ARRI LUKA Unreal Engine Plugin Announced – Virtual ARRI Lights and Cameras, Real-Time Lumen Previs, DMX and LiveLink Control

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by Nino LeitnerJune 24^th, 2026

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ARRI has released LUKA, an Unreal Engine plugin that drops accurate virtual replicas of its lighting fixtures and cinema cameras into a real-time Lumen environment. The tool spans previs, LED wall production, and post handover, and is currently available as a free three-month trial license for commercial customers.

For anyone who has ever booked a stage, rigged a dozen SkyPanels, and then discovered the look only half worked once the lens and stop were dialed in, LUKA is pitched squarely at that pain point. It is a planning sandbox where the lighting and the camera live in the same scene, so exposure, color, and shaping decisions can be argued out before the rental clock starts. ARRI positions it as inclusive of users with little or no prior Unreal Engine experience, from film students up to high-end gaffers and DPs, which is a notable framing for a company whose software has historically assumed a technical operator on the other end.

Virtual fixtures built on real photometric data

The foundation of LUKA is the ARRI Virtual Fixtures system, a set of light actors built from the photometric data of the real luminaires. According to ARRI, that means the virtual fixtures reproduce the same color, intensity, and light distribution as the physical units, with shadows that behave realistically whether they are hard-edged from an open-face lamp, softened by an accessory, or cast from multiple sources. These claims are based on ARRI’s own measurements and remain to be confirmed in independent testing.

The plugin currently ships with 21 different ARRI Light Actors, grouped by source type (HMI, tungsten, LED) and by the firmware generation that governs their control options. The catalog reaches across ARRI’s lighting history: TrueBlue daylight Fresnels (D5, D12, D25, D40), M-series open-face daylight units (M8, M18, M40, M90, ARRIMAX 18/12), the SkyPanel Classic family (S30-C, S60-C, S120-C, S360-C), the L-Series and L-Series Plus Fresnels, and the current LiOS-firmware fixtures including the Orbiter, the SkyPanel X21, and the SkyPanel S60 Pro. The discontinued L5-C, L7-C, and L10-C are present too, running their old-generation firmware with the same limited control set they had in the real world, a level of fidelity that will matter to anyone previsualizing a setup built around existing rental inventory.

Control depth scales with the fixture. LiOS and FW45 LED fixtures expose CCT, HSI, RGBW calibrated, CIE xy, Direct, and Gel color modes, white point control, cue mode with crossfades, and the same four dimming curves (linear, S-curve, exponential, logarithmic) found on the real units. The fixtures that consist of independently addressable Light Engines can be rendered with their full zone count: two zones on the S60-C, four on the S120-C and S60 Pro, eight on the X21, and twelve on the S360-C. ARRI notes that the multi-zone versions produce more realistic near-field distribution but cost more to render, while single-source versions trade that realism for performance.

Accessories, barndoors, and yoke behavior

As on a real rig, the spatial character of each light can be reshaped with accessories, and ARRI says the library is already extensive and will keep growing. The SkyPanel X, for instance, can be fitted with the HyperOptic for a hard, directional beam, the Dome for a soft source, or barndoors for cutting. Barndoors can be adjusted in base and leaf rotation, though ARRI flags that no proper collision is implemented yet, so it is possible to push the leaves into physically impossible overlaps. For point-light-based Fresnels and open-face units, the plugin stores measured light-source radii per accessory so that barndoor shadow casting stays believable, a detail that is easy to get wrong in generic 3D lighting tools.

Every fixture includes a manual yoke with top or bottom mounting, and the yoke’s mount point defines the actor’s coordinate origin, which keeps placement intuitive when you are dropping fixtures onto truss or stands. Automatic Yoke Selection decides between top and bottom mount based on surrounding geometry, and pan and tilt can be driven manually, via Unreal’s Pilot Actor view, or by tracking a chosen actor in the scene. The SkyPanel X21’s motorized Claypaky yoke is replicated and can be driven over DMX.

DMX, ArtNet, and a workflow that travels to the real stage

This is where LUKA stops being a previs novelty and starts looking like a production tool. The virtual fixtures integrate into lighting networks via ArtNet and sACN, and each light actor carries a DMXComponent that uses Unreal Engine’s native DMX system. The plugin ships parsed GDTF files for all the ARRI fixtures, so a DMX library and fixture patch can be built and the light actor will read the patch, detect the correct mode, and configure itself. The practical payoff, as ARRI describes it, is that a lighting program designed in the virtual world can be saved and applied directly to the physical gear on set, and lighting plots exported from the scene can be used to rig real equipment with high accuracy.

