How to get professional lighting for beginners

Hey, I am GalaxyWorld and this is my first community tutorial so I hope it is good enough to help people who click on this thread. I am going to show you how to give your game a professional looking lighting effects and show you how to choose the colours yourself as it can be hard, when starting to pick good colours. Thank you.

Part 2 coming soon, link here:

Good day time weather lighting:

Step 1. Open up your roblox world, i’ll be using the default pirate island for this. The first, most important step is to set technology to ShadowMap. You do this by selecting Lighting > Technology > ShadowMap:

Step 2. Choose your shadow softness, located above technology. At 1, your shadows are very fuzzy and faded and at 0 your shadows are clean and crisp. I am going to pick 0.

Step 3. Add ambience. Ambience will give your game a nice feel and tinge of colour. To do this at the very top of lighting, it says “Ambience” I would change this to a deep blue colour to make it feel clean or an orange for a place like a desert.

Step 4. Set your brightness to 1 to 2. Why? Because when we add sun rays and Exposure Conpensation later on, it will be too bright if you don’t. I will use 1.5 brightness. Your game should look a little like this so far:

Step 5. Set your colour shift bottom to a sky blue colour, something like you see when you look out of an airplane window, a light blue colour. Then set colour shift top to an orange or white colour. Personally I prefer orange. It should now look a little like this:

Step 6. Outdoor ambient. Outdoor ambient can be hard to choose. I would reccomend a dark pink colour or a dark orange colour or else it will just look straight up weird.It should now look a bit like this:

Step 7. Clock time and Geographical Latitude. Clock time, as it says, is clock time, aka time of day. Geographical Latitude is harder to explain. You kind of need to experiment with it to figure it out. It is basically where the shadows are compared to the latitude of the earth. I would set clock time anywhere from 12 to 16. I normally use 14.

Step 8. Exposure Compensation. Exposure conpensation is hard to explain too. It is basically how much sunlight hits your world. I would set it anywhere from 0.5 to 0.8 to make it look bright and nice. It should now look something like this:

Finally, step 9. Fog, It is easy to use but as you can probably guess, it can be hard to choose a colour. I would set the fog end anywhere from 1500, foggy, to 15000, clear. For the fog colour, I’d reccomend a pinky, white colour or an Teal Blue colour. Your final product should look something like this:

Well this is the end of my first tutorial! I hope you found this helpful and make sure to give it a heart, I’d really appreciate that as this took me about 45 minutes to make! Thanks for reading.:pray:
Cosmo

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Thanks for the tutorial. Lighting honestly seems like an easy topic to figure out, but to make good lighting can be pretty tricky if you don’t know what you are doing. This will be very helpful to new developers.

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You are welcome! That’s where this post is pointed, to newer developers that need to understand what they do, that’s why I said “Try experimenting yourself” a few times, so they get to understand it.

Maybe go over adding bloom, sunrays, and such.

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Okay! I’ll add that in when I have time to do so.

This tutorial is well-done, congratulations. As mentioned, this will go a far way in helping new developers figure out the lighting system with Studio.

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This doesn’t really explore color shift, despite it being one of the handiest utilities in terms of making good lighting. These properties are excellent for determining what colours are reflected off the ground and can be a game-changer if you’re trying to change your sun’s colour. Most prominent is of course colorshift_top which is what reflects from the sun. One good lighting set up is often Outdoor_Ambient set to a blue while your colorshift_top is set to a brighter yellow.

For reference:

Now another thing you missed out on is messing with both diffuse and specular, which can really help 3D Models pop a bit with a bit of work. I’d more or less experiment with this and find what combination you like best.

There’s plenty more nitpicky stuff, but for the most part with a bit of experimentation, you can often find those yourself.

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Yes Meta, I will make a part 2 soon which is more advanced and shows stuff like colour correction, sun rays, diffuse, specular and more.

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I learned a lot from this, but when is part two coming out?