I've always liked Cornell Box renders, as well as the real life model they are based on, for the place it has in 3D graphics history, so I figured it would be a good simple project to test UE5's Lumen global illumination. I have to admit that while Lumen does have a few small limitations here and there, it does manage to get incredibly realistic results, especially for a real time GI solution. And it makes the workflow of lighting a scene in UE5 so much more fun and intuitive!
This scene is lit trying to match the reference, using the rectangular light in the ceiling and two supporting point lights on each side of the camera. I did have to cheat a bit with the ceiling by adding additional lights to make the hole shine like in the reference without over lighting the scene, maybe I could have achieved that with the more accurate camera settings instead, but I'm not that skilled when it comes to camera settings. 😅
The scene also uses the new virtual shadow maps introduced in UE5, and while they are a bit noisy in this release at the default settings, they do give pretty accurate results as well.