Learn how to add, duplicate, position, and customize lights in Blender to create more interesting 3D animation renders. This beginner-friendly Blender lighting tutorial demonstrates how to view your scene using rendered viewport shading, move the default point light, duplicate lights, and change their colors.
It also shows how to add a Sun light, adjust its direction, control shadow softness, and increase its strength. Finally, the tutorial explores Blender’s World settings and Sky Texture for creating atmospheric global illumination in Eevee.
These simple lighting techniques are useful for motion capture animations, character scenes, basic environments, and other Blender projects that need more depth, visibility, and visual impact.
Video Transcript
How can I add an extra light to a scene? And also, how can I even see the lights in my scene?
Here I have a very simple environment made with basic primitive shapes and blender and some retargeting motion capture animation. I want to go ahead and add an extra light to this, but first I want to see where the lights actually are. To do that, I need to click on the render tab. This is this button on the far right on the top right of your viewport. And then we can see that we have the default light. So this is the default light. And if I select it and press g shift z. You can see I can move this light all around. So this is pretty cool. But what if I want a different light?
Well I can just duplicate it by pressing shift D and then move it over here. I can even click on each individual light and change their color temperatures. So I can have this one be kind of pink. And then I can select this one. Maybe I’ll make it a bit green. And now I have an interesting scene going on, I probably want to have more There are other types of lights to add, so sometimes a point light is a great light. But other lights such as shift a light sun. If I add a sunlight, I can put the sunlight anywhere. It doesn’t really matter where it is because it’s so far away. It’s just a sun. But we can put it up here just for visuals sake. Then I can change the angle and watch what happens.
If I change the angle of the sun, it will show where those shadows are. Right now it’s not very strong. But if I if I change the exposure to one, it’ll be a lot stronger. And you can see how that sun angle will now change. So now if I change the angle of the sun, it’ll be a bit different. right now this is rendering in EV. So if I click on this sunlight and if I look down at these shadows here and I change the angle, you can see how the angle of the sun will change as well. So this is seeing how soft those shadows are along with the angle of the sun. So this can be a great way to just have very brightly lit scene outdoors, with some still influence from your other lights. So if I bring my green light over, it’s still affects the scene, but I have overall kind of global illumination.
Another way to have global illumination in your scene without a sunlight. I’ll delete this sun by pressing X. So now I’m back to my dark two point lights. If I click the world icon here, this is the red icon. If you don’t see it, scroll on your side screen then under color. If I click the little yellow dot, I can select Sky texture. Since I’m rendering in Eevee, I can’t use the sun disc, but I can choose a different way of rendering the sky, and this can be really nice as well. I can change the turbidity of the sky, that’ll change the color and the intensity of the light. There is also. This setting right here, and I can change this, and then I can change the strength and how dirty the air is. So this is another way of adding in global illumination to your animation renders.
There’s a lot more to lighting that you can do, but hopefully these tricks of adding extra lights besides the default point light will get your animation up and running with lots of interesting lighting. Happy 3D modeling!