Artist Developed Unreal Engine 5 Lighting Plug-in
The tool enables real-time light and shadow painting to bypass traditional limitations in game lighting workflows.
Updated on Oct. 6, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence
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Senior Lighting Artist Karim Yasser has created an Unreal Engine 5 plug-in that allows for real-time, non-destructive light and shadow painting. The tool is currently in development with an early access release planned.
Why it matters
This plug-in aims to address existing lighting constraints within Unreal Engine 5 by allowing artists to manipulate illumination through a 2D painting workflow. It enables faster iteration by storing lighting data directly in textures.
The tool supports global and local lighting through integration with Spot Lights and Gobos. It provides seven interaction modes—Paint, Smudge, Flatten, Smooth, Noise, Gradient, and Lasso—to manipulate light data stored directly in textures.
The players
Karim Yasser
A Senior Lighting Artist at MBC Game Studio known for developing artistic workflows for real-time environments.
Unreal Engine 5
A leading real-time 3D creation platform developed by Epic Games used for game development, film production, and architectural visualization.
The details
The plug-in introduces a 2D painting metaphor to 3D lighting, letting artists brush light and shadow directly onto surfaces. By storing the resulting data in textures, the system preserves user control and allows for non-destructive edits, where changes do not permanently overwrite the underlying light information. This approach bypasses standard engine limitations by allowing manual, per-pixel lighting adjustments.
Timeline
October 6, 2026: Article publication date.
The Tech Race
The plug-in arrives as real-time engines increasingly prioritize automated global illumination systems like Lumen. It represents a shift toward re-integrating manual, texture-based light authoring into these modern, high-fidelity pipelines.
Artists working within Unreal Engine 5 will be able to accelerate lighting workflows once the early access version becomes available. The tool will likely find its primary use among environment artists looking to perform fine-grained, non-destructive light adjustments.
The takeaway
The project signals a growing need for artist-driven, non-destructive tools within automated 3D rendering engines. Developers should track future updates on the planned early access release to see how custom shape support impacts integration with existing lighting workflows.
Further reading
Explore more developments in real-time environment creation in our Artificial Intelligence section.
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