In Adobe® After Effects® 6.5, you can create any number of lights to illuminate a 3D scene, and you can select and control these lights much as you would in the real world. In After Effects, however, lights are only evident when they illuminate 3D layers that are set to accept lights. You can select a light to place it in the scene and then point it at a subject, but you’ll never see a lighting instrument in the scene. Pointing a light into a camera won’t cause a lens flare or overexposed image—in fact, you won’t see anything at all. And you’ll never blow a lamp or overload a circuit breaker.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a light, and then we’ll show you how to customize the light and the shadow it casts.