Lights are a very important part of rendering a scene. They define object visibility, color, and set the mood. Sketchfab supports two kinds of lighting: Real-time dynamic lights and Environmental lights.
Light tools are available in 3D Settings:
- From your model, go to Edit 3D Settings or add "/edit" to the end of any model URL.
- Select the Lighting panel in the top left.
Only the model's author can access 3D Settings. Edits you make will not change your original file, they will only affect viewing on Sketchfab.
Lights will only have an effect when shading is set to Lit (see Scene settings).
For 3D scans and models with baked lighting, we recommend you to set Shading to Shadeless and not use lights.
Real-time Dynamic Lights
Real-time dynamic lights simulate different kinds of lights sources. They let you precisely control how your model is lit.
Lighting Presets
The easiest way to have a good lighting is to choose among the available presets. There are currently 6 presets that cover different kinds of moods and styles.
Click Load Lighting Preset and select one of the available presets.
Manual Setup
There can be up to 3 lights per scene, which is usually enough for sophisticated lighting setups such as the classic 3-point lighting.
The light list shows you the type of light for each slot and lets you turn them on or off. Click a light slot to open its properties. Hover on a light slot and click Move to center to move the light to the center of scene and reset its direction.
Choose None to remove the light completely.
Directional
The directional light simulates the light emitted by the sun.
- The light is infinite.
- Only the direction counts; changing the position of the light will not change the lighting.
You can adjust:
- Color
- Intensity
- Direction
- Attached to camera
- Shadows
Point
Point lights simulate small sources of lights, such as light bulbs.
- It is positioned in space; its position affects the lighting
- Light is emitted in all directions.
- Light becomes less intense farther away from the source.
You can adjust:
- Position
- Color
- Intensity
- Falloff (how far the light reaches)
Spot
The spot light is similar to a theater spot light or a desk lamp. It projects light as a circle.
- It is positioned in space; its position and rotation affect the lighting.
- Light becomes less intense farther away from the source.
You can adjust:
- Position
- Direction
- Color
- Intensity
- Falloff (how far the light reaches)
- Angle (how large is the circle)
- Softness (how soft is the edge of the circle)
- Shadows
Hemispheric (“Hemi”)
Hemispheric light simulates the effect of an overcast sky with light bouncing on the ground. It is similar to the directional light.
- The light is infinite.
- Only the direction counts; changing the position of the light will not change the lighting.
You can adjust:
- "Sky" color and intensity
- "Ground reflection" color and intensity
- Direction
- Attached to camera
Attached to camera
Directional and Hemispheric lights can be attached to the camera, making the lighting consistent whatever the point of view. For example, if the light is set to come from the top right corner of the screen, it will always come from this corner when you move around the model. Backlights (or rim lights) usually work best when attached to the camera. However, lights attached to the camera hurt rendering performance.
Shadows
Direction and Spot lights in the Lighting editor can be set to cast real-time shadows on your models.
Enable Cast shadows to activate this option and tweak the Shadows bias value to get the best result for your model: change it so you get the least amount of noise, while the shadows are still "connected" to your objects.
Due to their nature, real-time shadows may look different from rendered shadows. If you need high-resolution shadows, blurred shadows, etc., you should consider baking them.
Ground Shadows
The Ground Shadows feature allows you to automatically add a ground plane under a model without creating it yourself before uploading.
Shadow Catcher
The Shadow Catcher option places a plane under the model for casting shadows from real-time lights.
- Opacity defines the intensity/transparency of the shadows on the plane.
- Border Fade removes the hard edges of the plane to allow shadows to fade to transparent.
- Height defines the vertical position of the plane between 1 and -1 world height; 0 sets it at the bottom of the model.
- Size defines the horizontal scale of the plane.
Here's an example of the real-time Shadow Catcher in action:
Baked AO
The Baked AO option bakes an ambient occlusion texture onto the ground plane. It will take about 10 seconds to prepare the baked texture each time you adjust settings.
- Opacity defines the intensity/transparency of the shadows on the plane.
- Border Fade removes the hard edges of the plane to allow shadows to fade to transparent.
- Height defines the vertical position of the plane between 1 and -1 world height; 0 sets it at the bottom of the model.
- Shadow diffusion defines how sharp or blurry the baked shadow is.
Here's an example of the Baked AO shadow:
Environmental Lighting
Environments offer a 360° panorama background for your models, and will affect lighting and reflections. Environmental lighting is very important in PBR materials. It creates realistic lighting and reflections.
Environment Settings
- Choose an environment from the drop-down menu.
- Import your own with the Import Environment HDR button.
- Use the Orientation slider to rotate the environment itself around the scene's z-axis.
- Use the Brightness slider to change the background's reflections and ambient light brightness.
Control the background's brightness and blur level, or turn it off completely, in Scene settings.
Our default environments are provided by HDRLabs thanks to Christian Bloch, as well as hdrmaps.com. "Studio Soft" was provided courtesy of Browzwear.
Importing environments
Pro members and above can import custom environments in 3D Settings.
- We support .HDR and .EXR formats
- The maximum file size is 50MB
- The maximum resolution is 2048px × 1024px (Larger images will be downsized)
- There is no limit to the number of environments you can import
The process for creating your own HDR environment is explained in The HDRI Handbook 2.0.
