Save, Export & Import

Octane Light Studio provides multiple ways to save and share your lighting work. Understanding the difference between each option helps you choose the right one for your situation.                

Three Levels of Saving

Think of saving in Octane Light Studio as three levels, each with a different scope and purpose.

Snapshots save the state of a single layer. They live inside your Blender file and are perfect for comparing variations within a project. You create and switch between them directly in the panel.

Light Setups save your entire lighting scene — all layers, lights, and snapshots — as a JSON file in the addon's setups folder. They persist across Blender sessions and are always available in the Setups section. Use these for building a personal library of reusable lighting configurations.

File Export saves your lighting scene as a standalone JSON file anywhere on your disk. This is what you use when you want to share a lighting setup with someone else, transfer it to a different machine, or create a backup outside of the addon's internal library.

Save to Disk

The Save to Disk button in the Setups section saves your complete lighting configuration to a file. A file browser opens where you choose the location and filename. Everything is captured — layer structure, light positions, intensities, colors, gradients, emission types, temperatures, visibility settings, spotlight cone angles, analytic light parameters, mesh light references, pivot modes, and all snapshot data with  their type-specific properties.

Quick Export

After you have saved to a file at least once, the Quick Export button lets you re-save to that same file with a single click. No dialog, no confirmation — just an instant update of the last used file. This is  ideal during an iterative workflow where you want to frequently update an external backup or shared file without interrupting your creative process.

Import Setup

The Import button opens a file browser in the addon's export folder by default and lets you load a lighting configuration from any JSON file. When importing, the addon recreates all layers, lights, and snapshots from the file data. Gradients are regenerated on area lights, and all light-type-specific properties are restored to their saved values.

Import supports two modes:

• Replace mode removes your existing lighting setup and loads the imported one as a clean replacement.
• Update mode keeps your existing setup and merges the imported data — matching lights by name and updating their properties while preserving anything not covered by the import file. Update mode also restores pivot mode settings for each light.

What Gets Saved in Files

File saves are comprehensive and capture everything you need to fully recreate a lighting setup. For every light, the following is stored: position, rotation, scale, intensity, color, emission type, temperature,  all visibility flags, sampling rate, Light ID, pivot mode, and the complete gradient configuration with all slider values.

Light-type-specific properties are fully covered. Area lights save their shape, size, and gradient settings. Spotlights save cone angle, throw distance, cone width, and hardness. Directional lights save spread  angle and sample count. Sphere lights save radius and samples. Mesh lights save the object reference and samples. Analytic lights save geometry type, spread angle, falloff, cutoff, all four size parameters, and samples.

Snapshot data within files is equally thorough. Each snapshot stores all base properties plus every type-specific property for every light, including emission type, temperature, spotlight cone angle, pivot mode, and pivot auto settings. This means loading a file not only restores your current lighting state but also all the snapshot variations you had saved.

Best Practices

Get into the habit of using Quick Export regularly during long sessions. It takes a fraction of a second and gives you an external safety net alongside Blender's own save system.

Use Light Setups for configurations you want to reuse across projects — your go-to three-point lighting, your preferred product lighting rig, your standard interior setup. Use file export for sharing with  collaborators or archiving specific project states.

When sharing files with others, keep in mind that Mesh Light setups reference specific objects by name. If the recipient's scene does not contain objects with matching names, the mesh light references will need  to be reassigned manually.