Hi ZapWorks Community,
To go along with our 3D model tutorial, this demo will teach you about the different lighting types in studio, and how you can best use them. Studio provides a number of lighting options to illuminate 3D content in your scenes, ranging from simple directional lights to more complex environment lights, and we also offer some preset lighting templates to use in your projects to get you started. 
Please note, your 3D model must contain lighting materials to react with lighting in the scene. Unlit materials will work without a light in the scene.
Types of Lighting
- Directional Light. A directional light simulates a strong distant light source emitting parallel rays in a single uniform direction. They are often used to simulate sunlight.
- A point light simulates a light source that emits equally in all directions from its origin point. The intensity of the emitted light decreases the further away from the origin point it travels, falling off entirely at the specified range. They are a great way to represent local light sources such as lamps and candles.
- A spot light simulates a direct light source emitting light through a cone. The angle of the cone and the range (inherited from the point light) determining the area of illumination. They are often used to represent flashlights and car headlights.
- An environment light applies lighting to objects in a scene as if they are placed in a specific setting defined by a cubemap. Only the rotation of an environment light affects the lighting.
Lighting Materials
ZapWorks Studio uses 3 types of lighting materials: Standard Lighting Material (SLM), Toon and Physically Based Render (PBR) materials. Your 3D model can also be set as an unlit material which does not react to lighting. To find out in depth details of how these lighting materials are set up, check out our handy documentation.
You can choose which material is applied to your model through the using material drop down when importing your 3D model. You will also see a preview of your 3D model and how it will react to lighting. Please note you will have to add textures to your 3D model first if they are not already present.
You can also simulate lighting in your scene without a light, by clicking the lightbulb menu entry along the top of the Studio UI and selecting, ‘Use simulated light only’. This gives the scene a simulated light in the viewport. You’ll need to follow the steps below to view the lighting materials when you publish / preview your experience.
Adding Light to your experience
- Set up your experience so you have a 3D model, ideally tracked to an image. Check out or 3D tutorial to find out how to import a 3D model into your scene.
- Left-click on your tracking image’s node and select New → Lights → whichever light you would like to use. In this example, I have used a point light.
- You can edit your light source either through the properties tab, or by dragging it around your scene. This will give you an idea of how the light source affects your model
I hope this helps!
Please let us know on this thread if you have any issues using lighting in ZapWorks Studio, we’ll be more than happy to help.
Adam