow pulse.
As for flickery truss, it could be a number of things. The default light bp is very bright, so it could be causing issues with reflections. Turning the roughness up or metallic down on your truss might solve this. Decreasing the spotlight intensity in the details panel may help as well, and using UE 5.6 may help because moving lights can utilize mega lights.
As for soft transitions, I’m about to battle this one. I honestly feel like it may be coded in, because the multi instance fixtures I make that use a rect light and beam material snap off immediately on a blackout - but plugin fixtures have a bit softer out, maybe .2 seconds to fade out.
Now let’s talk about strobes. I just upgraded the strobe component in my fixture pack, and found some stuff that epic shipped that made me thoroughly confused.
The default strobe method is to round a sine wave input by time - that means 50% on, 50% off.
I changed this so that it’s sine wave(time) - .9, so that I have 10% on, 90% off, which is more of a quick flash, led by the strobe frequency.
Epics random strobe made me say wtf. They took the range of frequencies for that row, and chose a random value, rounded up, and set different frequencies for each one. That means that in a row of 5hz to 10hz, there are 5 possible strobe frequencies assigned randomly to fixtures - far from a random strobe.
For a 0hz to 1hz, there’s only one frequency to choose from.
If you want to chat with me on discord, join the server Caleb Hoernschemeyer - Captivise or add me on Patreon at Caleb Hoernschemeyer - Captivise LLC | I focus on Unreal Engine DMX fixtures and development tools | Patreon and I can chat on either.
You can find my YouTube at https://youtube.com/@calebhoernschemeyer?si=cVVLWhdrC6cQ1I-4 and my channels main focus is DMX in unreal, and other visualization stuff.
Hope to hear from you if your still interested in DMX in unreal!
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