Blender Day 5 - Lighting - Introduction Series for Beginners

[Music] hi welcome to day five of blender introduction series today we are going to talk about uh how to set up light in blender okay in previous chapter we set up few materials and textures for objects we have built so far in this series now it's time we set up our own lighting from scratch and understand the tools available within the software okay to begin with this chapter we'll open the file from the previous chapter and uh just delete all the lights which are affecting the scene okay you can just go to the solid mode and uh if overlays were disabled you can enable them so you can see the lights or you can just look at this outliner and delete all the three area lights now okay i'll just make a duplicate of full scene and now i'll just delete all the three area lights now let's render the scene just to make sure nothing else is affecting the light and of course we have one hdri in a background so i'm just going to in the color just uh disable this one by remove okay click remove and disable this one and set the strength to zero all right now it's almost black but we have few more things to take care of just select these filament objects and remove these materials and also the screen of the game is also being affected with the emission shader i'll rename this and so i can find this later and remove this you can also remove this one all right okay now you can't see anything because there are no light sources or no emitting objects okay so this is what you need to start with this tutorial all right so if you select all you can see all the objects are there but no lights are affecting it okay all right so now that we have our file set up let's start with this tutorial so let's talk about light so lighting is actually one of the most important part of creating uh creating visuals and telling stories with them it's so much more than just adding lights to scene and make it bright cinematographers use these great techniques to tell the stories effectively lights can be used to create different moods help compose your visuals effectively and separate objects create depth in your environment different color saturations and temperatures can be used to evoke different emotions in the scene and but these are all light theories okay and it is interesting however but it's a very vast topic to discuss you can research more about it later if you want or maybe we can discuss this chapter in some other video where we just talk about the light theories but it will be one of a very powerful knowledge to carry with you if you are into creating very rich visuals okay now there are mainly two kind of light sources one is the direct lights and the second is the indirect lights now to make this one clear i'll bring up my another setup which i have created over here now if i click on the render over here viewport render you can't see anything because there are no lights so what i'll do is i'll click on my sunlight which i have in the scene and enable this now what is happening here is light is falling from this direction if you just enable overlay i have this sun object over here and it's falling in this direction and uh from these windows actually light is coming inside this room and falling on the floor so that is what you're looking over here okay but rest everything is looking like absolutely pitch dark and this is not how the world this is not how the actual light works in the real world okay now this doesn't look natural at all that's because the global illumination is missing at this moment so we were talking about the indirect and indirect lights so this example is actually direct light what is happening is the light is falling on this surface and that is what you what you're seeing the only the direct interaction with the surface okay now see what happens when i enable indirect lights okay now there's a parameter in render settings and by default this amount is set to 12 but just for this tutorials purpose i made it zero now when i start increasing this parameter you can see now light is bouncing from here to other walls and this is called indirect light and it's also called global illumination so the more i increase this the more number of time this light will bounce by default this number in the blender is 12. now if you see we have only this light source and there are no direct lights in this room but the room is uh actually lighting up from the indirect light source most of it just from these two patches actually light is bouncing around and eliminating the rest of the room and it's not just the light which actually bouncing around it's also uh the surface uh surface colors now if you have a look at over here from this wall whichever rays are actually bouncing from this wall red color are adding into other walls color as well this wall over here if you see from here to here you can see there is a slight transition towards the red and from here to here you can see there's a transition towards the green okay and that is because the green rays are bouncing around from this wall to the nearest object and uh so it's not just the light which bounces but also it picks up the color from the from where the loud light is bouncing okay so you can use these things uh when you're setting up studio lights uh you you can keep in mind like what kind of color bounces you want around your object and set up a lighting with this so these patches over here these are from the direct light and indirect light is whatever light rays are bouncing from here to the other surfaces that source is called the global illumination is called indirect light it's a very popular term you can study more about it if you want okay i'll go back to my scene and so in direct lights uh there are mainly three kind of uh lights one is the environment light where you use a very high dynamic range images such as hdr or exr