Lighting Tool

  The Lighting Tool is a completely new tool in 10.5. The documentation describes it "The Lighting Tool makes lighting objects a great deal easier. Instead of placing each light in an iterative process and fine-tuning their brightness in the Attributes Manager, lights can be created, placed, selected and their brightness interactively edited directly in the editor view. All of this without even entering the Attributes Manager!" I couldn't have described it better myself. Here are the options for it. Note that I have changed from the default dropdown box mode to radio button mode so that you can see all of the options.

Lighting tool (Radio button mode)

In addition to the various options as shown in the image there are also modifier keys that can be held down in conjunction with the left mouse button. They are:

    Shift - Move the light i.e. the distance will change
    Ctrl - Change the light intensity
    Ctrl + Shift - The cone of light of Spot lights will be varied (Outer Angle parameter)
    Ctrl+Alt (prior to clicking) or Alt during manipulation: The tool will temporarily switch to Target mode (For spotlights)

After selecting the lighting tool from the tools menu you can create an Omni light just by clicking on any object in the scene. The light is created on the surface of the object you click on. If you click in empty space an additional light is created at the cursor position. A third method of adding a light is to click on the Add Light button. This then places a light wherever you click next. If you have lights already in your scene once you select the lighting tool and click on any object in the scene the the most relevent light will be selected. This in most parts is based upon the direction of the surface that you click on. You are then able to edit the selected light with the Lighting tool. Here's a viewport animation showing how different lights are selected as the lighting tool cursor moves around the sphere.

Lighting Tool Options

As your saw in the first image above, there are a few options for the lighting tool. Whilst these options are relatively easy to use, they are quite hard to describe in writing. So to cover these options and demonstrate the new lighting tool in action, 3DKiwi has put together 33 minute in depth video tutorial that covers all of the options and how to use the lighting tool. Click here or on the link below and you will be taken to the Cafe's tutorial section where you can download the video tutorial in 2 parts. The animation here is taken from the tutorial and shows the Lighting tool in Pivot mode and with Enhanced OpenGL and shadows enabled.

Conclusion

This is a really great tool and I gather no other major 3D application has an equivalent tool. The tool is made even better when you work in Enhanced OpenGL mode and get real shadows in your scene. It's takes a bit of getting used to some of the modes especially the default Trackball mode. There's one very minor bug that I mention in the video but I'm sure this will get fixed in a future update.