# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Understanding Blender Lights

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Blender provides several different kinds of lights:

-   **Point**: Single point light source. Useful to provide very
    localized light. The shadows can be sharp, or you can set its size
    to something nonzero to make the shadows fuzzy. Can represent light
    sources within the scene; e.g. if there is a lightbulb or candle or
    something in the scene, position one of these within it to give the
    impression of light coming from that object.
-   **Sun**: A light with parallel rays that will illuminate the scene
    with an even light. Because the sun is (effectively) infinitely far
    away, the position of this lamp does not matter, only its direction.
    Good to use in brightly-lit outdoor scenes (i.e. a sunny day).
-   **Spot**: Spot lights produce light constrained to a cone-shaped
    beam, and have some special features. They are the only light source
    that can be made visible with the \'halo\' option, to simulate light
    in a fog. They are also the only light source that can cast buffer
    shadows (see below).
-   **Hemi**: 180°-wide uniform, shadowless light source. Great for use
    as a fill light, or as a back light, or to represent light from the
    sky. Similar to Sun, its position does not matter, only its
    direction.
-   **Area**: These are similar to point lamps, except that they are
    rectangular. As a result they can cast accurate raytraced soft
    shadows, at the expense of additional render time.

There are two different kinds of shadows that lights may cast:
*buffered* and *ray-traced*. The main difference is that buffered
shadows are much quicker to calculate, but take more memory, and can be
of lower quality without some fiddling. Also strand-rendered materials
(as can be used for hair or fur) cannot cast ray shadows with the
Blender Internal renderer, so you have to use buffer shadows for them so
their shadows look realistic.

Only spot lamps can cast buffered shadows. Hemi lamps cannot cast
shadows at all.

+-----------+-----------------+-----------------+
| Lamp Type | Buffer Shadow   | Ray Shadow      |
+===========+=================+=================+
| Point     | 