Each light layer has its own various timeline properties, for example:
Intensity controls a light’s brightness
Color behaves like a colored gel sheet or filter over the light
Cone Angle (for spot lights only)
Comps can have more than one light, and more than one light often looks best (there are tons of exceptions of course)
But: too many lights can make previews and renders become sluggish, and this can bog down your creative process. (Same goes for 3D layers. Try to find ways to simplify or “cheat”)
Lights can be parented to other layers, and vice versa: layers can be parented to lights.
Lights themselves are invisible in the render(including with their light beams) but you can sometimes fake a light cone using semi-transparent Shape layers or masked Solid layers, and there are also 3rd-party plugins for sale which can make the lights/beams more visible; e.g., Trapcode Lux.
Layers Affected by Lights
Lights can only cast their wonder on 3D layers; 2D layers basically ignore lights
Lights affect ALL 3D layers by default.
But, each 3D layer has a property called Accepts Lights which can toggle whether it should be affected by lights or not
3D layers with Accepts Lights turned off will appear at full brightness, useful for simulating video screens, the sky, stars, fire, or anything else that would emit its own light in the real world
All lights can be temporarily disabled using the Draft 3D switch (set to on) This is useful for speeding up previews while working, and for seeing layers that might otherwise be too dark to see. (This switch also temporarily disables any camera layer’s Depth of Field property.)
The Four Types of Lights: Parallel, Spot, Point, Ambient
Point lights behave like spheres of light
Spot lights behave like cones of light. The light’s point-of-interest (similar to how a camera’s point-of-interest works) is used to control the direction of the cone.
Cone Angle
Cone Feather
Parallel lights behave like sunlight or moonlight: for when the imaginary light source is far away and light beams hit everything at the same angle. Light (x,y,z) source position is somewhat irrelevant, as point-of-interest matters most.
Ambient lights are immersive and light all surfaces equally. Useful for bringing up/down the overall brightness of a 3D scene. Shadows not possible with this light.
Falloff – In the real world, as lights get farther away, they get less bright. This is called “Falloff”. In After Effects, there are 3 types of Falloff:
None – Lights from far away shine equally bright as close up lights. Light brightness on a surface is determined by the angle that the light rays hit the surface.
Inverse Square Clamped falloff
Most like real-world lights
Radius option adjusts how quickly this falloff is applied
Smooth falloff
Similar to Inverse Square Clamped but with more control over when falloff begins to happen. Useful when your 3D layers are not exactly positioned the way they would be in the real world.
In addition to Radius, there is a Falloff Distance option
When working with these lights, try setting the Falloff Distance to 0 while adjusting the Radius value, then increase the Falloff Distance
Lights (and 3D Layers) Can Create Shadows
Lights have a Casts Shadows property which can be turned On to create shadows in the comp
Each 3D layer also has a Casts Shadows property which you toggle to On in order to make the layer cast shadows. 3D layers do not cast shadows by default.
A 3D layer’s Casts Shadows property can also be set to Only which makes the 3D layer invisible but still able to cast a shadow. Useful for special circumstances where a shadow requires more custom placement, sizing, rotation, etc.
Shadow appearance is controlled via an individual light’s settings:
Shadow Darkness a percentage value typically from 0% to 100%, but can go higher than 100%
Shadow Diffusion a pixel value indicating a shadow edge feathering amount