images and you use these images to emit light in the environment and second type of lights are the lamps which are in all of the 3d softwares there are lamp objects which you can use just like artificial lights in your scene okay so so the third one is the emission shader when you turn the object itself into a light okay okay so let's talk about uh the environment light first now if i hit render over here as you can see there is nothing happening at this moment so what i'll do is i'll go through the different lights one by one over here i'll bring up the shader editor and uh so to set up an environment light you'll have to go to the void properties so if you click over here you can see there's a shader for the world output which is called uh background you can also see this in uh shader editor over here if you go to shader editor and from object in object you see all the materials but if you change this this to word you'll see the world shader and so right now if i render this nothing is happening because i don't have any color or shader now see if i increase this to white you see when i increase this color to some value my environment is being affected by this so my environment is at this moment a bright white endless white light okay so what i can do is i can bring up hdrs to affect this color i go to i'll press shift a and in texture i'll click environment texture or you can simply click over here and bring environment texture and connect this to background now now i need to find one hdr so i'll click over here so you can go to the blender's default hdr or exr folder which is located somewhere in the data files studio lights world okay so i'll pick up uh this city.exr now see what happens in the environment i have this 360 world which is uh emitting light okay and it's creating very realistic result and that is because the hdr or exr images have a very dynamic values to clear this out what i'll do is i'll change this to image editor and bring some simple image over here now if i click on any of these pixels you can see over here when it's showing the value none of these values exceed one okay there is a rs1 g is one b is one and that is when its pixel is absolute white okay even though it's absolute white still these numbers are not exceeding one and that is because this image is not a dynamic range image this is just a bitmap okay you can click on any other image you will see these number will never exceed one from here now see what happens when i bring one uh hdr or exr image now if i click on any image any pixel which is dark you'll see these values uh very low values over here as i move towards the brighter pixels you'll see okay let's go over here when i go to these pixels so here red value is 526 green value is 206 and blue value is 18 which is way beyond like one standard uh white color okay even though this appears wide this have much more energy than a white color just like how when we look at a sun the sun is not usually white it's the energy of the emission which is stronger okay these properties what uh makes it very good for environments so i'll go back to my 3d viewport and i'll change this to maybe sunrise okay now you'll see so now you'll see uh our scene actually looks like it is actually a part of that environment which is being which is affecting it okay if i choose any scene which have a very soft light such as this one now this scene this environment doesn't have any sharp sunlight you can see everything is some sort of average okay and because of that if you have a look at this road and our ground it's kind of blending in very well okay now if i choose something a very intense light over here okay now you'll see my scene is being affected with a very strong light from this direction and it's actually casting very long shadows just like in actual scene if you see this grass these are grass shadows so so for any exterior render or interior render i think most of the time you'll always be using dynamic range images in your environment and it's a very good way to start setting up your light you can also use hdr for studio setups let's say if i open this studio.exr then you see i have a studio kind of a setup in environment and and if you press ctrl t because our node wrangler is enabled from the add-ons yeah so this will this will bring up these nodes mapping nodes and you can uh rotate your hdr and align where you want this to be okay and also you can combine multiple hdr just like how uh we combine shaders let's say if i go to color and mix rgb and let's say if i make a duplicate of this and add this to first sorry and here i'll change this to sunrise now you'll see i have the sunrise image as well but the brightest spots from the studio light are also affecting uh my scene if i change this to multiply baby i can see the environment and the studio light set up both okay you can see these different mods actually bring up different results so you can tweak these if you want and you can align them the way you want so maybe if i want my studio light somewhere over here i can do that from mapping nodes okay so so these are environment lights and i think hdr and exr are the most essential things so if you want to set up something very realistic if you're doing outdoor renders i think you can actually make entire render with just one hdr so just play around with this have fun with it and uh now we'll move on to the next one which are lamp objects okay so i'll just make a copy of this scene just for the sake of backup and i'll remove these nodes in the background and turn the intensity down to zero so now our scene is back to black now second category is the lamp objects okay like just like a real world artificial lights almost all the 3d packages have these artificial lamps okay so you can bring this by pressing shift a and in the light category over here you can see there are four different lamps now let's