Free Light It Up 4.0.0 add-on builds studio lighting in Blender from presets and no longer tips the rig over on FBX-imported characters

Developer Rasheed Shaikh has released version 4.0.0 of Light It Up, a free add-on for Blender. The add-on builds a studio lighting setup in the scene from a ready-made preset. Version 4.0.0 is a bug-fix release. The author fixed three issues that caused the rig to end up at the world origin, get the wrong scale, or tip over sideways on imported characters.

Light It Up is distributed under the GPL license and published on the official Blender Extensions platform, so it installs via drag and drop. The add-on works in Blender 4.2 LTS through 5.2 and supports both built-in render engines, Cycles and EEVEE.

A preset turns into ordinary lights

The library contains 17 setups, divided into portrait, cinematic, environment, and product lighting. Each has a rendered thumbnail, so you can pick the lighting by the picture rather than by the name.

An applied preset doesn't bake or hide anything. Standard Blender light sources parented to an empty appear in the scene. Any light can then be moved, recolored, or deleted by hand. Everything the add-on creates is native Blender data, so a file lit with Light It Up renders even on a machine where the add-on isn't installed.

The whole rig is controlled by four global controls:

• intensity;
• color temperature;
• key-to-fill ratio;
• rotation of the setup around the subject.

The controls work in absolute values: with every change, the parameters are recalculated from the preset's original settings. If you raise the intensity from 1.0 to 3.0 and bring it back, the lighting will be exactly as it was at the start, and the values won't gradually drift.

The Fit To Subject function adjusts the rig's size and position to the dimensions of the selected object. Custom setups can be saved as presets, and they go into the same library as the built-in ones. User presets are stored outside the add-on folder, so updating doesn't delete them.

What was fixed in 4.0.0

The author singled out three fixes because these bugs got in the way of normal work:

• if you picked another preset right after building a rig, the new rig collapsed to the world origin. Yet cycling through setups one after another is the most common way to work with a library like this;
• linked and instanced objects were detected as zero-size objects, and the rig was built at the wrong scale;
• on characters imported from FBX, the entire rig tipped over: FBX import writes the axis conversion into the object's transform, and the rig inherited that rotation.

The scale fix applies to assets brought in via File > Link and the asset browser, as well as objects instanced by particles and geometry nodes: the add-on now measures the geometry that actually ends up in the render. In addition, thumbnail settings moved to a popover menu in the panel header, and preset categories are now collapsible.

Paid version

Light It Up has a commercial version, Light It Up Pro, sold on Superhive for $49. It includes 37 studio and portrait setups, including six classic portrait lighting patterns: Rembrandt, split, loop, butterfly, short, and broad. It also offers 20 volumetric atmosphere presets, 13 animated lighting effects, light groups with one-click AOV export, a local HDRI browser, and setup matching from a reference photo. Judging by the descriptions, the free version uses the same principles, namely native lights and absolute controls, but lacks atmosphere, animation, and HDRI features.

What this means for Blender users

Add-ons for quick lighting setup in Blender have been around for a long time. Light It Up bets on transparency: the result can be taken apart and refined by hand, just like lighting built from scratch. For modelers and prop artists who need to quickly prepare work for a portfolio or a preview, this can save time on routine light placement.

With the arrival of Blender Extensions, add-on authors will likely choose this model more often: an open base version is published on the official extensions platform, while an extended version is sold separately. The free version attracts users, and the paid one brings in revenue.

What's most useful to you in Light It Up 4.0.0?

• 17 lighting presets
• Global rig controls