Light your prop in Render

What you'll learn#

You will light your textured prop in Render and produce a presentation image. Good lighting is what proves the material work from Pigment actually holds up.

Before you start#

• Finish Texture your prop in Pigment, or bring any textured mesh.
• Render is a backed module, and the one module of this chain that really does need WebGPU: it runs its own WebGPU context in an isolated frame. A browser without WebGPU cannot open it.
• Worth knowing: a PBR material has no look of its own. It only describes how a surface responds to light. Change the lighting and the same material reads completely differently.

Steps#

1. Bring the textured mesh into Render with Send to Render, or import a .glb or .gltf.

2. Set an environment under Environment, with the HDRI control. An HDRI lights the whole scene from an image of a real location, which gets you a plausible result faster than placing lights by hand.

3. Rotate the environment and watch the prop. You are looking for an angle where the form reads clearly and the material shows its roughness variation.

   Tip: rotating the HDRI is the cheapest lighting control you have. Try it before adding a single light.

4. Judge the result before adding anything. If the HDRI alone already reads well, extra lights will only flatten it.

5. Add a key light for direction. The HDRI gives you ambient realism, the key light gives you shape and a defined shadow.

6. Add a rim or fill light if the prop merges into the background. A rim light along one edge separates the silhouette from whatever is behind it.

   Warning: more lights is not better lighting. Three well-placed lights beat eight fighting each other, and each one you add costs you contrast.

7. Adjust the material response if something looks off. A surface that reads too shiny or too flat here usually means a roughness value to revisit in Pigment, not a lighting problem.

8. Frame the camera. Turn the prop so the most interesting silhouette faces the viewer, and leave some breathing room at the edges.

9. Produce the image with Export Render, choosing what to write under Select Passes to Export, and keep the setup with Save to Cloud so you can come back to it.

Result#

You have a lit, framed image of your prop, and a saved project you can reuse for the next asset. You have also validated your material under real lighting, which is the only test that counts.

Going further#

• Next in the pipeline: put the prop in a playable scene with Engine.
• Light the same prop with three different HDRIs and compare. It is the fastest way to learn what your material is actually doing.
• Reuse this scene as a turntable setup for every asset you produce.