3.1.1 — light shafts, your own patterns, and one panel instead of seven

NEW

• Light Shafts. With a gobo on a light, press Add Shaft and the beam itself becomes visible — carrying that same pattern, so the bars in the air line up with the bars on the floor. Both are the same cutter, seen twice. Strength, spread, length, far end, edge fade, haze and colour are yours, and there is no volumetric domain to size, position or keep the camera out of. Renders in Cycles and EEVEE; Cycles resolves finer detail inside the beam.

• Use your own image as a gobo. Any file on disk — a logo, a leaf, a painted matte — blocks the light the same way the built-in sixteen do, sized to your subject, and the shaft carries it into the air too. Flip swaps which part blocks if it comes out as its own negative.

• Two new volumetric presets in a fifth category, Light Shafts: God Rays and Window Shafts. These are the only two presets that place a light as well as a volume, so they arrive as a finished shot rather than an atmosphere you then have to light. That makes 22 atmospheres in five categories.

• Animated effects now work on ANY light. Select one light and the effect applies to that light; select several and it applies to those; select a light belonging to a rig and it applies to the whole rig. Previously all thirteen required a Light It Up rig and silently did nothing useful without one.

• Shaping works on any light too — including lights you placed yourself, in a scene this add-on has never seen.

CHANGED

• One panel, one section at a time. Light · Shape · Match · Air · Move · Ship across the top; click a name and the panel becomes that section. The seven stacked panels are gone. Measured fully open before and after: 4,450 px of panel down to 788 px for the tallest single section.

• Gobo cards are sized to your scene. On area, point and sun lights the card was derived from a fixed angle rather than from the light's own throw, which put a 5.66 m card on a 5.75 m throw — and because the card sits at a fifth of the throw, it magnifies five times on the way to the subject. Cards on those three types are now capped to a fraction of the throw. Spot lights are unchanged: a spot was the one type already sized from a real cone. The projected pattern is identical either way, and the lit floor comes out 27% brighter, because the oversized card had been half-blocking light across a solid angle no shot uses.

• Light shafts start dimmer. The default Strength is 0.1 where it was 0.22 — measured in a scene that already has lighting, the old default lifted the whole frame by 41% and had begun washing the gobo pattern off the floor, while 0.1 lifts it 19% and still reads clearly as a beam. Shafts already in your scenes keep the strength they have; this only changes new ones.

• A sun's beam runs straight instead of spreading, and its shape buttons read Cylinder and Box rather than Cone and Rectangle — a sun's rays are parallel, so those are the shapes it can actually build.

• The Light Shaft panel was tagged "Cycles". It renders in both engines and the tag now says so. Measured over an air band containing no geometry: EEVEE 0.2105 against Cycles 0.2117, both exactly 0.000000 with the shaft off.

FIXED

• Gobo patterns went flat in large scenes. The pattern was sized so one bar lands about a hand's width across — right for a person, and held to the same width however big the scene was, so in a large room the beam ended up with hundreds of bars in it and the pattern washed out to nothing. Sizing is now capped so the pattern always reads. Small and person-sized scenes are unchanged, so nothing you have already lit will look different.

• The fog container showed its own faces on a snug fit. The fog now fades out across the fit margin instead of stopping at the box.

• Fitting a second fog layer onto the same selection made the first one disappear. Fit now keeps the stagger between coplanar layers.

• Dragging the beam's Spread slider raised a ValueError on every write.

• The Shaping panel raised an error on some light types, and followed your selection instead of the light carrying the gobo.

• Custom fog presets now save and restore the ground, distance, wind and detail controls, and no longer multiply their own density on reapply.

• Beam render time is about 4.3 s where it was 7.6 s, with no change to what it looks like.

Tested on Blender 4.2 LTS, 4.5 LTS, 5.1 and 5.2.

**3.1.0 - Light shaping**

Light It Up could place a light and adjust it. Now it can shape one.

**Gobos - 16 procedural patterns, in Cycles and EEVEE.** Blinds, Window, Stripes, Lattice, Grid, Honeycomb, City Lights, Palm Fronds, Bark Breakup, Clouds, Breakup, Water Caustics, Rain, Dots, Sunburst and Stained Glass - projected from **any light in your scene**, whether Light It Up placed it or you added it yourself. Scale, rotation, edge softness and depth are all adjustable, and depth goes the whole way from a gentle break-up to a hard cut. The patterns are procedural, so there is nothing to download and nothing to run out of.

**Every pattern and profile has a rendered thumbnail**, so the library is a set of pictures rather than a list of names - which matters when the vocabulary is a lighting one and "breakup" or "bark" tells you nothing until you see it.

**And they move.** One button sets a pattern going: rain falls, palm fronds sway, cloud drifts, water caustics ripple. It is driven off the frame rather than keyframed, so there is no frame range to set up, it  runs as long as your scene does, and stopping it leaves no keyframes in your file to find and delete. Speed is yours. 

*Two notes worth having up front.* Adding a gobo **hardens the light** - a wide softbox blurs any cutter into nothing, so the source is shrunk to make the pattern read, and removing the gobo puts your  original size back. And it works in **EEVEE as well as Cycles**, which most gobo tools do not, because the pattern is cast by a real camera-invisible cutter rather than by a light texture EEVEE cannot see.

