About Lighting Styles

Inventor offers three types of model scene lighting: Directional lighting, Environment (IBL) lighting, and a combination of Environment lighting with directional lights referred to as blended lighting. Use lighting styles to enhance your working environment, visual communications, and design presentations.

What's New: 2024

Several lighting styles are provided for your use. To create your own style, use an existing styles as the beginning of your new style and make the desired modifications to the style elements.

Lighting Styles

Styles can be global or local and are differentiated by their icons.

Directional lighting, global style stored in the library
Directional lighting, local style stored in the document
Environment lighting (also called IBL), global style stored in the library
Environment lighting, local style stored in the document
Blended lighting, global style stored in the library.
Inventor includes these blended styles: Dark Sky, Grey Room, Infinity Pool, Stuttgart Courtyard, and Tranquility Blue.
Blended lighting, local style stored in the document

Environment Lighting

Environment lights derive their lighting parameters from the image used in connection with the style. The image provides a source location and luminance or radiance values that correspond more with real world lighting, providing a more realistic viewing experience. The scene lighting is derived from this 360 degree image providing more realistic results. Style settings control exposure, rotation, and scale.

The environment image source can be used as a 3D background in the scene. The background provides visual continuity with the light source and is seen in materials defined with high reflectance values.

Custom IBL environment lighting

When you import an image for use in a lighting style, the image is automatically added to the enironment folder.

Currently, Pack and Go doesn't support including the Environment folder in the package. Thus, when you want to view the model on different machine with the same scene lighting, there are additional steps to take. These are:

Copy the environment folder on the current machine to the (target) machine where the model will be opened and viewed.
On the target machine, in the application options File tab, set the Environment Folder to the location to the copied folder.

Directional Lighting

Directional lighting consists of up to four directional lights which participate in the scene when their box is checked. Each light has settings for color, brightness, relative movement (Camera space or ViewCube space), and position.

Each Standard Lighting Style has settings for brightness, ambience, and shadow direction.

Blended Lighting

Blended lighting consists of environment lighting combined with directional lights to achieve a unique scene lighting scheme. To turn standard lights on/off go to the Lighting tab and click the light icon to toggle off or on. Use the typical methods for modifying the settings.

Shadows

The active lighting style sets the direction and appearance of shadows.