Placeable lights
Drop point, spot, and soft area lamps into a scene, with shadows, a day/night schedule, projected gobo/cookie patterns, and volumetric light shafts.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
Beyond the scene-wide sun & sky, you can drop placeable lamps into a scene: a lantern, a streetlamp, a spotlight on a display, a soft glowing panel. A light node adds to the sun & sky; it's a lamp, not a second sun. Add one from Create ▸ Light (Point, Spot, or Area), then tune it in the Light section of Properties: the Type dropdown switches between the three at any time.
Point vs spot vs area
| Type | What it is |
|---|---|
| Point | A bulb that shines in every direction from its position. |
| Spot | An aimed cone of light. It beams down the node's local -Y: rotate the node to aim it. |
| Area | A soft rectangular panel (like a studio softbox or a glowing sign): gentle wraparound light and smooth specular streaks. It faces down the node's local -Y, and shows as a faint glowing quad in the scene so it reads as a real fixture. Sized by Width / Height in metres. |
The controls
| Control | Does |
|---|---|
| Color | The light's tint. |
| Intensity | Brightness: around 30 reads like a bright lamp a few metres out. |
| Range · Decay | Point & spot. How far the light reaches in metres (0 = unlimited), and the falloff exponent (2 is physically correct; lower carries further). |
| Width · Height | Area only. The panel's size in metres. |
| Angle° / Softness | Spot only. The cone's half-angle, and how feathered its edge is (0 = hard, 1 = fully soft). |
Don't stand the lamp in its own beam
If you model a visible fixture (a barrel, a housing, a shade) and put it on the light's axis, it blocks the cone. A 26 cm barrel sitting 60 cm from a 19° spot covers most of the beam: your subject goes dark while the pool on the floor stays bright, and turning the intensity up only blows out the floor. Nothing looks wrong in the viewport, because the thing doing it is the geometry you meant to be there.
Two ways out, and sideways is the reliable one:
- Offset it to the side of the axis by a bit more than the fixture's own radius: the beam passes it cleanly.
- Or pull it back along the axis until it subtends only a sliver of the cone, which for a narrow spot means metres, not centimetres.
The Assistant and Claude via MCP are told when this happens: a scene where a fixture blocks its own lamp comes back with a warning naming both clearances in metres for that particular lamp.
Shadows (budgeted)
Tick Cast shadows to have a light throw real shadows. Shadows are expensive, so at most four lights cast at once: the first four shadow-enabled lights in scene order win, and the Inspector shows the running count (and warns a light that's over budget). Everything else stays lit, just shadowless. An area panel can't cast a true shadow on its own, so ticking Cast shadows gives it a soft grounding shadow instead, enough to sit objects convincingly on the floor.
The budget is per neighborhood, not per scene. On a multi-room site, bind each lamp to its page under Neighborhood ▸ Belongs to and every room gets its own four. Otherwise the first rooms in scene order spend the lot and the rooms you built last get no shadows at all, however far away they are. The count in the Inspector reads within the selected light's own room. See scoping a room to its neighborhood.
Day / night schedule
Each light has a Time of day setting so it can switch itself with the Live sky:
A "Night only" streetlamp lights up at dusk and switches off at dawn on its own. (The Always-daytime toggle and Studio mode both count as day.)
Gobos, cookies & light shafts
A gobo (or cookie) projects a pattern through the light: the dappled light of leaves, window slats, rippling water. Both spot and point lights support it (area panels don't). Pick a bundled pattern (Dapple, Blinds, Window pane, Caustics) or a Custom image/video, and optionally set Motion ▸ Drift to give it a slow wind-like pan and spin.
- Spot: the pattern is projected straight through the cone onto surfaces.
- Point: the pattern wraps all the way around the bulb (lat-long), and only shows once you turn on the volumetric glow below.
Turn on Lit air and the light becomes visible: a spot renders shafts of light, god rays through the cone; a point renders a soft glowing sphere of lit air around the bulb. Either way the lit air is carved by the scene's shadows, so objects punch real gaps in the beam (and the gobo/cookie pattern shows in it too). Beam / glow density controls how thick the lit air reads.