Setup a Godot 3D Scene in 30 Seconds

’Cause your 3D scenes deserve lights & env

Did you ever run a Godot 3D scene, just to discover that it was all dark and one-coloured? That’s because Godot actually does something a little tricky in the editor: as long as you don’t have a lighting and environment of your own, it shows you preview ones… but only while debugging in the editor!

A before/after of the scene in-game — better with some lights!

👉 This tutorial uses assets by Kenney

First of, if you want to disable these previews altogether, you just need to click on the little light and globe icons in your 3D viewport’s toolbar:

But if, instead, you’d rather use those previews as a first building block for your actual scene lights and environment, you can click on the little vertical dots next to those icons to open up the preview options.

Here you can adjust those previews — and then, go and click on the buttons at the bottom to convert those previews into actual nodes!

And there you go! You now know how to quickly setup a 3D scene in Godot so that it has basic lighting and environment when you run the game :)