Tutorial — Kiosk Lighting for a Life-Size MetaHuman

Augmented Traveler local tutorial. Back to Unreal — Tutorials · kiosk: Kiosk — Process · display: Hardware — Looking Glass Displays · set: Tutorial — Place Kits for Historic Interiors

How to light a figure shown at life size on the kiosk so they look like a person standing in the room: believable skin, living eyes, and period-true light. It must hold a steady frame rate on the kiosk PC.

Draft. No published benchmarks exist for MetaHumans on RTX 5080/5090 at 4K. Benchmark on our kiosk PC and screen, then lock the settings here.

1. The look we want

2. Engine settings (kiosk, Windows, RTX-class GPU)

Setting Choice Notes
Renderer Deferred, Shader Model 6, hardware ray tracing on Needed for MegaLights and hardware Lumen
Global illumination Lumen, hardware ray tracing Try the new Lumen Lite (medium quality, about twice as fast; Beta/Experimental in 5.8) if the budget is tight
Lights MegaLights (production-ready in 5.8) Many shadowed lights (lamps, candles) cheaply. Needs hardware ray tracing; not for headsets
Materials Substrate (production-ready since 5.7) Use MetaHuman's supplied skin, eye and hair materials. Don't rebuild them
Anti-aliasing / upscaling TSR At 4K, a 58–66% screen percentage is the balanced range; test 50% (1080p internal) if needed
Character Cine assembly, LOD0, strand hair Tutorial — MetaHumans in Unreal
Target Steady 60 fps (or 30 fps locked if the display and content allow) Decide with the kiosk integrator

3. A three-part lighting set-up (start here)

Start from Epic's character lighting presets (six presets by cinematographer Greig Fraser: Portrait, Split, Fireside, Moonlight, Tungsten, Red Lantern). Then adapt:

  1. Key light: a warm rect light (about 2,700–3,200 K for lamplight, 5,000–6,000 K for daylight through a window), 30–45° to one side, slightly above eye level, soft (large source size).
  2. Fill: a low-intensity, cooler bounce from the opposite side, or let Lumen's bounce from the set do it.
  3. Rim / separation: a subtle back light so hair and shoulders separate from a dark background, especially important for dark period clothing.
  4. Practicals: the oil lamp or candle in the set is a real light (MegaLights), with gentle flicker from a Light Function or animated intensity (±3–5%, slow).
  5. Eyes:
    • make sure the key light produces a catchlight (a small reflection) in each eye;
    • if it doesn't, add a small, dim light near the camera direction that affects only the figure (lighting channel).
    • Eyes without catchlights read as dead at life size.
  6. Skin: check subsurface scattering at the ears and nostrils against the key, and check that no area looks waxy. Don't raise the specular to "add life".

Use MetaHuman Creator's custom lighting scenarios (5.8) to preview the figure in our kiosk lighting while working on the character. A lighting scenario is a level that references L_BaseEnvironment and keeps its required actors. It is preview only; the shipped lighting lives in the program level.

4. Match the display

5. Performance

6. Check before opening

Sources