CHIARO 3.0

Production-proven lighting rigs for Blender.

CAMERA-RELATIVE LIGHTING

Every rig is positioned relative to the camera, the way a film set is lit for each camera setup: key, fill and rim land where they belong in the frame, not at fixed points in world space.

The rig is centered on the bounding box of the subject, so an off-center origin does not matter, and light distances, power and size are scaled to the size of the subject: a cup and a car get the same look. Several objects can be lit together as one group. Lights that would end up below the subject's lowest point move closer and stay above it, lighting it the same.

Keep Aim on Subject keeps every light pointed at an aim sphere at the center of the subject while the rig rises, lowers or turns. Moving the sphere moves the point the lights aim at, for example to a face instead of the center of a full body.

Re-target fits the current rig to other objects, or to the same objects after they move or change scale, keeping its settings, colors, overrides and rotation. Chiaro also remembers which objects each rig was made for.

RIG LIBRARY

68 rigs in six categories, each in Area, Spot and Point versions. The three versions light the subject equally bright, so switching type changes the quality of the light, not its exposure.

NEW IN 3.018 new rigs, among them Fashion Editorial, Packshot Tent, Food / Tabletop, Sodium Streetlamp, Haunted House and Found Footage / Flashlight.

NEW IN 3.0Rigs are chosen from a grid of thumbnails, new for every rig, with the full name below. Search Rigs finds a rig by its name or its category, and a star keeps it in Favorites, shared across every file.

Twelve rigs move by design: flames flicker, glows pulse, strobes flash, lightning strikes, and neons and streetlamps fail now and then.

Only the lights the rig designs with motion move; the rest stay still. Animate, Speed and Amount control the motion for the whole rig, and with Animate off the rig holds still for a still image. A film reel marks animated rigs in the selector, and the Animated category gathers them all.

The animation is stored in the .blend as regular Blender animation: it renders without Chiaro installed, on a render farm for example, and stays when the rig is detached.

Haze fills the air around the subject, so the light of the rig becomes visible: beams from spots, glows around backlights, light falling through the air.

One switch creates a volume box around the subject, the lights and the camera, fitted to the scene. Its density fades out before its walls, so the box itself never shows.

The haze works in Cycles and EEVEE, still gets the light of the rig with Light Only, and is saved in presets. Volumes are slow to render in Cycles; EEVEE renders them much faster.

CONTROL THE SYSTEM

Global controls for speed, per-light overrides for precision.

CREATIVE RANDOMIZER

Each click of Randomize Lighting produces a new lighting setup, randomizing only the checked parameters, within limits that keep the result usable. Every variation starts from a tested rig.

PRESETS

Any rig can be saved as a preset: rig and light type, Distance Scale, Height Offset, rotation, Keep Aim, the global controls, the animation controls, the haze, and every light's color, color lock, mute and overrides.

Presets adapt to the subject they are loaded on. Global Intensity, Global Light Size, Height Offset and light overrides keep their proportions to the subject's size, so a look saved on a person does not leave a car in the dark.

Presets are JSON files in Blender's user scripts folder, so they can be copied to another computer. A refresh button reads the folder again, and a preset is never overwritten unless Replace is checked.

WORKFLOW INTEGRATION

Chiaro adds structure to a scene without taking it over.

CHIARO 3.0 UPDATE (2026/11/01)

Lazy Lighter is now Chiaro, a Blender extension, and this is its biggest update so far.

COMPATIBILITY & SUPPORT

Production-proven lighting for Blender.