have a look at these lamps one by one i'll go to 3d viewport and change this one to render now i'll click over here and bring one point light okay so it's a very simple one point emission object which is a casting light from the one point now since it's a point light when you change the position it will affect the scene but rotation won't matter here because it's a one point object okay now you can either delete this one and create a different light from here either sun or spotlight or you can just go to the object properties you'll see when you have a light object uh selected there is one uh this bulb icon in the properties panel which is object data properties and uh from here you can change the kind of light you want instead of uh deleting this one and creating a new one so i'll change this to sun okay now you'll see my entire scene is eliminated it's a the range of the light is actually limitless and in this case it doesn't matter where i position the sun the only rotation will change the effect of the light okay let's say if i tilt this to something like a sun dawn okay now this works like a like a sunlight okay now the third one is the spotlight okay if i go over here and change this to spotlight you can see there is a light is only affecting in one direction in one spot okay now now for spotlight the position and the rotation both works because uh this is not a 360 light this is only working in one direction and the fourth one is area light and area light you can have a different shapes uh rectangle disc ellipse from here you can choose the shape yeah so you can use area lights for uh setting up interior or studio light setups and all okay so let's talk about these parameters the first one is the color okay now this is a very simple self-explanatory thing and uh the color of the light okay and uh now let's go back to the shader editor over here and go to the object now if you click use nodes over here this will show us the node which is actually building this light now if i change color over here now this will work like uh just like how we changed color over here okay but but you can do much more than that in this note setup what you can do is you can bring one uh texture image texture and plug this one into color now what will happen is if i choose uh just like hdr from environment if i choose a studio exr let's bring up something better than this and maybe if i press ctrl t and rotate my light or position my light i'll be able to see the effect better so right now it's using uv what i'll do is uh change this to object okay now i think you can see the effect better now see uh this light is now picking up colors from the hdr image and it's a much more richer than just using a flat color over here sorry now the third parameter over here i'll go back to the 3d viewport and let's delete this light and create one new light area second parameter is power which which is like intensity of it and over here there is a size parameter now let's have a look at it this one this is a very important parameter over here now what is happening is if i set the size to let's say one this light is creating a very sharp shadows okay now if i start increasing this size parameter you'll see the bigger the light is the softer the shadow it will cast okay and of course the larger the area it will cover okay so you can use this parameter to control how softer or sharp shadows you want and max bounces you can leave this to default value you can change this whether you want this light to cast shadow or not now let's create a few lights and uh you can bring one over here all right now what i'll do is i'll create one more duplicate and place one light over here okay just to fill this part and decrease this intensity okay now sometimes uh you would want to add a light into your scene just to brighten a few areas but you do not want a light to affect all the other reflections and everything right so you can control a lot about this from uh object property panel so let's say right now i have this light over here and uh it's also affecting the ground reflection okay but i want this light to only the intensity should only work but this should not affect the reflections okay so what i can do for that is i can go back to object properties and this is not just for light you can do this with any kind of object okay so you can see in the visibility option over here there are several properties one is array visibility and the viewport visibility okay now one is the camera now camera is for let's say if you choose if you select any object whether you want this object to be visible in camera or not so this is a very simple one and second one is uh diffuse okay now okay i'll just uh deactivate these two lights this one and this one okay if i disable this diffuse now see what is happening uh this light is not affecting any of the diffuse surfaces okay the only thing you can see is in the glossy highlights now if i disable the glossy and leave the diffuse you'll see the light is not visible in any of the glossy reflections it only disappeared from the reflections but the effect is still there so you can play with these properties and there are different scenarios let's say if i if i had some smoke in the scene and fog in the scene and i don't want this light to affect the smoke or the fog then this parameter is for that okay so i'll bring up my lights back again okay so i'll just reset my scene i delete all these lights so let's just uh set up a very basic uh light setup for the scene just like we used for the shader tutorial in the previous one so i'll go to the top view and uh i'll create one area light over here okay i'll scale this down and uh maybe rotate in this direction like this something like this okay and so what i'll do now is i'll combine both kind of light i'll use one environment shader from here uh i'll bring up shader editor and uh now what i do is