`lighting`

Rendering & look Experimental

Level lighting and light actors: skylight, shadows, GI, volumetric fog, and lighting builds.

What it's for

This namespace drives how a level is lit. It spawns and configures light actors, sets up a skylight, and controls the renderer-level knobs that decide the mood of a scene: shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination, auto-exposure, and volumetric fog. When the bake matters, it also kicks off a full lighting build.

Reach for it when you want to light a level or adjust its look through your assistant instead of clicking through the editor. Typical asks: drop a directional light and a skylight into a fresh map, switch global illumination to Lumen, enable volumetric fog for atmosphere, or bake lighting at production quality before a capture. It can also tidy up a scene, for example collapsing duplicate sky lights down to a single one.

Keep the split in mind: use lighting for scene illumination and the lighting build itself, and use environment.control for the legacy sun and skylight-intensity controls grouped under environment. For a persistent global-illumination write into DefaultEngine.ini, pair the live lighting.setup_global_illumination call with rendering.set_dynamic_gi_method. Typed atmosphere, volumetric cloud, and reflection-capture spawns that pair with light actors live in environment.

This area is experimental and still improving. The methods work, but names, parameters, and defaults may shift between releases. Read the current method page before relying on an exact shape.

Examples

Light a fresh level with a sun and a sky

Spawn a directional light for the sun and a sky light for ambient fill.

You: Add a directional sun light and a sky light to this level.

  call("lighting.spawn_light", {lightType:"directional", name:"Sun",
        rotation:{pitch:-45, yaw:30, roll:0}, properties:{intensity:8}})
    → {ok:true, actor:"Sun"}
  call("lighting.spawn_sky_light", {name:"SkyLight"})
    → {ok:true, actor:"SkyLight"}

Done. Level lit with a directional sun and a sky light.

Switch to Lumen GI and enable volumetric fog

Set the global illumination method, then turn on volumetric fog for atmosphere.

You: Use Lumen global illumination and add some volumetric fog.

  call("lighting.setup_global_illumination", {method:"LumenGI"})
    → {ok:true, method:"LumenGI"}
  call("lighting.setup_volumetric_fog", {viewDistance:6000})
    → {ok:true}

Done. Lumen GI enabled and volumetric fog switched on.

Bake lighting at production quality

Kick off a full lighting build for the current level before a capture.

You: Bake the lighting at production quality.

  call("lighting.build_lighting", {quality:"production"})
    → {ok:true, quality:"production"}

Done. Lighting build finished at production quality.

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