Lights & materials

Lights

Create one from Layer → New → Light… (Ctrl/⌘ + Alt + Shift + L), or Light… in the toolbar’s New Layer menu. Both open a real creation dialog where you pick the type, colour and intensity. There are five light types.

Its controls are the Light settings section of the Properties panel, and Light Options also appear under the light’s row in the timeline, where any of them can be given a stopwatch.

Property	Notes
Light preset	Starting points: Key, Fill, Rim / Back, Soft top, Warm practical, Cool moonlight, Sunset key
Colour, colour temperature	—
Intensity	—
Radius, falloff, falloff distance	—
Direction, cone angle, cone feather	For the types that have them
Target	The point of interest, draggable in the viewport
Shadows	Darkness and diffusion, plus map quality, bias and softness for shadow-mapped lights

Keyframing intensity is the cheapest dramatic move in the app: a light that rises from zero as a title lands does more than most transform animation.

Ambient Fill

Every new light since 0.7 brings an Ambient Fill term, so the unlit side of a 3D object is no longer black. It is a flat, direction-free contribution — raise it for a soft product-shot look, drop it to zero for hard cinematic falloff — and it is keyframeable like every other light property.

The shading model

Lighting is computed per fragment, using Lambert diffuse plus Blinn-Phong specular. That is a real shading model, not a per-layer tint:

Diffuse falls off with the angle between the surface and the light.
Specular gives you a highlight whose position depends on where the camera is.

The practical consequence is that moving the camera changes the highlight, which is what makes extruded 3D text read as solid rather than as a flat image with a gradient on it.

Materials

Per-layer material properties feed the shading model. They decide how strongly a layer responds to diffuse and specular light — whether it reads as matte paper or as something with a sheen.

They are in the Material Options section of the Properties panel, on any layer that is 3D: the shading model, Accepts lights, ambient, diffuse, specular intensity and shininess, roughness and metal, reflection and transparency controls, Reflect Layers, a height map with displacement, and Casts shadows / Accepts shadows. Materials can be saved and reapplied as presets.

A 3D layer with no light in the composition is rendered unlit. If your scene went flat the moment you turned on 3D, you need a light — not different material settings.

Shadows

Lights can cast shadows onto other 3D layers, and every shadow-casting light gets its own shadow map. Composition Settings ▸ World ▸ Ground Shadows catches shadows on the ground plane, with its own opacity, so an object can sit on a floor without a floor layer.

Renderer settings

Composition Settings ▸ Renderer (since 1.0) holds the 3D renderer’s quality settings, per composition:

Setting	Values
Shadow map size	512 px (fast), 1024 px, 2048 px (sharp) — per light, so a larger map costs more memory and time for each
Shadow-casting lights	How many lights cast mapped shadows
Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)	On or off, with radius, intensity, and half or full resolution
Depth of field quality	Draft, Medium, High
Anti-aliasing	MSAA off, or 4× — off is fastest on heavy scenes

Shadow maps, ambient occlusion and reflections are reused from frame to frame while the camera, the lights and the shadow casters stay put, so a still camera on a lit scene is cheap.

What is not here

No ray-traced renderer. Reflections of other layers (Reflect Layers) are planar reflections drawn by the rasteriser.

Beyond Classic 3D

These go past After Effects’ Classic 3D, and are newer than the rest of this page:

Shading modes. A 3D layer’s material can use the Blinn-Phong model described above, a PBR model with a roughness control, or toon (cel) shading with a chosen number of bands.
Skies and reflections. An environment light lights the scene from an image sky — since 1.0 a Radiance .hdr file as well — and the sky can be shown behind every layer. A material’s reflections show that sky and, with Reflect Layers on, the other 3D layers (toon shading never reflects).
Fog. Composition Settings ▸ World ▸ Fog — linear, exponential or exponential squared.
Imported models. File ▸ Import ▸ 3D Model… takes .glb, .gltf, .obj, .fbx, .usda and .usdz (select the .bin, .mtl and textures with it). The model arrives as ordinary layers — a 3D null per node, with a layer for each mesh — so it is parentable and keyframable like anything else.
Plugins. A native plugin can draw its own 3D — a glTF model through the comp camera and lights, with motion blur, passing behind the comp’s 3D layers.

Everything else here is Classic 3D: flat planes and extrusions, lit well. See Known gaps.