Blender Lighting Tutorial for 3D Beginners - Learn how to Light

hey guys henny from flip normals here and in today's tutorial we are going to go through the basics of lighting in blender we'll go through the most common types of lights and also you'll learn how to set up an hdri from scratch as well so the way we make a light and blender is by hitting shift on a and then we go here under light and here you can pick one of four kinds of lights which one you pick right now isn't that important because you can change this later on we are going to be starting off with a point light now we are using cycles here with a gpu acceleration enabled so we are we switch this to cycles and use we're using gpu here instead of cpu then we have around a thousand samples here around 900 samples in the viewport and this will just give us a nice smooth result in the viewport so now that we have the point light here we first just have to move this out a little bit so you can actually see what's going on because he's in the middle of the monkey here which you can't have now we access the settings for the light under the object properties which is down here this is always the the green one if you ever have a um a camera you can see it's green now and if you have a light you can also see it's green now this will be called point light and if you change the sonatic light it does not change the name so be aware of that another thing to be aware of as well is that you can see that i've enabled the disable disabling renders toggle as well you can do that by going up here to the filters and then you can enable this one it's really important this is enabled because otherwise if you have a light like this and you hide it right now now it's only hidden in the viewport it's not actually hitting a render so if you're gonna do a render now you can see that this light is still very much visible in the render while it's not visible in the in the viewport so while this looks like the final render this is actually not the final render so be aware of that enable restriction toggles enable this one and make sure to disable both at the same time so the point light is a point in space it's a very simple kind of light this is something that you would use for something like a a light bulb a candle or anything like that which is simply a point in space technically this is the sun as well considering that would be a big point in light but you wouldn't practically use this for a sun at all because it's it's way too close to the object so the settings we have for this would be the color which simply changes the color of the light i tried to keep it to white in the beginning and then i add color later on you can also change the value here as well hue saturation and value right here as well or you can use rgb and hex if you prefer that as well you can also color pick something so if you want to color pick really anything from the interface you can do that as well so now we just color back that weird orange thing there then you can change the power of it the power is the intensity what i tend to do here is i generally adjust it up to a certain level this depends a little bit on your scene and your materials textures and the scale if you've seen as well and then once i'm happy with that then this is this is when i attempt to do math on it where i simply type multiply by two to make it twice as strong or i do divide it by two to make it half as bright so this is a slightly better way of doing it for me instead of just numerically tweaking this just because it's a little bit easier it simply means you can make it twice a bright yep times two can make it half as bright yep divided by two then you also have the radius as well for this let's just increase this by something like five to make it much much brighter and this we see what the radius does now if you want harsh shadows you want the light to be really small to be a small light source and if you want soft shadows you want this light source to be large and this is what the radius is doing if you see here we change the radius all the way down to zero now we get really sharp shadows and you can see this one here now it becomes really small but if we now change this to be something much much bigger almost like a meter now now you can see that the radius is much larger and we have much much softer shadows now it's not better or worse to have harsh or soft shadows that depends entirely on what you want to tell with the image [Music] then we have the sunlight now we can simply just click here to convert this to sunlight or we can shift a light and sun and that's what we'll do now and this just shows us that now this is named sun and this is not named sun even though it is indeed a sunlight so just delete this one and the sunlight is what you call another software direction light it's a very simple kind of light and it doesn't have precision it does not matter at all where you position it in space the only thing that matters is the rotation of it so this will emulate sunlight it will emulate sunlight in a practical sense remember that the sun is technically just a point in in space well big big point in space but very far away that's technically true but it's practically useless because practically on earth if you need to emulate sunlight you need just parallel arrays and that's what this one is doing so this you can see the render doesn't change at all if you move it the only thing it changes is if we rotate it around so if you start wrote this around you can say the r key for that now you can see that the render does change significantly based on that now speaking of rotation we have a few ways of rotating our lights this is true for all the lights which has rotation which would be these three ones here now what we can do is of course we're gonna set the r key and we can just rotate like this but this is a pretty awkward way of doing it you could also go in here and hit the gizmo and you can rotate it and you can hit the comma key and now you can go between local and and look global as well this can be handy but still it's a little bit awkward the best way of doing it i found is going either between hitting r twice so r twice and now you can really control it here