Lighting

Tab: Lighting — Lights & mood · Plugin: Cinematic Lab

Light the shot without leaving the cockpit. Every light in the level in one tree, every property of the selected light in one column, and rigs that place a whole setup around a subject in a click.

The Lighting tab: light tree on the left, rig buttons, and the selected light's properties on the right.

The light tree

+ Point, + Spot, + Rect, + Dir spawn lights; + Folder organises them; Refresh re-scans the level.

Right-click a light for Move to Folder, (Ungroup), Focus in Viewport, and Convert to… — Point, Spot, Rect or Directional. Folders support New Subfolder, Rename and Delete Folder.

Three-point lighting

Three-Point Lighting on Selected Actor spawns Key, Fill and Rim spotlights around the currently-selected non-light actor.

It uses skeletal-mesh bounds when the subject has them, so a character is framed on the mesh rather than on an actor bounding box that includes whatever is attached to it — the panel calls this “MetaHuman-aware framing”.

◀ Flip and Flip ▶ move the selected three-point light to the subject’s left or right side, so you can swap key and fill without re-placing anything.

A three-point rig spawned around a selected actor.

Building a three-point rig around the selected character: key, fill and rim spot lights.

The same portrait under the new rig.

Cinematic rigs

Stamps a rig around the selected actor, or in front of the camera when nothing is selected, aimed at the current view.

A cinematic rig stamped into the level.

Editing a light

Select a light in the tree and its full property set appears, grouped. The header reads Selected: <name> [<type>]; with nothing selected it says so rather than showing a dead panel.

Common

Property	Notes
Intensity	—
Color	—
Use Temperature (Kelvin) + Temp K	Colour temperature instead of an RGB colour
Preset	A temperature preset picker

Advanced

Vol Scattering (volumetric scattering intensity) and Specular Scale.

Local Light (Point / Spot / Rect)

Attenuation Radius and Source Radius.

Spot Light

Inner Cone ° and Outer Cone °.

Rect Light

Width, Height, Barn Door ° and Barn Door Length.

Per-light property sliders for the selected light.

Time of Day presets

A preset picker that applies to the first directional light in the level. The panel states that scope on the control itself, so there is no ambiguity about which light moves when you pick “golden hour”.

IES profiles

Assign a UTextureLightProfile asset to give the light a real photometric falloff. The X clears it.

The lighting preset library

Save the selected light’s full settings under a name and apply them later to any light.

Control	What it does
Save Selected	Snapshot the selected light’s properties to a named preset
Apply	Apply a preset to the selected light
Delete	Remove a preset

Presets are JSON-persisted across editor sessions — they are not per-level and not lost on restart.

The lighting preset library with a saved preset.

Light Painter

Open Light Painter launches the full interactive painter in its own panel: paint / line / grid / spline placement, an IES gallery, batch edit, and an overlap heatmap.

Press Esc or close the panel to exit.

How lighting connects to shots

The Shot Manager tab’s Capture Look to Shot stores the scene’s local lights — Point, Spot and Rect — into a shot, with their full authored state: transform, intensity and intensity units, colour, temperature flag and value, attenuation radius, cone angles, source width and height, mobility, and shadow casting.

Directional and Sky lights are deliberately skipped. That asymmetry is the design: restoring a shot’s look never destroys the level’s base lighting rig. Restore runs inside a single transaction, so an entire look swap is one Ctrl+Z.