Today, I’ve released a video detailing just about everything you need to know about lighting. I’ve been tuning lighting heavily for around 2 years on many maps of many different styles and decided to bring all the advice I’ve learned together into one video to help other developers make their maps look breathtaking with some easy changes.
I recommend watching the video and following along in Studio for the best explanation since this is meant to be a visual guide, but I am providing the gist of the effects in a text tutorial as well for convenience.
So first you need to make sure you can see properties and explorer. Go to view and make sure properties and explorer are grayed out. Now lighting is a Service that is right here near the bottom of explorer. To see the properties of your game’s lighting you select it, and now you can see all the properties of it in the properties window. Now, each of these properties will change your lighting in a different way. The best way to learn what these do is to experiment with each one.
(For demonstration of each effect visually, see the video.)
Now I do need to point out that you need to have your Studio graphics up to see most of these. Go to File > Studio Settings > Rendering > EditQualityLevel , and set it to the highest one possible. If your computer slows down, turn it down to the lowest level where it still works and make sure you are in a simple place like a baseplate to work on your lighting, and you can turn your graphics back down and copy it over to your map when you’re done.
Now, in lighting you can also add in different post processing effects that will add extra customization to your lighting. On the new Roblox baseplate, it comes with default lighting that is OK but still pretty dull.
By hovering over the Lighting service, you can click the plus to see things you can add. For some reason not all of these are shown at the top but you can search “Effect” to see the other ones.
(For demonstration of each effect and the changes of values visually, see the video.)
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ColorCorrectionEffect lets you add all kinds of modifications to the color and saturation, and overall vibrance of your map. I use this to crank up the colors in my map and make it look extra cartoony and bright. I’ve also seen a lot of games use this for filters and effects like black and white. Saturation changes the strength of the colors and turning this up a little bit can make your map really pop. Contrast improves the darks and lights of your colors, making them stronger, and making everything just crisper and more defined. I also recommend turning this up a bit. Brightness is just an additional way to change the brightness of the map, this affects the look differently than the other property because it doesn’t just affect where there’s light being shown on your map, but rather the whole screen’s brightness.
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BloomEffect just or decreases the bloom, or glow you see around objects that have a bright sun reflection on it or a part with a neon material. It’s not really necessary to change this unless the settings you already have are screwing up the bloom on everything, so your map is glowing, like if your brightness is too high. If so, just turn up the threshold, and turn down the size and intensity. Otherwise just don’t use it, it’s not really worth tweaking.
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BlurEffect is really not useful for your default lighting. It just smothers everything and makes it look bad. It’s only useful when you want to open a GUI and show blur in the background, or for other effects involving UI.
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DepthOfField is cool, but I don’t really recommend using it unless you have a big map. It let’s you make things in the distance blurry which can make your map look more realistic, just don’t have it too strong because it makes it look terrible.
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SunRays is an amazing effect that lets you add sunlight beams that sort of move with your camera, it looks really cool and adds a lot of realism to your map.