Shade supports all standard 3D lights you expect: Point Lights, Spot Lights, Distribution Lights. In addition, you can also turn an object into an emitting Area Light, or an object into a luminous Linear Light. Using Radiosity, you can also use Sky Lights to create highly realistic renders.

Shade's flexible lighting system works hand in hand with other Shade technologies: 64 and 128 bit HDRI background images in Image Based Lighting (IBL), Radiosity and Global Illumination.

Area Lights excel at providing irregular, but a source of soft lighting to illuminate a scene.

Linear Lights make it easy to create objects that emit light throughout the object, such as florescent lights, in combination with Path Tracing and Radiosity.

Shade Lights can also be associated with Light Joints, allowing you to animate the intensity of any light source.

Shade 12 introduced support of Volumetric Lights with the VolumeLight attribute that can be assigned to almost any light source.

Create More Realistic Lights with IES Data. Distribution Lights can accept industry standard IES data that simulates photometric attributes of real world lighting. Create both indoor and outdoor scenes that duplicate commercial lighting systems, streetlights and more. Find excellent examples at Lithonia Lighting.