Lighting Art Course for Gamedev [UE5] by Yury Vorobiev

This course is a straight shot into practical game lighting. Yury Vorobiev walks you through setting up lighting for a ton of different scenarios, from overcast exteriors to tight interior spaces. You’ll get over 12 hours of content focused on making your scenes look good and run well, without the fluff.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Set up lighting for exterior, interior, and natural environments.
• Understand the difference between Static, Stationary, and Movable light mobility.
• Implement Lumen and Ray-Tracing for real-time global illumination.
• Create lighting for multiplayer maps and cinematic cutscenes.
• Balance artistic beauty with performance optimization.

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic understanding of Unreal Engine’s interface is helpful, but Yury explains everything from the ground up.
• Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Photoshop (or any image editor).
• Hardware: A PC capable of running Unreal Engine 5.

📝 Description

This isn’t just a button-pushing tutorial. Yury starts with the core theory—color, light behavior, and how cameras see—so you understand why you’re doing something, not just how. Then, he applies that theory across seven distinct projects.

You’ll work through real-world scenarios: lighting a sunny seaside town, a moody sci-fi corridor, and a dark forest using Lumen. The course also covers the often-overlooked topic of multiplayer lighting, where you have to balance visuals for multiple players. Each module comes with source files and lighting layers so you can dissect his setups.

The focus is on the artistic side of lighting. Even if you use a different engine, the principles of composition, color, and mood are universal. Yury also shows you how to optimize your lighting to keep your frame rates healthy, a critical skill for any game dev.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Aspiring lighting artists who want a structured, project-based learning path.
• Environment and level artists who want to improve the lighting in their own scenes.
• 3D artists looking to present their work with more professional, cinematic lighting.

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Yury Vorobiev is a Lead Lighting Artist with over 5 years of experience in the game industry. He has worked on major titles like Halo Infinite (as a Senior Lighting Artist) and Saints Row The Third Remastered. His experience spans realistic and stylized art directions, single-player and multiplayer maps, and in-game cinematics. He has also written articles for 80.lv on lighting for games, sharing his expertise with the wider community.

🏁 Final Result

• A portfolio of 7 different lit environments, demonstrating your ability to handle exterior, interior, natural, and cinematic lighting scenarios.
• A solid understanding of Unreal Engine 5’s lighting systems, including Lumen and Ray-Tracing.
• The ability to critically evaluate and optimize your own lighting for performance.