Lighting advice

  • it depends, you need lights for shadows at least unless they’re pre-baked
  • if you align lights with the environment you get more realism, i would always try to do that
  • you can, but it’s a bit more involved

generally, take a look: Live envmaps and getting realistic studio lighting almost for free the best way forward is to not rely on hdri images, or not solely, but to create your own environment with light emitting shapes. this environment can be live, you can rotate it or move lights through the scene.

here’s what kind of a difference this can make, without a proper environment, cgi cheese:

with an environment:

Demo: https://lwo219.csb.app
Sandbox + code: Building live envmaps - CodeSandbox

if you can consider react + three, this is a piece of cake. otherwise you’ll have to build your own, but you can take the code as a reference.

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