Getting Started with the Lighting Service
When you first open a new baseplate, you might not think much of the Lighting object sitting in your Explorer panel. But that little folder holds the key to the entire visual identity of your world. If you click on it, the Properties window will suddenly fill up with dozens of options. It's a bit overwhelming at first, but once you break it down, it's actually pretty intuitive.
The first thing you should probably look at is the Technology property. This is the foundation of everything else. It's the engine that decides how light bounces off surfaces and how shadows are rendered. If you don't get this right, all the other tweaks you make won't matter nearly as much.
Choosing Your Lighting Technology
Currently, Roblox offers a few different rendering engines under the "Technology" dropdown. Choosing the right one depends on the "vibe" of your game and how much you care about performance.
Voxel is the old-school choice. It's very performant and works on almost any device, but it lacks precision. Shadows are chunky, and light doesn't really "bleed" into corners naturally. If you're making a game for players on very low-end mobile devices, this might be your go-to, but for most modern projects, it's starting to show its age.
ShadowMap is the middle ground and arguably the most popular choice for general development. It gives you crisp, realistic shadows from the sun and local lights, but it doesn't quite handle complex indoor light bouncing perfectly. It looks great, it's relatively fast, and it gives that "standard" modern Roblox look.
Future is the gold standard. If you want your game to look high-end, this is it. It enables real-time shadows for every light source, meaning a swinging lantern will cast moving shadows against the walls. It creates beautiful reflections and depth. The catch? It's heavy. If your game is already filled with high-poly meshes, using Future lighting might make mobile players' phones turn into hand-warmers. Use it, but use it wisely.
The Power of Ambient and OutdoorAmbient
One of the biggest mistakes I see new developers make is ignoring the Ambient and OutdoorAmbient settings. By default, these are often set to a dull grey, which can make your world look muddy.
Think of Ambient as the color of the air in places where the sun doesn't reach. If you're building a cave, you might want a deep blue or a dark purple ambient color to give it some atmosphere. OutdoorAmbient affects the parts of the map that are exposed to the sky.
If you want a "warm" sunset feel, try turning your OutdoorAmbient toward a soft orange or peach. If you're going for a cold, snowy mountain, a light cyan can make a world of difference. It's a subtle change, but it stops your shadows from looking like pitch-black voids, which is a common giveaway of an amateur build.
Atmosphere: Adding Depth and Haze
A few years back, Roblox added the Atmosphere object, and it's a total game-changer. You usually have to manually insert this into the Lighting service. Once it's in there, you can control things like density, offset, and color.
Without an Atmosphere object, your game world usually has a very "infinite" look where you can see perfectly to the edge of the map. That's not how the real world works. Adding a bit of Density creates a natural haze that makes distant objects look slightly faded. This gives your world a sense of scale and "bigness" that you just can't get otherwise.
Plus, you can change the Color and Decay to match your skybox. If you have a dusty desert sky, making your atmosphere a brownish-tan color will make the whole world feel cohesive. It glues the sky and the ground together.
Post-Processing Effects: The Polishing Cloth
Once you've got your base lighting and atmosphere sorted, it's time to move on to post-processing. These are effects that are applied "on top" of the screen. You can find these by right-clicking Lighting and "Inserting Object."
Bloom is probably the most used (and most abused) effect. It makes bright parts of the screen glow. Used correctly, it makes neon parts look like they're actually emitting light. Used poorly, it makes your game look like a JJ Abrams movie where you can't see anything because of the lens flares. Keep the Intensity low and the Threshold high enough that only the truly bright spots glow.
ColorCorrection is where you can really play with the mood. You can adjust saturation, contrast, and tint. If your game feels a bit "cartoony" and you want it to feel grittier, lowering the saturation and slightly bumping the contrast can do wonders.
SunRays are those "god rays" you see when looking at the sun through trees. They add a lot of cinematic flair for very little performance cost. Just don't make them so bright that they blind the player every time they look up.
Balancing Performance and Visuals
It's easy to get carried away with roblox lighting settings and turn everything up to eleven. We all want our games to look like cinematic trailers, but we have to remember who's playing. A huge chunk of the Roblox audience is on mobile devices or older laptops.
If you're using Future lighting, try to limit the number of light sources that actually cast shadows. Every "PointLight" or "SurfaceLight" with Shadows enabled adds more work for the GPU. If a light is just there to brighten up a room, turn the shadows off. Save the shadow-casting lights for the big stuff, like a flickering campfire or a main chandelier.
Also, keep an eye on your EnvironmentDiffuseScale and EnvironmentSpecularScale. These settings (found in the Lighting properties) control how much the skybox color affects the parts in your game and how much they reflect their surroundings. Setting these to 1 makes things look very realistic, but it can also make metallic surfaces look a bit too "busy" if your skybox is cluttered.
Lighting for Different Genres
The way you use these settings should change drastically depending on what you're making.
For a Horror Game, you'll want to keep ClockTime at night, obviously. But the trick is to use a very low Brightness setting and rely on local lights. Use a dark, desaturated ColorCorrection and maybe a bit of Blur to make the player feel uneasy.
For a Simulator, you want the opposite. High saturation, bright OutdoorAmbient, and maybe a bit of extra Bloom to make everything look "juicy" and inviting. You want the colors to pop.
For a Showcase, go all out. Use Future lighting, high-density Atmosphere, and fine-tune your SunRays. Since players in a showcase aren't usually worried about high-speed competitive gameplay, you can afford to push the visual limits a bit more.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, there isn't a "perfect" set of numbers for Roblox lighting. It's all about experimentation. I usually spend hours just sliding bars back and forth until the shadows hit the ground just right.
The best advice I can give is to look at real-world photography or other games you admire. Notice how the light hits a brick wall or how the sky turns a specific shade of purple during twilight. Then, head back into Studio and try to recreate that using the tools we've talked about. It takes a little practice, but once you get the hang of it, you'll never go back to default lighting again.