Lights

Direct illumination for a 3D scene, with control over which scenes each light touches.

Without a light, the only thing illuminating a scene is the environment, its sky and ambient light. A light casts direct illumination, sculpts form with highlights and shadows, and tints the mood with colour.

Most lights are added with the Light node. Wire it alongside the geometry into the Render node.

Light types

A light's shape decides how it throws illumination.

• Directional. Parallel rays from a single direction, like the sun. Position does not matter, only the angle. Use it for a key sunlight or moonlight.

• Point. A glowing dot radiating in all directions, fading with distance. Lamps, candles, sparks.

• Spot. A cone pointing one way. inner_angle is full intensity, 25° by default, and outer_angle where it fades to nothing, at 35°. Widen the gap for a softer edge. Stage lights, torches, headlamps.

• Area. A soft rectangular light emitting from a whole surface rather than a single point, giving wrapping shadows and broad highlights. The most flattering for product-style looks. position and direction aim it, size_x and size_y set the rectangle, and a bigger rectangle softens the shadow further. It emits along its direction only unless two_sided is on.

Real scenes rarely use a single light. A classic setup is a bright key from one side, a dimmer fill from the other to soften shadows, and a rim behind the subject to separate it from the background.

Under the Path Traced integrator a Light node is not the only source in the room. Every emissive triangle in the scene is sampled as a light too, so a surface glowing from its material's emissive genuinely illuminates what is around it rather than only appearing bright. See Choosing a renderer.

Intensity, colour and falloff

intensity is how bright the light is, 10 by default: up for a punchy key, down for a subtle fill. It can go well above 1, because lighting works in HDR. color tints the light and mixes with the material colours it lands on, warm reading as sunset or tungsten and cool as daylight or moonlight. range is the distance at which a point or spot light reaches zero; a short range keeps light pooled close to the source, a long one spreads it across the scene. Directional light ignores both position and range, because its rays are parallel and never weaken.

Lighting is physically based, so a light's colour and brightness interact with each material's metallic and roughness. A shiny metal picks up tight, bright highlights; a rough surface spreads the same light into a soft sheen. See Materials.

Shadows

A light does not cast a shadow until you ask it to. cast_shadows is off by default on every light type, so a new light illuminates and nothing more. Turn it on per light.

The other side is per object. Object Render Properties sits in a geometry stream and stamps render flags onto whatever passes through, so one prop can be taken out of the shadow pass while the rest of the scene keeps casting. Three of its controls reach the renderer today: cast_shadows on meshes, visible on analytic-shape content, and opacity on analytic shapes and sprites. receive_shadows, double_sided and render_order are recorded on the geometry and nothing reads them, so setting them changes nothing.

Shadows are ray-traced, which is a whole-scene method rather than a screen-space one. It is on by default and lives on the Render Settings node, covered in The render node.

There is no softness dial for a scene shadow. Penumbra comes from the light's own extent: shadow rays aim at a jittered point on an area light's rectangle, so a bigger size_x and size_y give a softer edge. shadow_softness on the node belongs to the field output below, and is ignored otherwise.

The light list is unbounded. There is no cap on how many lights illuminate a render.

Scope

By default a light lights only its own scene. A light is an influence rather than a surface, so its reach can be broadened. 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) affects only the scene the light lives in.

• Global reaches every scene at once, which is what a shared sun or a master ambient wash needs.

• Granular 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 and a cold exterior in the other, while 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.

The light as a field

The node has a second output, field, which is the same light as spatial radiance rather than as a light record. It feeds anything that takes a colour field: a fill pin, a composition graph, a volumetric preview. Wire a distance field into scene_sdf and that field output gains sphere-traced shadows, with shadow_softness setting the penumbra.

Parameters

See also

• Environment & image-based lighting for sky, ambient and HDRI lighting

• Materials for how surfaces respond to light

• The render node

• Layers & scenes on nodes