The supported DMX mode coverage is broad but not total. The SkyPanel X, for example, supports its legacy CCT+RGBW, the various 8-zone modes, and CCT+HSI and CCT+XY, while the 16- and 24-zone modes and the Ultimate modes are not yet implemented. Across all fixtures, attributes such as effect selection, gel selection, dimming curve, strobe, and fan control are currently unsupported over DMX. Anyone planning to lean on zone-based matrix modes needs to make sure an accessory with the matching number of light sources is selected first.

Beyond the catalog, LUKA provides a custom practical fixture as a base, which can be driven by an IES file or defined by hand, with control over luminous intensity in candela, CCT, gel, light-source type, and a custom body and emitter mesh. There is also a growing library of predefined practicals: incandescent bulbs from 25W to 1000W, fluorescent tubes, wall lanterns, indoor spotlights at fixed beam angles, streetlights, and office pendants, each with adjustable illuminance, color temperature, and gels.

Virtual ARRI cameras with a real ALEXA UI

On the camera side, LUKA implements virtual versions of the AMIRA, ALEXA Mini, ALEXA Mini LF, ALEXA 35, and ALEXA 265. The camera settings UI is modeled on the ALEXA 35 and shared across all the bodies, so the on-screen experience mirrors operating a real ARRI camera, down to FPS-driven exposure simulation, shutter angle versus exposure time, exposure index, model-specific internal ND filters, and white balance by CCT and tint.

The virtual cameras carry genuinely useful exposure tooling. False color is available with the standard ARRI scale, viewport processing reproduces what a real SDI output would show including framelines and status overlays, and the image can be output as a display-referred Look (sRGB, Rec 709, Rec 2020, or the Rec 2100 PQ and HLG HDR transforms) or as LogC3 and LogC4 depending on the camera. Lens behavior is modeled through ARRI’s own glass: Signature Prime and Zoom, Enso Prime, Master Prime, and Master Anamorphic, with focal length, focus distance, aperture, vignette, and anamorphic squeeze all in play. The anamorphic handling is faithful to a fault, so a 2.0x lens against a 1.0 project squeeze produces the same vertically stretched, un-desqueezed image you would see on a real monitor until you set the project squeeze correctly.

ARRI is candid about the current limits. The virtual camera does not yet simulate sensor noise, so the image at a given exposure index will not reflect real-world grain, and the white balance shift is described as less accurate than the color emitted by the fixtures, with both flagged for future optimization. Recording resolution and sensor mode menus are presently informative only; they tell you what speeds and formats would be available on the real camera without changing what the engine renders.

Rendering, color pipeline, and LED wall twinning

For finished output, LUKA leans on Unreal’s Movie Render Queue, Sequencer, and OpenColorIO. The ARRI camera inserts its own imaging pipeline ahead of OCIO, disabling Unreal’s tone curve while leaving your PostProcess and color grading intact, then running the scene through LogC conversion and the ARRI display transform. From there you can render display-referred 8-bit deliverables, LogC-encoded sequences, or OCIO transforms into ACES Rec 709 or ACEScg for a linear post workflow, with the plugin shipping its own OCIO configuration file referencing ARRI LogC3 and LogC4.

The piece most likely to interest virtual production stages is LiveLink camera twinning. LUKA can pair a virtual camera with a physical ARRI camera over LiveLink, syncing camera and lens settings in real time for live output, and it ties into ARRI’s Color Management calibration tool to improve results on LED walls. This slots LUKA neatly alongside ARRI’s existing virtual production stack and its SkyPanel S60 Pro digital twin, and it fits the broader strategic direction ARRI’s leadership laid out to us at NAB 2026, where software, services, and integrated technologies are set to carry more of the company’s value. If you want a primer on the surrounding discipline, our overview of working with LED walls in mixed reality and the new Virtual Production for Beginners course on MZed are good starting points.

LUKA is a Windows (Win64) plugin, available now with its user manual and trial license through the ARRI LUKA page. It is offered to commercial customers only, and a LUKA Trial License valid for three months is currently free; ARRI has not published commercial pricing. The plugin requires Unreal Engine, with several features such as MegaLights support tied to Unreal Engine 5.5 and later. Full details and the download are on the ARRI LUKA page.

Could a real-time virtual rig like this change how you plan your lighting and camera setups, or do you still trust your eye on the day over a Lumen preview? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!