K-tools: Scene Light Manager (SLM)

Stop fighting Blender’s interface just to light your scene.

Scene Light Manager (SLM) is a professional, high-fidelity lighting workflow toolkit designed to keep you in the creative flow. Adjust intensity, change shapes, solo lights, control HDRI rotation, and manage light/shadow linking directly in the 3D Viewport without ever opening the properties sidebar.

Why Scene Light Manager? (The SLM Difference)

In vanilla Blender, setting up cinematic lighting is a tedious loop: select a light, look at the properties panel, drag a slider, look back at the viewport, select another light, expand sub-panels, repeat.

SLM changes everything by bringing the controls to your cursor:

• Zero Context Switching: Adjust power, size, beam angle, and color directly on the light object inside the 3D Viewport.
• Instant Visual Feedback: High-fidelity GPU outlines highlight exactly which objects are affected by light or shadow linking in real time.
• Intuitive Environment Controls: Rotate your HDRI or position the Nishita sun texture with simple viewport gestures.
• Pure Performance: Built from the ground up for heavy production scenes with zero overhead.

Key Features

1. Viewport Gizmo Interface & Floating Overlay

Gain instant, contextual access to light settings directly on the active light:

• Smart Buttons: Click interactive icons next to your selected light to cycle types, change area shapes, toggle solo mode, adjust spot beam spreads, or tweak sizes.
• Real-Time Value Overlay: Get beautiful, color-coded HUD feedback showing your precise parameter values as you drag. Choose to lock the HUD to your mouse or snap it cleanly below the gizmo cluster.
• Alt-Modifier Batch Control: Hold Alt while adjusting a viewport gizmo to propagate the change to all selected lights instantly.

2. High-Fidelity GPU Linking Highlights

Configure Blender’s powerful Light and Shadow Linking systems visually:

• Visual Silhouette Outlines: Selecting any light instantly projects clean, anti-aliased wireframes and silhouette highlights over the linked receiver or blocker geometry.

• Dynamic Customization: Choose from three outline modes (Silhouette, Wireframe, or Both), and customize line thickness and colors to match your scene style.

3. Interactive HDRI & Sky Rotation

Ditch the shader editor mapping node. Rotate your environment from any camera angle:

• Auto-Detection Engine: Automatically detects and rotates the active background environment—whether it is Nishita Sky, a World Mapping node (Z Rotation), or Blender's built-in Viewport HDRI.

• Instant Drag Gesture: Hold Ctrl + Alt + Right Mouse Button and drag horizontally to spin the dome. Release to commit, or cancel with a right click.

• HUD Angle Readout: A clean digital compass at the bottom of the viewport displays the exact rotation angle in real time.

4. HDR Studio Light Textures & Gobos

Project real-world high-dynamic-range softboxes and patterns directly from Blender Area Lights:

• Photographic Realism: Map photographic softbox reflection textures and studio Gobos with a single click.

• Integrated Node Automation: Behind the scenes, SLM handles shader setups, texture mapping coordinate projections, and strength balance.

• Interactive Tweaks: Adjust Gobo rotation, scale, and softness directly from viewport operators.

5. Cinematic Presets & Custom Lighting Rigs

Build master lighting setups in seconds using built-in rigs and saving custom presets:

• Instant Rig Spawning: Spawn standard 3-point rigs, butterfly setups, or backlighting rings aligned to your active viewport camera.

• Preset Library Manager: Save complete scene lighting states to the global asset library and restore them instantly.

• Non-Destructive Mixing: Test different lighting directions, colors, and intensities by saving snapshots as presets.

6. Smart Light Isolation (Solo Mode)

Isolate a single light source to judge its contribution, shadows, and bounce:

*** Synchronized Soloing:** Solo any light via the viewport gizmo button or the sidebar list.

• Automatic Restores: Un-soloing returns your scene to the exact previous visibility layout.

• World Muting Option: Automatically disable the World background shader while soloing to isolate light color contributions in pure darkness.

7. Unified Light Manager Sidebar

A beautiful, tabbed panel consolidating every light source, emissive mesh, and setting in your project:

• Properties Tab: Grouped list control over name, power, color, and visibility of all scene lights.

• Synchronization Tab: Seamlessly synchronize viewport selections, automatically activate collections, or sync visibility parameters.

• Light List Tab: Customize which property columns are visible (including icons for Light Groups, Light Linking, Shadow Linking, and Exposure Overrides).

• Mesh Emitters Detection: Automatically scan and list mesh objects acting as lights via emissive shaders (using configurable search terms like led, emit, glow).

8. Geographic Sun & Sky Positioning

Align your Nishita sky or solar directional lights using real-world geographic coordinates:

• Latitude/Longitude Inputs: Enter standard coordinates in Decimal format or degrees/minutes/seconds (e.g., 48°51'30.2"N 02°17'40.2"E).

• 3D Solar Path Overlay: Projects a beautiful daily solar path arc and cardinal direction compass (North-South, East-West) inside the 3D viewport.

Global Hotkeys

Modal Navigation

Modular Preferences

Tailor every detail of the interface to match your personal pipeline inside Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > K-tools: Scene Light Manager:

• Customize Gizmos: Choose which buttons (Type, Shape, Size, Beam, Isolate) show up in the viewport.

• Clean Tabs Grid: Choose between a grid or column layout for the preference panels.

• Custom Emissive Keywords: Add your own terms to scan materials and automatically detect custom Mesh Lights.