While ARRI’s acquisition by the Riedel Group was still less than three months ago, the company has remained quite steady, releasing new products and updates at a usual, if not advanced, pace since then.
This announcement of ARRI Luka, a new Unreal Engine plugin that aims to bring ARRI lighting and camera tools into a real-time virtual environment, is probably one of the more notable new developments the company has pushed live in quite some time—and hopefully a good sign of things to come.
Let’s take a look at this new, simple-to-use plugin for Unreal Engine that is here to allow anyone from film students to high-end gaffers and DPs to accurately test lighting and camera setups in their future-minded, real-time virtual environments.
ARRI Announces Luka Unreal Engine Plugin
Designed to be a simple, intuitive, and very easy-to-use plugin for Unreal Engine that helps filmmakers and DPs test lighting and camera setups in real-time virtual environments, LUKA is a scalable interface that is inclusive of users with little or no previous experience in Unreal Engine.
What’s cool about LUKA (besides being a great player on the Dallas Mavericks… er, now the Lakers) is that the plugin has an extensive, ever-growing catalog of ARRI luminaires, lighting accessories, cameras, recording formats, and lenses for users to explore—as well as options for inputting their own custom and third-party hardware as well.
Plus, with these ARRI Virtual Fixtures, built from the detailed specifications of real lighting fixtures, users can achieve the same look, reach, and tunability as the actual fixtures, with accurate color, intensity, and light distribution metrics to explore.
The Next-Generation of Lighting Work
Honestly, this is a pretty cool, future-focused play by ARRI that even offers seamless integration with lighting networks and control panels via ArtNet and sACN.
Users can even test out common accessories that can be attached to the fixtures or positioned around them, including diffusion, bounce, and flags, so that aspiring DPs and gaffers can explore how shadows can display realistic characteristics, whether hard-edged from an open-faced lamp, softened by accessories, or cast from multiple sources.
The ARRI Virtual Cam can also emulate different ARRI camera models and their settings, evolving Unreal Engine’s Camera Actor into a fully realistic production camera and incorporating key lens properties, such as focal length, focus setting, and T-stop.
Price and Availability
There’s a lot more to explore with LUKA, though, as it offers many opportunities to learn and streamline your workflows from pre-pro to post-pro. The plugin is available to try for free with a trial license; it looks like it will eventually only be available to commercial customers, with pricing TBA.
For more info, you can head to ARRI’s website here.
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