Blender Lighting Basics:
Placing Your First Light
Without an HDRI

Before getting into lighting, check how big your model is. Light falls off with distance, so a model at real-world size lets you judge where to put a light, and how bright to make it, the way you would in real life.

Start with the cup. Each square on the floor of the 3D Viewport is 1 m. Select the cup and press N to open the sidebar, where Dimensions shows you its actual size.

The cup is about 2 m across. In "Blender Modeling Basics: Move, Rotate, Scale, Extrude, and Modifiers" we started from a default-sized cylinder, and that size has carried through ever since. Next to a real coffee cup, it's roughly 25 times too big.

You could render it as it is, but it's worth fixing before you start lighting.

Select the cup and the saucer together, press S, and type 0.04. For the table, press S and type 0.12.

After scaling each of them, run Ctrl + A → "Scale".

The cup and saucer are now floating above the table.

Press G → Z and lower them until they sit on the table.

So you can see which light is lighting what as you go, start by taking the scene to black.

Of the four round icons at the top right of the 3D Viewport, switch to "Rendered", the one on the far right. Rendered view shows the lights you've placed in the scene, so you can adjust them while watching how the light actually falls.

The HDRI lighting your scene right now is set on the World. Open the "World" tab in Properties and set "Strength" to 0.

The screen has gone completely dark. This is where we start adding light. Set Strength back to 1.0 at any point and the HDRI comes back.

The HDRI was doubling as the background, so turning it off leaves nothing but darkness behind the cup. Light the cup from there and it reads as floating alone in the dark. Standing a single plane behind it makes the cup look like it's sitting in a room.

If it's too dark to move objects around, switch back to "Material Preview", the second icon from the right. It ignores the scene lights and shows everything brightly, which makes positioning easier.

Add a plane with Shift + A → "Mesh" → "Plane" and give it these values.

The 1.2 m width matches the table. Setting Z to 0.4 puts it at exactly half of the 0.8 m height, which lines the bottom edge of the wall up with the tabletop. The X rotation of 90° stands the plane upright from flat.

Once you change the size of the plane, the status bar at the bottom of the screen reads "Object has non-uniform scale". That's because the X and Y directions were scaled by different amounts.

Run Ctrl + A → "Scale" and the message clears.

Add a material to the wall with these values.

The table stays as it is. We're not building a ceiling or side walls. Box the scene in and you lose track of whether the light on the cup is coming from the light you placed or bouncing back off a wall.

A plain wall is fine if you're only trying lighting out, though a texture will improve the result. Keep the background modest in colour and pattern so it supports the cup rather than competing with it.

Start with a single light and give the cup its light and shade. Once that first light has settled the basic look, add a second one to lift the areas that fell dark.

Blender's default scene comes with one light, called Light, in the Outliner. Rather than adding a new one, we'll use it.

Select Light and open Light Properties. The tab at the top is set to "Point", so switch it to "Area".

An Area light emits from one side of its face only. The light leaves perpendicular to that face, so with every rotation at 0° it lights straight down.

An X rotation of 90° turns the light away from you, and -90° turns it towards you. Values in between angle it. When you've placed a light and nothing lit up, this is the first thing to check.

Give Light these values.

Leave "Exposure" at 0 and "Normalize" checked. Both are the defaults.

Switch the display back to "Rendered" to see what the light is doing. It reaches the cup from the front right, slightly above.

The cup is visible now. The right side is bright and the left is dark. That difference between light and shade is what gives it depth.

The 5 we put into Power is a small number next to the "100 W to 1000 W" you'll find when you look up Blender lights. The thing is, the power you need changes with the size of your scene and the distance to the light. Rather than going by the number alone, adjust it while watching the result.

Light weakens as it travels. Double the distance and it drops to a quarter; triple it and you're at a ninth. It falls with the square of the distance. Scaling the cup to real-world size changed the power it needed by exactly this much.

Cut the distance to a twenty-fifth and the light you need drops by a factor of several hundred. Which is to say that 100 W and 1000 W are numbers written for a much larger scene. For something as small as a real-world coffee cup, Power lands in single digits.

Using the first light's settings as your baseline, change its position, rotation, and size and compare. Keep the viewpoint still and move only the light.

Both sides of the cup are equally bright and the roundness has gone. The shadow is hidden directly behind it. Without a difference between light and shade, even something round reads as flat.

The left of the cup has gone dark and only the right is lit. The line between light and shade runs vertically, and clearly.

The grain of the table shows up more than it did at the baseline. When light strikes a surface at a shallow angle, small bumps cast shadows of their own. Light from the side is what you use when you want to show texture.

Only the top of the cup is bright, and the sides sink into shadow. The shadow falls directly beneath the cup, out of sight from the front.

The left-to-right contrast we had at 45° is gone. The closer the light gets to directly overhead, the harder depth is to read.

Leave position and rotation as they are and change Size alone to 0.8 m.

The shadow has softened.

The larger the emitting surface, the blurrier the edge of the shadow. It's the same reason shadows lose their edges on an overcast day: the light arrives from a wider area.

That's four setups. Where you put a light comes down to these four things.

When you're not sure, start at 45° and slightly above. From there, move the light a little at a time until it looks the way you want.

With one light, the left of the cup stays dark. Turning the HDRI off left nothing to light that side.
The second light goes in to lift it.

Add one with Shift + A → "Light" → "Area" and give it these values.

The left side is brighter now. Contrast with the right side is still there, so the sense of depth holds.

Size is set to 0.5 m, larger than the first light, to soften the edge of the shadow. The second light isn't there to light the whole cup — it's there to fill in what fell dark.

A Power of 1 is 20% of the first light's 5. Start the second light at that 20%.

Push it too far and things flatten out. At 2 — 40% — the two sides even out, and you end up with the same result as lighting from the front. Lighting evenly from both sides amounts to the same thing as lighting head-on.

If you're unsure whether to leave the left side dark, leave the power where it is. Take the dark areas away and the depth goes with them.

As lights accumulate, it gets hard to tell which one is responsible for the light and shade you're looking at. To check, use the eye icons in the Outliner to hide the others for a moment.

Turning the HDRI off and leaving out the ceiling and side walls come from the same reasoning. Once light mixes, you can't tell what is lighting what.

There's a third light you could add, called a rim light. It comes from behind the cup and picks out the outline.

It earns its place with something dark against a dark background, or when you want to show off glass, a drink, or steam. Here the cup already separates from the wall clearly enough, so we'll leave it at two.

Power is given as a ratio because the value you need changes with the size of your scene and the distance involved. Settle the first light first, then start the second at 20% of it.

When the light isn't landing where you want it, work down these five.

Starting from black, we added the lights one at a time and built up how the coffee cup looks. Once you know where to put a light, the same model can be shown in any number of ways.

If that feels like a lot to hold on to, these five will get a light placed.

Next comes rendering. We've been working in Rendered view up to now; from here it's about writing the result out as an image file. That's also where the difference between EEVEE and Cycles comes in, along with framing the camera.