# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Quickie Lighting

|previous=More Mesh Editing Techniques
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![](Blender263DefaultRender.png "Blender263DefaultRender.png"){width="120"}
Open a new default Blender document. Without doing anything else, hit
 to render the default cube with the
default settings. The result should look something like the image to the
right.

Note the lower left visible face of the cube is completely black because
the default light is at the upper right. 
![](Blender263ShadelessRender.png "Blender263ShadelessRender.png"){width="120"}
Go back from the render to the 3D view
(). Now select (with
) the default light, and either delete
it or move it to another layer (with ). Go
to your World tab
![](Blender255WorldContextButton.png "Blender255WorldContextButton.png")
in the Properties
![](Blender269PropertiesIcon.png "Blender269PropertiesIcon.png") window,
and look for the Environment Lighting panel:
![](Blender263WorldEnvironmentLightingSettings.png "Blender263WorldEnvironmentLightingSettings.png")
 Check the box next to the title, and leave the
"E:" (energy) value at its default 1.0. This gives us a pervasive,
directionless light, illuminating all objects equally from all
directions, which means there will be no shadows. Do another render, and
it should now look like the image to the right.

See how we have gone from inky-black shadows to no shadows at all. In
the real world, lighting is almost never perfectly uniform, and this
variation of light and shade is important to help us distinguish details
of the scene around us. Without such variations, everything devolves
into featureless blobs.

![](Blender263SoftenedDefaultRender.png "Blender263SoftenedDefaultRender.png"){width="120"}
Now undo your deletion of the default lamp (or move it back to layer 1).
Enable Environment Lighting again, but this time lower the Energy value
to 0.1. Do another render, and it should now look like the image to the
right. The shadowed face is still shadowed, but not enough to make it
impossible to see any details it may have. This is usually the type of
effect you want, unless you are aiming for really dramatic contrasts.

So the lesson is:

As you learn more, you will find that it is common to use two or three
lights, or even more, to ensure proper illumination of a scene. In
simple tutorials, where no explicit details are given about lighting,
you can probably get by with the default light, plus some environment
lighting (as we added earlier) to soften the shadows.

