Building Lesson 004: Lighting

Hello, welcome back to our new building lesson! This lesson we will be talking about the kinds of lights in your game you can create. This is extremely helpful especially if you have a roof on your creation or any dark areas you don't want. As Roblox says, "Lighting is one of the most important parts of developing a game". Lights give your game feeling whether it's happiness, darkness, or mystery.

P.S. After this lesson, you will be ready to take our Dev Trainee Promotion test!

Now there are three kinds of lights: PointLight, SpotLight, and a very new addition to roblox, SurfaceLight. Let's begin by talking about Point Light.

A Point Light is a light that emits from a brick in all directions. It is helpful for a simple light-up of a certain area. Point Lights go into bricks and will follow the path of the brick. Now let's look at the PointLight properties by clicking on it in our Explorer. We will be headed on a little trip to IT Headquarters, where I use PointLights quite often.

In this office made by Expert Developer Snapcash, I used a point light to make the room not so dark. Now let's take away the point light and see what happens. What a surprise! You can't see a thing!

The reason you can't see the light's brick part is because I have my brick set to Transparency = 1. The same goes for CanCollide. If you simply want to light up your place, place a brick and put a point light inside of it. Then make the brick un-collidable and transparent all the way so you can't see or hit it. Here are some helpful properties of the PointLight.

You want to make sure your game is not too bright. You want just the right amount of shadow to make your game look more realistic. In later advanced classes, I will talk about how to find the exact lighting you want to make your game look smooth.

Now let's move on to the SpotLight. SpotLights are lights that only shine light in one direction. When you open the SpotLight properties, you can actually set the angle and face (Bottom, Left, etc.) of the brick you want it to light up from. This is helpful for making ceiling lamps. Once again, I also have examples of these at HQ on the bottom of bridges. It has similar properties of the PointLight like the Brightness and Range. Like the PointLight, you can even change the color of your light. I also use colors for the balconies on the Headquarters Dev Building.

Now we move on to the SurfaceLights. These are extremely new features in roblox that came out late February this year (2015). Now SurfaceLights are a bit more complex but really helpful, especially if you're trying to light up a huge space. Basically with a SurfaceLight, you can have the light emit from one face of a brick, like a SpotLight. But when you increase the size of the brick, the light range increases along with it, seen in these photos.

Surpassing my first half year of being a developer and builder, this kind of Light was never thought to ever be invented and was the dream of all of us. Now that it's here, the world of lighting games has expanded. Enough about me, this also lights up the side of that brick with a color. Like the other lights, you can set range, brightness, color, and everything.

Thanks for tuning into this lesson. If you are curious about Lighting your game in terms of Lighting properties like GlobalShadows, Ambience, Time, etc. I will discuss those in the first few Dev Trainee Lesson.

-Domswolf