Lighting: sun, sky & time of day
Every scene has one shared sun and sky (a live time-of-day system or a fixed studio setup) that you can top up with placeable lamps.
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Every scene has one shared sun and sky (the base light for the whole world) that you configure in Settings ▸ Lighting. (To add local lamps on top of it, see Placeable lights.) The sun & sky has two modes.
Live (sun · moon · sky)
The default. A procedural system computes the sun, moon, and sky from the viewer's real location and the current time. By day the sun is your key light; at night the moon takes over (scaled to its phase), with stars fading in, all cross-fading through twilight. Open a scene at 3pm and it's bright; open it at midnight and it's moonlit.
Nobody is asked for their location. The sky places the visitor from their time zone: the clock's offset from UTC gives a longitude, and whether the zone keeps summer time says which hemisphere, which is enough for the sun's height and the time of day. A precise position is used only when the browser has already granted this site location access for some other reason, so a published scene never pops a permission prompt for a cosmetic sky. (Before, every live scene asked, and a visitor who declined got New York's sun.)
A Time of day control decides how the clock is read:
| Time of day | What it does |
|---|---|
| Live (viewer's clock) | The real sun/moon/sky for the visitor's own time zone and moment. Every visitor sees their own sky. |
| Always daytime | Pins a pleasant midday sun and ignores the clock, so the scene never goes dark. (No clock and no location needed.) |
| Set a time… | Pins one moment for every visitor. One-click presets (Sunrise, Noon, Sunset, Twilight, Midnight) or drag the clock slider to any minute. Sky, sun, moon phase, and stars all follow, so you can dial in a golden-hour or a starry-midnight scene deliberately. A preset pins the solar phase, not a clock: Sunset is re-derived for today's date every day, so it stays sunset in June and in December alike (the clock readout shows the minutes the sky is actually at). The slider pins a clock minute instead, and a fixed minute drifts with the season, on the horizon in August and well below it by winter. |
Moonlight and Moon color (Settings ▸ Lighting, in the Live mode) dial the moon's light once the sun is down. 1 is its natural, phase-scaled strength; 0 turns its light off while the disc still shows (the sky's own faint night fill stays), which is what a night scene that wants only its own lamps sets; up to 4 for a brighter-than-life moon. The pair is offered when the sky can reach night, not under Always daytime. Over MCP the same dial is lighting.moon.
Studio (manual sun + HDRI)
A fixed, hand-aimed sun plus a neutral studio environment for reflections, predictable and product-shot friendly:
| Control | Does |
|---|---|
| Sun azimuth / elevation | Aim the sun in the sky. |
| Sun intensity / color | Brightness and warmth. |
| Sun casts shadows | Toggle the shadow map. |
| Environment intensity | The ambient fill. In Studio mode, how strongly the HDRI lights reflections and fills shadows; in Live mode, a scale on the sky's own fill (0.55 is the sky as shipped; 0 leaves only the sun, the moon and your lamps). |
The Night fill light
Because Live follows the visitor's real clock, a scene built at noon can be close to black for someone who opens it at 10pm. So every new scene starts with one light already in it, called Night fill in the Scene Tree: a soft warm point light above the origin, set to the night day/night schedule.
That schedule is what makes it free rather than a trade-off. The runtime switches the light off entirely whenever the sky says day, so it costs nothing at noon and changes a daytime frame not at all; at night it brings the scene back up to roughly the brightness a daytime visitor sees. It doesn't cast shadows, so it doesn't spend one of your four shadow slots before you've placed a light of your own.
It's an ordinary node: rename it, move it, retune it, or delete it. If you're lighting a scene deliberately (or you've switched to Studio, where the clock doesn't apply), deleting it is a perfectly reasonable first move. And a scene holding only a camera and this light still counts as empty, so you keep the "add your first object" nudge.
Sun god rays & lens flare
Two optional, sun-aware post effects live in Settings ▸ Viewport Feel ▸ Post-processing: Sun god rays (crepuscular shafts streaming from the sun's screen position) and Sun lens flare (a glare + flare that brightens as you look toward the sun). Both are off by default, follow the sun, fade out at night, and show in published scenes too. God rays give you five: Ray intensity, exposure, reach, density and strength shape how the shafts look, and Ray samples is the one that costs: it is the number of steps marched per pixel, so 120 is roughly twice the GPU work of the default 60, paid by every visitor on every frame. If god rays are what made a scene heavy, lower samples before you lower anything else. Lens flare has intensity and glare size. The same panel holds color grading & LUTs and the master toggle for publishing the rest of the effect chain.
Per-page lighting zones (advanced)
A page surface can override the lighting for the area around it, cross-fading in as the camera approaches. Travelling from a "day" page to a "night" page can sweep the sun across the sky. It's a niche, camera-driven effect set in the page's Properties under Lighting Override.