Light Guides - Visual Assists for Light Projection

[ProtoValence (Valence)]

Hi developers,

Excited to announce a helpful new feature for adjusting light sources in Roblox Studio - Light Guides!

Light Guides are a form of light visualization that is intended to help you get a better sense of where your lights will project by visually depicting light properties such as: Color, Range, Face, and Angle in real-time. These guides will help with any fine-tuning you’re looking to do with various light properties by allowing you to visualize property changes in real time.

How to Use Light Guides

To see the new guides, all you need to do is select any light(s) you want to visualize and check the Enabled box. Once enabled, you will be able to see the guides and, when you adjust the properties of the light, the guide will update automatically to show the change in real-time!

Light Guides will not show when just selecting a light’s parent, but if you select both a light and its parent, you can move the light and have the light guides tag along for the ride. This allows you to have more control over which parts of your overall scene are lit rather than only being able to update local properties.

Selecting multiple lights will show you multiple Light Guides. Make use of this feature to understand how lights fill your workspace, especially in reference to specific environments within your project.

Tips & Tricks

Did you know that you can also use a light on an attachment rather than just on a part? Whether you use this already for ambient lights and the like, or are hearing about this for the first time, light guides still have you covered.

Additionally, while Light Guides work with all lighting systems, we recommend switching to Future lighting for the best results.

If for any reason Light Guides are not ideal for your workflow, you can completely disable them by turning the feature off in your settings. See below:

How to enable / disable via settings

Thank you!

[Khronikus]

This is super amazing! Just yesterday I was spending so much time working on the lighting for my game, this feature will really speed things up.

[flojo007_fs]

Light Guides are so simple, but they can help a lot and save time too! Great Feature!

[idealxy]

Awesome! This feature is way better than the past pointlight system!

Good job!

[ArchBond02 (Duolingo)]

This is something i need, i use way to many lights.

[NodeSupport (Node)]

Here come the floods of people trying to get hearts by being the first comment.

I’ll jump on the bandwagon;
Does this feature take distance in to effect as well, the video doesn’t show anything regarding it, I’ll look myself when I have time but I feel that it’ll be… iffy…

Overall useful though.

Edit:

Feature was automatically on for me when restarting studio, however the lines weren’t showing, had to disable re-enable it for it to work, may want to look in to that.

Particular angles on spotlights result in the display disappearing entirely, 180 is an example of this.

Large angles aren’t entirely accurate when displaying… https://i.imgur.com/aWpCxp1.png

[BeastyBlake101]

I’m such an enormous geek about lighting and dark environments. This is an enormously helpful update. Transitioning to future lighting is rather intimidating with the realistic behavior of the lights and something myself and others have struggled with. Well done

[mosyed7 (BigMo)]

This great I love Roblox improving their lighting system it’s so great to see. I love working with skyboxes, sun and moon, and lighting adjustments and it’s great to see it actually being fixed and reworked. At the moment I really looking forward to clouds but anyways another dub to devs!

[4teapo (teapo)]

This is something ive been wanting for a really long time. It looks great so far and is really a must have to me.

[idealxy]

Amazing thank you!

[ProtoValence (Valence)]

It does take distance into account. Currently the distance / range is reflected by the height of the cone / pyramid. We are working on some changes that should make this even clearer and which improve functionality with large angles.

[crazyblocks234]

This seems to work similarly to Blender’s Light Guides! In the past, it was difficult to pinpoint where exactly the light was pointing, but now it’s a lot easier.

[NodeSupport (Node)]

Awesome, I was just about to mention that right now particular angles result in the display disappearing entirely, such as 180 on a spotlight! Not sure if that’s intentional

[x5tb]

This is great! Thanks, I’ll definitely be using this for lighting.

[ProtoValence (Valence)]

A fix for this is coming next week. It should also make support for large angles better, since the light guides don’t really help much when they span your entire workspace.

[NodeSupport (Node)]

Perfect, and final question; are there any plans to make it so the display will show up if you have the parent part selected rather then the light source itself? This is more of a tedious request, if you’re trying to adjust your light sources quickly (and you have a lot of them) it will become relatively tedious to switch between to two!

[ProtoValence (Valence)]

This was the original plan, but due to performance concerns, we decided not to implement it this way. For now, you’ll have to select the lights + parent part(s) if you want to be able to see light guides while moving things around.

[supertom145]

This is really amazing and helpful update. I will use this definitely, when I will work on my horror game.
Good job!

[bobbybob2131 (Sanguine_Saracen)]

This looks to be very useful! Are there any plans to include an inner and outer range i.e. one guide that shows up to where the light begins to fade out and one guide showing where it finishes fading? Additionally, are there any plans for including brightness in the calculations since it can produce some odd looking results (see images) that don’t really match up with what you can see?

Note: Images taken using ShadowMap with no visual effects applied.

SurfaceLight.Brightness = 3

SurfaceLight.Brightness = 40