Rendering Design

UDK 3.0 uses the Gemini rendering engine: Unreal Engine 3’s multi-threaded rendering system, Gemini, gives you a 64-bit HDR rendering pipeline. The raw power behind Unreal Engine 3’s rendering system will push your creations to new levels. Your work has never seemed as alive as it is with Unreal Engine 3.

Unreal Engine 3 brings you Gemini, the multi-threaded rendering system. Gemini creates a lush visual reality and provides the power necessary for photorealistic simulations. Deliver stunning results with this flexible and highly optimized renderer.

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Global Illumination
UDK 3.0 has lightmass, which is a global illumination solver: "Illuminate your world with Unreal Engine 3’s advanced game lighting and shadowing system, screen space ambient occlusion and Unreal Lightmass, the global illumination solver yielding high-quality static lighting and effects. Unreal Engine 3 supports all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques as well as custom, artist-controlled per-material lighting models."

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Light Rigs
Light rigs should be constructed for the exterior, interior, and characters. Additionally, light linking should be performed on each object to avoid light pollution. Should we do this?

Ambient Occlusion
To simplify shading, the game will support ambient occlusion.

Textures

 * What should we support as the maximum texture size (I've read we can raise it to 4096x4096)?

Review & Feedback
It looks like UDK's lighting/shading will be a good tool for rendering the forge and the external environment. There are still some question marks in some parts of this page, I say just decide what you want to do with each of them and go for it.