Hello Creators,
Roblox is committed to providing an exceptional user experience for everyone, no matter what experience they jump into or what device they’re using. This is why we prioritize building a platform that adapts seamlessly – and that includes how we handle lighting. Our vision for lighting on Roblox is that it scales smoothly across all devices, empowering you to achieve visuals true to your artistic intent without compromising on performance.
To help bring this vision to life, we’re introducing Unified Lighting, an overhaul to configuring lighting in your experiences. This update brings immediate improvements to how lighting scales, like better lighting for mid-distance objects, while also laying the foundation for many improvements, including increased light ranges.
Rest assured, we are committed to maintaining the existing look and feel of all experiences. Unified Lighting builds upon our current lighting technologies, providing you with more options and control while not removing any existing lighting technologies.
Unified Lighting scales lighting better as seen via improved shadow gradients.
What is Unified Lighting?
Unified Lighting changes how you configure lighting in your experiences. It replaces the existing Technology property in the Lighting Service with two new, intuitive properties:
-
LightingStyle: Tell us the visual style you’re aiming for. Current options include:
- Realistic: High-fidelity lighting with detailed shadows and shading.
- Soft: Offers flatter-looking Lighting with diffused shadows and lower contrast between shadowed and lit areas with non-directional lighting. This is also the best option for achieving the classic Roblox look.
- We may expand the options for Lighting Style in the future.
-
PrioritizeLightingQuality: Let us know how important lighting is to your experience.
- Enabled: Lighting is crucial! This option will maintain lighting quality as much as possible while lowering the quality of other aspects first (e.g., draw distance). In other words, Lighting quality will be traded-off at a slower rate.
- Disabled: Lighting is less important. This option will reduce lighting quality first in order to preserve the quality of other aspects of the experience such as draw distance.
Selecting Prioritized preserves key lighting details, such as the large building shadow, for larger distances.
Note: Neither of these properties are scriptable, similar to the old Technology property.
What Will Change for My Existing Experiences?
With Unified Lighting, you can expect improved scalability without compromising on visuals. The most noticeable change you may see is an improvement in how mid-distance objects are lit, thanks to the system’s refined control over lighting quality.
To ensure a smooth transition, your current Technology setting will be automatically mapped to the equivalent Unified Lighting settings:
- Future: LightingStyle = Realistic & PrioritizeLightingQuality = Enabled
- ShadowMap: Lighting Style = Soft & PrioritizeLightingQuality = Enabled
- Voxel: LightingStyle = Soft & PrioritizeLightingQuality = Disabled
Unified Lighting preserves lighting details for mid-distance objects. Note how the main, diagonal shadow coming from the blue building is preserved the entire time when Unified Lighting is enabled.
This new system also sets the stage for future lighting enhancements. Here’s what we’re working on next:
- Increased maximum range for local lights: Illuminate larger areas with your PointLights, SpotLights, and SurfaceLights.
- Improved light attenuation: Achieve more realistic and nuanced lighting effects with enhanced falloff control.
How to enable Unified Lighting
- To opt into the Studio Beta, go to File > Beta Features and enable “Unified Lighting”
- After opting in, you should see two new properties (LightingStyle and PrioritizeLightingQuality) under the Lighting Service, replacing the previous Technology property. Your previous Technology setting will automatically map to the above configurations to maintain consistency.
- Play around with the possible combinations to get a feel for how your experience looks with different lighting settings!
Rollout Plan
- Studio Beta Release: [Today!] - Unified Lighting will be available to test within Studio. This means that there will be no changes in live experiences. This will enable Creators to test out this new system and report any bugs to ensure we fix them before full release.
- Full Release: Once we’ve addressed feedback from the Studio beta, we will enable Unified Lighting in all experiences and migrate their lighting preferences. Creators will be able to configure their experience’s lighting via the two properties listed above, and the changes will be live for all players. At this point, we will fully deprecate the Technology property under Lighting Service.
Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Shine bright,
Roblox Rendering Team
FAQ
Q: How will enabling Unified Lighting affect my experience’s performance?
A: Unified Lighting is designed to improve lighting scalability for all players. We’ve ensured that for all experiences performance will not degrade, and in certain scenarios, we’ve seen improved performance for the same perceptible visual quality.
Q: What happens if I select “Realistic” LightingStyle and “Disabled” for PrioritizeLightingQuality?
A: Currently, this will use the “Future” lighting technology, but with a shorter shading distance. This means the transition to lower-detail lighting will happen closer to the player. You may notice a difference in how objects at a mid-distance are lit.
Q: What’s going on with the GPU Light Grid technology you previewed at RDC 2023?
A: We de-prioritized GPU Light Grid to focus on performance, lighting scalability, and requested improvements like increased light ranges. We will share updates when available.
Update - 01/21/2025
We’ve noticed some crashes coming from devs using Studio with OpenGL selected as their Graphics Mode in the Studio Renderer settings. We have a fix for this incoming.
On Windows we don’t actively support OpenGL as a fully featured rendering mode in Studio, so please make sure to use the Automatic graphics mode if you want to try the Unified Lighting beta at this time.
Very epic Roblox, very epic! 