i'll bring up one environment texture from here and i open sunset.exr okay and give this one 0.4 intensity so i don't want this environment to affect my scene entirely i mean or overpower these lights i just want to combine i just want the dark areas to fill in so i i'll give it some z rotation okay so so that we have this sun source in the back okay so i'll go back to my camera view and uh go back to my 3d view over here so right now the hdr is affecting the back of the scene and creating some nice rim light so this light i i want to use this light just to fill in some uh just to highlight some part of uh of the top side of these chocolates and the liquid so i reduced this to only one i don't want this to be so bright and maybe we can align this right on top of the chocolate over here and i can also make a duplicate of this and place it somewhere over here so that we okay so if i disable this one you'll see this area is pretty dark so i can bring a very uh subtle effect here so i can bring one very low intensity light over here just so that we have some interest on the colors over here so as you can see this scene this light setup is uh starting to look like what we used for the shader scene okay there are a few things we'll add over here now i can make a duplicate of this and and i want this to this light is just to add some visual interest on this area so that i can see the surfaces of this cheese and the liquid part over here okay it's a light number five so now let's talk about the third category of the light which is uh the emission shaders okay i'll just make a so i'll just make a duplicate of this scene full copy and i can actually rename these scenes i'll call this one emission light setup and i can call this scene mixed light setup and i can call the scene number one hdri lights so from this scene i'm just going to reset the few things i'll delete all the lights we created and maybe we can go to the shader editor and disable the hdr all right so now let's talk about uh use of emission shader okay and uh if you have a look around all the lights which we use as artificial sources have some sort of a shape okay even though uh you can use lamps for lighting up your scene such as the interior lights and all but sometimes uh you want the lights to have some sort of a form okay a shape so for that what you can do is you can you can apply emission shader on your object in the first instance uh i'll select this game screen okay i'll create a new material for this one just like in the previous chapter we discussed okay so now the game screen is emitting a light okay if you have a look around uh in the night time the lights from the vehicles the billboards and the neon signs on the streets or the led lights on any electronic kind of surfaces all those uh can be made with uh these emission shaders and it's not just the color but you can also bring up images to light up your scene okay i'll just uh complete this one with the simple texture gradient texture in the color to make it like a screen and a converter color ramp to give it some color just like a previous chapter nothing complicated and uh yeah okay so we have a one kind of a light source now all right now let's say you want uh a billboard in your scene okay now i'll bring up one image over here i rotate this one in 90 degrees and place it somewhere over here i'll bring one more emission shader sorry on the surface of this object and now i can bring in some image texture now from the texture if i choose image texture and let's uh bring up the pacman logo okay something like this and let's go back to the render view now you can use image textures for stuff like billboards just like this one and you can increase the intensity of intensity if you want and you can also use a emission shader for a studio lighting setup let's say if you want some flat surfaces to be emitting lights and creating some strong reflections uh on these objects so you can simply bring up some simple plane objects let's say if i go to the side view and make 190 degree plane in the top view i'll place one over here now if you see if we bring up emission shader now you can use these kind of panels for studio light setup okay and you can disable the camera visibility so just that we have the lights and uh or you can just play with these parameters and set up the way you want it okay i'll bring one over here bring one over here so there are two light sources though and also you can make neon signs with your emission shader let's say if i bring up one cube and uh give this one a wireframe modifier okay and uh throw in one emission shader okay i'll just uh delete these two these are these were just for your reference so you can make neon lights let's say if you have a logo in a wireframe format okay so you can just uh give it a emission shader and that would be enough okay so i'll just uh give this one some green color maybe and what i can do is just for fun uh i can select this part over here uh this part and make a duplicate of this okay now what i'll do is select only this face and delete the rest of them faces and make one insert out of it and delete this face and extrude this one okay now what we can do is we can bring another emission shader and give this one some sort of a green color okay and now the last part are the actual sources of emission which are being used here these ones i'll apply one simple shader for these as well okay surface and uh black body for color temperature i'll select these two and transfer the material from this one and go back to your scene and now increase the intensity so that these should be very strong maybe 50 or all right so i think this gives you enough idea of this alternate light source the emission shader and now to finalize this scene uh this scene is totally uh just to explain this shader there is no specific kind of a look which i am trying to achieve i'll go to