Manage your scene lighting in Uniform

This is how you can manage the lighting of your scene in Uniform. Uniform’s viewport includes a real-time path tracer that can preview lights with soft shadows and global illumination in real time. We’ll explain some features that can help you while designing the lighting setup for your scene.

You can add lights from the Light Mixer. After selecting a scene, open the Light Mixer inspector and choose the “Add Point Light” option. This will add a point light object to the scene, represented by a glowing sphere. The point light can be selected and moved just like any other geometry object. Hold down the selection shortcut button to select the light, and use the scene transform tool to set its position.

You can now hold down the Surface View shortcut and drag to the upper part of the square to activate the PBR viewport. In this mode, you can move and adjust the lights in real time, as well as use any other tool. Keep in mind that previewing lights and materials is much more GPU-intensive than the regular viewport, so it may affect your device’s performance and power consumption.

By dragging the Surface View chart to the top right of the square, you’ll preview the scene with albedo colors and materials. If you drag to the top left instead, Uniform will disable the albedo colors of the objects, allowing you to evaluate only the contributions of the lights to the scene.

Each time you select a point light, a gizmo appears. Drag from the yellow circle to adjust the size of the point light. This will change how sharp the shadows cast by this light appear. You can drag left or right from the center of the light to slightly tweak its intensity. If you drag the point upward, the line will move in steps—each step doubles the light’s power. If you drag the line downward, the power will be halved. With this gizmo, you can quickly adjust the power of each light across a wide range of values.

Another way to create lights is by using the Light Field tool. Click and drag to create a new point light under the cursor. The light will be placed at a distance from the model equal to your brush radius.

You can also add environment lights from the Lights inspector. Select the plus icon, then choose “Add Environment Light.” By default, environment lights use a solid color, but you can load an HDRI file in .EXR format from its entry in the Light Mixer. Environment lights are also just another type of object—they can be rotated with the Scene Transform tool to change the direction of the light.

Finally, you can adjust all light properties for the scene from the Light Mixer. Here, you can also use the Solo and Mute buttons to isolate or toggle lights in the scene. Additionally, you can change the color of point and environment lights from this menu.

If you need better performance while working on your scene’s lighting, you can adjust some render settings to reduce the demand on your system. Open the Viewport Modules panel. First, you can disable shadows by tapping the Shadow module. You can also change the physical shading mode from path tracing to rasterized, which disables global illumination and path-traced subsurface scattering.