Ambient Light

An Ambient Light adds the same amount of light to every surface in the scene, from every direction at once. It has no source, no direction and no shadows. It does not make anything look lit in a dramatic way; it lifts the darkest parts of a scene so they are not pure black, and sets an overall tint.

How it works

Real rooms are never lit by one source alone: light bounces off walls, floor and sky, and fills in the shadows a little. The ambient light is the simplest stand-in for that bounced light. Because it lights every face of every object equally, too much of it flattens the scene and removes the sense of shape, so it works best low, under a key light that does the modelling.

Settings

• Intensity sets how much the darks are lifted.
• Color tints the whole scene: a cool blue fill for night, a warm amber for sunset, a neutral grey for a clean studio.
• Enabled switches it off without deleting it.

Both Intensity and Color can be animated, so the overall mood can shift, for example from day to dusk, over the course of a scene.

Use it for

Filling shadows under a Directional Light or Spot Light, setting an overall colour mood, and keeping dark product scenes readable. For more natural fill, an HDR environment lights the scene from a real photograph.