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Effects & Atmosphere

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.

A Time of day control decides how the clock is read:

Time of dayWhat it does
Live (viewer's clock)The real sun/moon/sky for the visitor's own location and moment. Every visitor sees their own sky.
Always daytimePins a pleasant midday sun and ignores the clock, so the scene never goes dark. (Also skips asking the viewer for their location.)
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.

Studio (manual sun + HDRI)

A fixed, hand-aimed sun plus a neutral studio environment for reflections — predictable and product-shot friendly:

ControlDoes
Sun azimuth / elevationAim the sun in the sky.
Sun intensity / colorBrightness and warmth.
Sun casts shadowsToggle the shadow map.
Environment intensityHow strongly the studio HDRI lights reflections and fills shadows.
Which mode should I use? Use Live for an experience that feels real and changes with the visitor's day. Use Studio when you want every visitor to see exactly the same lighting — galleries, product showcases, anything where consistency matters. If a Live scene looks dark to you, it's probably night where you are — flip on Always daytime.

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. Each has a couple of intensity/size sliders. 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.

Spotted something off, or want a topic covered? Email buck.rackley@gmail.com.