**IES profiles  6 built in, plus your own files.** Narrow Spot, Wide Flood, Batwing, Downlight, Bare Bulb and Wall Wash, generated rather than shipped, so they cost nothing and are always there. Load any `.ies` file from a manufacturer or a library alongside them. **Cycles only** - EEVEE has no light node trees, and the panel says so next to the controls.

**Softbox modifiers.** Shape, size and spread on any area light, in both engines. Plus four Cycles-only modifiers that change what a glossy surface actually reflects: Gradient, Feathered, Octabox and Strip Box. On a shiny product a blank rectangle reads as CG; these give the source a real shape. 

**Everything is per light and it all round-trips.** Shape the key differently from the rim. Lighting snapshots capture and restore shaping along with everything else, so comparing two versions compares the whole look.

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**Volumetric fog - the presets became a system.** 

The twenty fog presets were a look you applied and then lived with. They are now a look you shape.

**Fit the fog to your scene.** One button sizes the fog container to your scene, or to only what you have selected, instead of a fixed 30-metre box sitting wherever it landed. A container that matches the shot renders faster, and the fog stops running out mid-frame. The container's faces fade out across the margin the fit adds, so a snug box never shows its edges - no hard line where the fog stops above the set, no slab edge where a side face crosses the frame.

**Ground Fog.** Settles the density towards the floor and clears the air above it, on a smooth curve across the whole container - fog that pools, rather than fog that fills.

**Distance Haze.** Thin at the camera and building with distance, ranged over the depth your camera can actually see. This is the atmospheric perspective that puts a background *behind* a subject instead of a wash over both.

**Wind.** The drift was always in there, running off the frame counter, and it was not reachable from the panel. Speed, direction and scale are now sliders. Speed 1.0 is exactly what the preset always did, and 0 holds the fog completely still - which is what you want for a still frame.

**Layering.** Stack a ground fog under a distance haze: different presets, separate containers, one on top of the other. Remove Fog now takes one, the selected ones, or all of them.

**And one fix that matters more than any of the features.** Fog density was scaled by the size of your scene in the wrong direction - the bigger the scene, the denser the fog, and the error compounded with the container's own size. Past about ten metres it went opaque: measured, nineteen of the twenty presets rendered their subject invisible in a fifty-metre scene. Density now scales the other way, so a preset reads the same whether you are lighting a product or a street, and no preset's authored look was changed to achieve it.

**Existing files will render differently - better, but differently.** If you dialled a fog density in by hand against the old behaviour, expect to revisit it. Saved fog presets are also no longer scaled twice when reloaded, which was compounding every save.

**Upgrading from version 2?** Version 3 installs beside it, not over it. Disable and remove the old *Light It Up Pro* in Preferences → Add-ons first, or you will keep seeing the old panel.

Pro edition. Requires Blender 4.2 or newer. Tested on Blender 4.2 LTS, 4.5 LTS, 5.1 and 5.2.

Version 3.0.1

IMPORTANT - REMOVE VERSION 2 FIRST. Version 3 installs as a separate add-on

rather than upgrading version 2. Go to Preferences > Add-ons, find the old

"Light It Up Pro", disable it and press Remove, then install this zip and

restart Blender. If you skip this step Blender will keep showing you the old

panel. Version 3 detects an enabled version 2 and offers to switch it off for

you, but removing it properly is still worth the minute.

New in 3.0.1

- Housekeeping only. No presets, controls or behaviour changed.

- The add-on was restructured internally so that a free edition could be

  published on Blender's own extensions platform. Nothing was removed from this

  build; the free one is built by leaving di

- Two labels reworded: the preferences panel now reads "Light It Up Pro", and

  the version 2 warning above now says "an orather

  than naming the product twice.

- If you are already running 3.0.0 there is nothing here you need. Install it at

  your convenience.

New in 3.0.0

- Three add-ons merged into one: lighting prion.

- 37 lighting presets, up from 26, including all six classic portrait patterns

  and dedicated glass and product rigs.

- Live master controls: intensity, colour teand

  orbit, applied to a whole rig at once.

- Rigs now scale to the object they light, so a preset authored for a person

  works on a bottle or a watch without hand-moving anything.

- Lighting from a reference image.

- An HDRI library that scans and browses the HDRIs already on your drives.

- Pipeline layer: light groups with AOV export, lighting snapshots, light

  linking and batch apply.

- Presets now layer instead of replacing, and the camera is opt-in.

- Every preset is shown as a rendered thumbnail, with a compact list view if

  you prefer the old text buttons.

- Aim the whole rig at a head, or at any object you pick, instead of at the

  centre of the bounding box.

Fixed

- Custom presets were stored inside the add-on folder, so every update deleted

  them. They now live in your user data foldnd

  Blender version changes. Existing presets are migrated automatically on first

  run.

- Every animation effect was broken on Blender 4.4 and newer, because Blender

  removed the API they used. All 13 work again.

- Undo could crash Blender after applying a volumetric preset.

- Saving a rig that contained a point light  on

  apply.

- Volumetric presets left lights and objects behind when you switched between

  them, which looked like the fog getting de

- A rig applied to an object away from the world origin counted that object's

  position twice, so the lights sat too far out and at the wrong angle. The

  further the object was from the origin, th

- Selecting an armature rather than its mesh put the rig on the floor.

Tested on Blender 4.2 LTS, 4.5 LTS, 5.1 and 5.2.