the world and enable my hdri from here i'll choose the knight exr so that we have a some sort of a light source of filling in in the negative parts okay now i can uh increase this i can decrease this to maybe point three and uh okay i can leave it to point four actually okay or you can choose studio light setup if you want okay it's totally your call maybe i can change this to some better image why not my own logo which is across mine color in word i can bring one uh mix shader over here bring one transparent bsdf and i can make these uh black parts disappear with the help of the negative and positive of black and white okay now there is one more fun thing you can do with emission shaders is uh you can combine them for uh with some other textures to create some effects like uh like surfaces which actually emit light such as lava okay this wood material we have in the scene uh what if we used uh emission shader and mixed with it so what you can do is uh you can bring in a emission shader and bring in one mix shader okay and combine these two shader and in the factor you can use this texture okay this this texture we have created you can bring that and put it in the factory value now uh let's uh bring one uh blackbody note and uh now you can see uh this texture is actually being uh uh affected by emission one and we have mixed it with the same values we have used for the base color okay so you can create something interesting like a lava lava object or melted uh metal or something like that okay so this is a another use of emission shaders actually emission shaders are what used shading volumetric effects such as fire and smoke so now i'll just increase the intensity of this to 5 and maybe this factor value we are using over here i can decrease the level of this with rgb curves so that not so much of it is brightened okay so the original texture is this and if i click on this one you can see i made the texture a bit darker so that a very subtle effect over here okay you can isolate this one to see the actual effect all right all right so now what i do is i just quickly take a render of each of the setup which we have done it's uh i mean however basic they are i just uh take renders so the first one was uh with just the hdri light and i take a render of this one and maybe take another render with uh maybe of a different direction in hdri i mean maybe something like this okay and uh then we have one with the mix light where uh the hdri light and uh there were few lamps and the third one was uh with the emission shaders where we used emission shader on a few of the objects and then the fourth one was uh we used few emitting panels to set up something like a studio light okay and uh the last last one uh what i did was uh i just uh took another render of the first scene where hdri and then there were a few lamps in the background and i also added uh some emitting uh objects okay so this one is uh like with all the kind of all kind of lights together okay so the screen is also emitting light these the filament is also emitting light and there are local lamps just to highlight these parts of chocolate so i'll quickly take a render of all these and uh we'll compare all of them okay so here we are we have a like a few of these renders put together so as you can see the result uh the first one and uh this one these two are with just the hdri and nothing else okay uh just the different direction of hdri and this one uh had uh like few lamps the second setup and uh then we talked about emission shaders and uh this one is with the studio light setup with the white panels and this one is the final render with all kind of lights okay i just added a little bit of glow in the post production and uh that's about it okay so yeah this concludes our lighting a basic lighting uh uh tutorial for the blender introduction series and uh uh like once you are comfortable with all these tools maybe one day we can talk about the principles of principles of lighting and how to set up a different kind of lights for different subjects such as portrait lighting and environment lighting and uh like how to light up a scene of a cinematic in fact uh our next series which is a soul stealer once you are done with this tutorial you can have a look at that tutorial once uh once it comes out or you can have a look at this tutorial series which was about product uh advertisement and how we set up lighting in this chapter so we will conclude this series with the one final chapter which will come maybe in a few days uh like uh within uh this week by the time you catch up with all this so in this last chapter we will work with the blueprints and uh set up and see how to set up a blueprints of designs you have and make something make a finished model out of it and also we will texture it shade it and do some kind of a fun animation with it just to conclude this entire series and after that maybe we can move on little more advanced chapters okay like always uh i hope to see what you guys uh like make out of this and uh post your results of renders and you can um you can tag me on instagram with the instagram so hope to see you guys in the next session thank you and we will see you in the next session [Music] you

Channel: CrossMind Studio

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Keywords: Learn Blender 3d, Blender for Beginners, Free Blender Course, Learn Blender Fast, Blender Crash Course, Learn 3d Animation, Learn 3d Modeling, How to make 3d Models, Blender, 3d, animation, 3dmodeling, HDRI lighting, Professional vfx training, Blender education, Get good with blender, how to make money with blender, how to learn blender 3d, Blender Modifiers, Blender Eevee, Blender Cycles, 3drending, 3ddesign, lowpoly, how to make cartoons, blender jobs, how to make 3d animation

Id: 3QqPY78cK1k

Length: 39min 28sec (2368 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020