Here are some websites that offer free environments:
- https://hdrmaps.com/freebies/
- https://www.hdri-hub.com/hdrishop/freesamples
- https://dativ.at/lightprobes/
- https://noemotionhdrs.net/
- http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html
- https://hdri-skies.com/
- https://blog.gregzaal.com/category/hdr-panos/
- https://www.maxroz.com/hdri
- https://www.eisklotz.com/products/hdri/
- https://polyhaven.com/hdris
- https://hdrihaven.com/
Saving
Once you've made your adjustments, including position and orientation, be sure to update your model's thumbnail image and default position with Save View and/or save your changes with Save Settings. You can return to your model by clicking either the model's name or Exit.
Also see:
Comments
29 comments
This is really nice stuff! :-)
Great job!!
How do you load your own environments though?
I'm also wondering how to change the environment with my own panoramas. How do you do that? Is it possible?
@cognition @gunnar - We just released this feature!
Hi @James
Could you please update this lighting help page to explain how the environnement is casting shadows ?
It seams that the shadows are casted from an arbitrary directional light not in relation with the HDRI map content.
See in the exemple below where there is not directional highligt in the map but still a spot light is generating light and shadows from one direction.
https://sketchfab.com/models/e39555d3242a4c48a3bb4d3bf98b651b
Regards
Fred
Hi Fred,
I believe the shadows are cast by a point of the highest brightness in the HDR image. Looking at that model, your environment is more or less uniform, so the highlight/shadow seems arbitrary.
If you look at other environments in the list, you can see the brightest point is marked in the thumbnail.
I am trying to upload a 360 environment, but it's taking forever and still "Processing your environment". How long does this take? I am going on 15 minutes for a 29 mb file, is this normal?
Hi there,
Sorry about that! It's a known issue that environment processing is really slow at the moment. We have some improvements planned, but it going to be a while before we can implement them because they will depend on some other infrastructure improvements coming later this year.
In the meantime, the environments should finish processing eventually, and you'll find them available in the dropdown.
Hi James!
I use Tilt Brush exporter，but the color is not beautiful as in tilt brush.
I clicked Load Lighting Preset and there is no select of the available presets.
I don't know how to modefy the light. Can you help me?
And, the brushes with flickering effects are not displayed properly. (>﹏<) Why？
Wish your reply.
thx
Luna S. H.
Hi James, Hi everyone, how to set light from within an object, like a lamp in the dark ? Thanks
Hello,
We don't have a way to attach a light to an object, but you can fake it by placing an appropriate light inside or nearby.
Not the best example, but I tried this quickly with a spot light near the lightbulb of the lamp:
With some emission and Bloom, you could also make the light a bit more realistic.
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/table-lamp-duplicated-version-6478b45ab00046cd8d8ed69412bdf651
I can't set the spot light falloff more than 1, Why that happens?
wowsolution - A falloff of 1 means that the light intensity falls off immediately, while a falloff of 0 means the light never falls off (it reaches infinitely far away). Can you explain the use case or link to a model where you would need a falloff greater than 1?
To elaborate a little bit, lights at the moment are not completely physically accurate, and we are using an approximation of real life attenuation effect. We will work on a more physically based lightning in the future. Falloff is sort of an arbitrary factor that doesn't make sense in real life.
Hey, is it possible to import lights to sketchfab using blender in someway? Even if it is the position will optimize my workflow a lot. Thanks.
Hey re1monsen
I'm afraid we do not import lights from Blender (or any other formats). Are you trying to have the same lighting settings across many models? In the future, we hope to implement a "presets" feature that will allow you to easily save and copy settings such as lighting between models, and/or set a default. Is that something you would be interested in?
Hey James,
I think it would be a great feature. Everything you can do over there to make the lighting process dynamic is greatly appreciated. If I can upload and start from a few custom presets that have the basic look I work with and copy and paste them between the models is a huge time saver. What will also be great is to be able to rotate all lights at the same time from a single point . Sometimes I want that specific angle of the model to be perfectly light with the proper light ratio and it is really hard to do it when most of the time I can't even see the light gizmos. What I'm saying is parenting all lights to an empty and rotate that empty to rotate all the lights in the scene. I don't know how hard it will be to implement but it will be huge to have it.
Thank you for the reply and for the amazing work with the platform. .
Understood! Thanks for the feedback.
At the moment, the closest we have to that is the ability to rotate all the lighting, just the environment, or just the real-time lights around the z-axis simultaneously. You can read about this here: https://help.sketchfab.com/hc/en-us/articles/202509026-Navigation-and-Controls#lights
Jamesssss
I was looking at the Lab section of SF and I saw an example of a youtube video embedded in a 3d model. Is it possible to add video textures to models? If so, where can I learn to do it. Also I would like to mention that the Screenshot tool is super duper useful.
Hello!
Glad the screenshot tool is useful for you! Posting links here for anyone else who lands here:
You can add video textures to models using the Viewer API.
Great, I'll try to make it work.
Hello! I be needing to import many models in the future and apply the same custom lighting preset to each. Is there a way to save lighting presets? Is there any way to configure all the 3D settings programmatically via API?
thanks!
Hello! Not yet, but it's a big project that we want to do in the future. I'm going to create a support ticket on your behalf so that I can add your vote to the feature request.
Jamessss!!
Are the default Sketchfab's Hdris accessible to the public for download?
Thanks!
Hi @re1monsen
Yes, you can find them here: https://github.com/sketchfab/sketchfab-legacy-environments
Hi James
Fantastic! Thank you very much! This is going to be greattt!
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