This page covers:

• What are Note Lights
• How Note Lights are scaled and positioned
• Common issues with Note Lights

What are Note Lights

Note Lights are invisible rectangular light sources that sit above and Note objects, and provide illumination around the path Note objects take. Note Lights cannot be seen directly, but can be seen in reflections of materials. Here is one in editor, highlighted yellow:

Note Lights do not cast shadows, but are very performance-expensive due to their often-large influence radius and their rectangular light source mode. Influence radius expands with the Note Light, but has a minimum radius while the Note Light is very small to ensure it still reaches the Backdrop.

Light channels

See here for more information about light channels.

How Note Lights are scaled and positioned

Note Lights inherit their parented Note object's sizing, including black/white key width. They are positioned directly above the Note object with a given Z-height.

Common issues

Note Lights are quite unintuitive (thanks to being invisible), and a lot of common questions often centre around the way Note Lights behave "physically" within the Keysight scene.

De-sync from Note objects

With a reflective Backdrop (that is, a Backdrop material with low roughness and either some amount of specularity or metalness), Note Lights risk becoming de-synced from their Note objects when viewed at an angle. This can happen either in a manual 3D view (stock Gemstone preset):

Or with some amount of Perspective under Core > Visual layout:

This is due to the height of the Note Light being reflected, like so:

In order to "fix" this, consider:

• Using a low-specularity, zero-metalness, high-roughness Backdrop material. This will cause light spill to be spatially accurate, as only diffuse lighting is visible (stock "Keysight" preset with its Concrete Backdrop is a good example of this)
• Reduce the Z-height of lights above note objects
• Reduce Perspective in Core > Visual layout to reduce the reflection angle and thereby reduce de-sync
• Don't use Note Lights

Hard-edged reflections

Note Lights are perfectly rectangular, with light emitted uniformly from their area. With reflective-enough surfaces, their shape can become visible. This is most commonly seen on the Backdrop around Rounded Note objects ("Fire" default preset, with roughness of Backdrop edited from 0.50 to 0.25:

In order to fix this:

• Consider using square Note objects (Flat or Angled shape)
• Increase roughness of material where Note Light edge is visible

Curved lighting influence

When Note Lights are suitably long (such as held notes in a vertical layout), it can become possible to see non-uniform lighting with some curvature to it:

This is due to light falloff within the influence radius becoming more aggressive towards the bounds of that influence radius. There is no "fix" for this, aside from having a more reflective Backdrop in order to concentrate lighting a little more, or not having such long Note Lights.