 Lighting can be one of the most important factors of making your scene look presentable. Oftentimes you can spend hours on a model but none of the detail is visible at render because it's either too dark or too bright. For this we're going to go over a very simple way to make sure your lighting setup looks good. Three-point lighting. Three-point lighting is a standard setup for lighting that has carried on through the ages as one of the best ways to light a scene. In film, photography, painting and now digital graphics. Let's go over exactly what it is, why it's so good and how to set it up in Blender. Three-point lighting consists of three lights, hence the name. These lights are called the key light, the fill light, and the rim or back light. Let's go over each of these real quick. The key light is the main light. It's the primary or key light source so when someone looks at a scene and says oh the light's coming from the top left hand corner, they're most likely referring to the key light. That's the light that defines the light source in the scene. Now the fill light is the one that sort of fills or softens the shadow that the key light casts. It's usually the least bright light in the scene but it's very important. The fill light acts as a way to keep the shadows from being too dark on your subject. That way you can still see those details and soften the contrast that the key light makes. The third light is called the back light or the rim light. Now this as you might be able to tell from the name is cast onto the back of the subject. Usually it's actually the brightest light in the scene but it's there just to give a sliver of brightness around the edge of your subject. This gives the subject an outline or a rim of light which helps it stand out from the background. So let's try to recreate this in Blender. Instead of our default scene let's go ahead and replace our cube with a monkey. To do this simply left click select your cube and press the delete key. Then go to the add menu at the top go to mesh and select monkey. We're also going to right click it and select shade smooth. Now that we have our monkey in our scene let's get our three light sources set up according to the three point lighting technique. We already have a light here but if you don't you can simply add it through the same add menu but go to light point light. I'm going to go ahead and treat this first light as my key light. Let's use the move tool in the quick tools bar to bring our lamp to the top left hand side of our monkeys face. Now you may notice that our scene is not showing any actual lighting effects. That's because we're in solid mode. To see how our light actually will look at render let's go ahead and change our viewport to rendered mode. You can do that by going to the top right and clicking the right most sphere or pressing the Z hot key and using the pie menu. Now that we can see the effect of our light on the monkeys face we can adjust the light a bit more as needed. If you would like to adjust the brightness of your light simply go to your light properties tab indicated by a green light bulb icon in the properties editor. You can then edit the power of the light by left click dragging or you can left click tap the property and type a number manually. I'm going to go ahead and leave this at the default value of 1000 W. Next we'll make our fill light. Now as long as you have one light it can be very easy to make more as you can simply select the first light object and press shift D to duplicate. With this new light let's place it on the other side of the key light. If the key light is a little higher than the monkey make sure the place to fill light a little lower. However it seems a bit too bright on both sides. If you remember from our previous descriptions the fill light is meant to be the dimmest light in the setup. I'm going to go into our light property tab and slide our power value down with left click drag all the way down to zero. Then I'll slide it right back up just a little bit to a point where I feel like it's bright enough but not too bright. That's perfect. Now we can finally add our back or rim light. Let's create a third light object in the same way we did before and place it behind the monkey's head. For now we can place it directly behind the monkey's head but oftentimes it is a bit off-center depending on where the camera is. Feel free to experiment with this to get the best outline shape for your subject. Now if you remember the rim light is typically the brightest light in the setup. So let's just start off by dragging that power cider in the light properties tab as high as we can get it until we see that bright white outline around our subject. Just to save you some time I'll say that the number I decided to use was around 50,000. Definitely the brightest light but feel free to tweak the numbers based on your scene. Awesome! Now you have your three lights set up and it looks pretty decent. However, let's add a cube to act as our environment real quick. To do this simply go into the add menu of the viewport. Go to mesh and select cube. We can then scale the cube up with the scale tool until we find ourselves inside of it. Now you might notice something a little weird. Our cube is almost completely white. What's happening here is our environment is now super bright because of our lighting setup. This isn't very ideal especially if you want to have your character stand out. One reason for the environment being so bright is because we're currently using point lights for our light sources meaning that they cast light in all directions. In film and photography the physical lights used are typically directional lights specifically to avoid this problem. Let's try to do the same. Starting with our brightest light the rim light. If we select it with left click we can go into the light property tab to see other light options point, sun, spot and area. Feel free to experiment with each light type but I personally like the spotlight for this purpose as you'll be able to focus the spotlight column as needed. Simply select the spot option and you'll already notice a difference. Our environment is more clear but our monkey's rim light is no longer there. That's because our spotlight is currently rotated the wrong way. Let's use the rotate tool to point it back at our monkey. Now because this is a spotlight you can also adjust your spotlight's effective area by dragging the size value in our light property tab. Awesome. Now our backlight still has the same effect it had earlier but without the issue of over lighting our environment. Optionally you can do the same thing for your other two lights but this can be situational so feel free to experiment and adapt. And that's it. You now have a beautifully lit monkey and blender.