Lights
Add lights to shape, colour, and reveal your 3D scene — and choose exactly which scenes each light touches.
Lights bring your 3D geometry to life. Without one, the only thing illuminating your scene is the environment (sky and ambient light). Add a light to cast direct illumination, sculpt form with highlights and shadows, and tint the mood with colour.
Most lights are added with the light.dynamic node. Wire it alongside your geometry into the render.render node, and the renderer handles the rest.
Light types
A light's shape decides how it throws illumination:
Directional — parallel rays from a single direction, like the sun. Position doesn't matter, only the angle. Great for a key sunlight or moonlight.
Point — a glowing dot that radiates in all directions and fades with distance. Good for lamps, candles, sparks.
Spot — a cone of light pointing one way, with a soft edge you can widen or tighten. Good for stage lights, torches, headlamps.
Area — light emitted from a surface, giving naturally soft, wrapping shadows. The most flattering for product-style looks.
Real scenes rarely use a single light. A classic setup is a bright key light from one side, a dimmer fill from the other to soften shadows, and a rim behind the subject to separate it from the background.
Intensity, colour, and falloff
Three controls do most of the work:
Intensity — how bright the light is. Push it up for a punchy key, drop it for a subtle fill.
Colour — tints the light. Warm light feels like sunset or tungsten; cool light feels like daylight or moonlight. Colour mixes with the material colours it lands on.
Falloff — how quickly a point or spot light fades with distance. A short falloff keeps light pooled close to the source; a long one spreads it across the scene. (Directional light has no falloff — its rays never weaken.)
Lighting is physically based, so a light's colour and brightness interact with each material's metalness and roughness. A shiny metal picks up tight, bright highlights; a rough surface spreads the same light into a soft sheen. See Materials.
Shadows
Lights cast shadows automatically, with soft edges that get softer for area lights. Shadows are what make a scene feel grounded and three-dimensional.
The renderer shades up to four shadow-casting lights at full quality at once. Beyond that, extra lights still illuminate the scene but stop contributing crisp cast shadows — so make your most important few lights the shadow-casters.
For ray-traced shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion that read the whole scene, see Choosing a renderer.
Scope — which scenes a light affects
By default a light only lights its own scene. But a light is an influence, not a surface, so you can broaden its reach. This is set with the light's scope, the same way you control which scene any node belongs to (see Layers & scenes on nodes).
Scene (the default) — the light affects only the scene it lives in.
Global — the light reaches every scene at once. Handy for a shared sun or a master ambient wash.
Granular — the light affects an explicit list of scenes you pick.
Scope is what lets you light two scenes differently in one project — a warm interior in one scene and a cold exterior in another — while still sharing a single sun across both by setting that sun to Global.
A promoted (flattened) layer has no scene identity of its own, so only Global lights reach it.
See also
Environment & image-based lighting — sky, ambient, and HDRI lighting
Materials — how surfaces respond to light
Cameras — viewing your lit scene
The render node — assembling the final image
Layers & scenes on nodes — scenes and scope
Choosing a renderer — the built-in renderer and ray tracing