How to add lights to a 3D scene?

In this tutorial, you will learn about how to add lights to a scene, and use the [outliner] to management them. (This tutorial assumes that a scene is already created.)

1. Adding lights

If your scene seems under-lit, better add some more lights to the scene. Right click in space or press [Space] when nothing is selected to open up the generic radial menu again and left click [add light] this time.

Three types of lights are available:

Point light – light emitted from a single point, like what you would expect from candles.

Spot light – lights up only a targeted area, the lit area is bigger as it's further from light, like a torch or stage light.

Directional light – a huge light source that uniformly lit up the scene, doesn't care about distance from light source, only direction matters, like the sun.

Add one of each light into the scene and see how they affect your scene. Move the lights with the [widget] as you would with moving characters and props.

Note:

• When you grab the lights with either [G] or the purple pyramid in [widget], the lights do not clamp to the terrain, this is because we think lights are almost always above the ground.

• At the moment, point lights do not cast shadows, while the other two do.

2. Managing a scene with outliner

Now you have a few objects in the scene, you might not be able to keep track of where each one is, so this is where an [outliner] is useful. Open the generic radial menu, left click to select the [outliner].

The outliner has conveniently divided your objects in the scene into three groups: [characters], [props] and [lights], and you can select the object by left clicking its name tag. Double-click the name tag to rename the item to your liking. There are four icons beside each name tag, from left to right they are:

• [crosshair] – left click on the [crosshair] to let the camera centre on the object, similar to pressing the [F] key.

• [pointer] – left click on the [pointer] to toggle the object to be selectable/unselectable. This is quite useful if you populate a scene with props only as background, like a forest. You would make the trees unselectable after you've lined them up so you don't select them by accident during filming.

• [eye] – left click to toggle visible/hide. For lights, it turn on/off the light.

• [coloured circle] – left click to open a colour picker to change primary colour of the object. For character, it changes the skin colour; for props, it changes the primary colour; for light, it changes the light colour.

Tip: 
To get help messages for [Outliner] GUI, click [Help] at the tool bar on top of the scene window and check [Show Floating Tooltips in UI].

To remove objects from the scene, select the desired object, then press [Delete]. This works both in the scene and in [Outliner].

Save the scene after you have arranged it properly and given it a unique look.

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