or what you can do is you can change the target you see you have this little gizmo on it here you see a little device on the gizmo this is the this is the target off the light so now if we were to just drag this to a certain point you can see that this snaps to the points we're hovering over so this is really cool because this allows us to be very precise with lights if we want a light to go directly into the skull here into the eye of the skull you can very finely tune it and you can see if you hover over it as well it says shortcut shift and t which means you can do it even faster so if you wanted to really change this fast you could just hold down shift t and you just hover over different areas like so it's a really fast way of doing it or you can hit double r and now it just gives you it's faster but you have less control it's much harder to be granular with this so you can see the point the position is exactly the same spot but the rotation changes so this changes drastically as well like with the other light as well we can change the color for sunlight you really want to stay stay white unless you're going for something more stylized or maybe a sunset and we have strength as well then we have the angle the angle also determines the sharpness of the shadow so you can see here the angle is really low which means we get sharp shadows this emulates sunlight pretty well because right now the sunlight is pretty sharp but you can see what happens if we start to change the angle now it goes from proper sunlight into something like it's going through a cloud or something that it's like entirely diffused by clouds to the point you can you you have a hard time seeing more the exact direction of the sunlight so this is a pretty cool way of doing it if you're doing some kind of outdoor scene and you're doing um and you have sunlight i really recommend this light here so let's delete this guy hit the x key delete shift a and then we're gonna look at the spotlight then we can hit g and just move this guy up like so the spotlight is pretty self-descriptive because the spotlight lights it based on a physical spotlight so this is this is the kind of light you've seen if you've ever seen any kind of stage so we can just move it into a position like this and let's increase the power significantly so let's increase this by 10 and even this is not really enough so now we can increase this by 10 again and you can see how fast that is on how clean values we get this is a very this is a really powerful light because it's a really cinematic light this is before the most appealing result we had on this monkey so far where it looks like he's actually on stage right now now we have a few settings for this as well we have color and power like we had before with the other ones then we have radius which doesn't change the radius of the spot itself it changes the radius of the light source so now if you again if you want something the shadows to be harsh you see here there's it's set to zero or if you want to be really soft you just increase this to the desired number so i really prefer to have harsh like completely harsh shadows you should never have shadows this harsh unless you're going for a very specific look it just makes it look pretty cg to be honest and stuff it just isn't that harsh in real life you very very rarely see harsh shadows in order to control the actual shape as well we just go right down here to beam shape and this is where you have the actual size of the spot so now you can change the actual size of this you can make it really wide or you can make it really narrow like this as well so this is really cool if you really want to make something like this which is way more cinematic than than what we got with something like the direction light or the sunlight now the last light we're going to be talking about is going to be the area light so select this light x delete shift a light and then area light and then we are going to just move this guy up like so and the error light is by far my favorite light this is the one i use for lighting most things this is similar to a light you would see on film sets as well where it's simply a big plane and this shoots light through it the advantage of this is that you get a very soft and controlled light this is equivalent to having a lamp behind a big piece of white cloth so that the light comes out of this whole area so this allows us to get really to really control what we what we want so with this as well we have a few settings we have color and power which is exactly what you had before for this we have to just increase this by something like 10 so we can see what's going on then we have the shape as well here we can choose between a square a rectangle disk so here the big change here is that it changes between a circle and a square now you wouldn't really do this for something like this there's no practical advantage to going between a certain disk and a square for this but there is a huge practical advantage if you have a lot of reflections if you're doing something like a car or a product shot you really want to control the shape of your light because it's going to be visible in reflections technically this is now visible infections as well but our reflections are so diffused they're so scattered that we're not really going to be seeing them there's no way you can see the shape of the light in this so we are sending this back to a square as well so the error light is fantastic it really has to control things as well you can see now that the shadows are incredibly soft which while it's cool can also be a problem because now you can't really control the softness of the shadows because in this case let's move this over like so and let's um try to get something a little bit more a little sharper so in this case the shadows and grip is soft and there isn't a setting for changing the uh actually changing the softness of it and that's because keep in mind this is just a light bulb behind a piece of cloth and what determines how soft it is is how big is the piece of cloth so while we technically don't have a um a setting for it do you have size and size very much determines the sharpness of shadows so now you can see if we set this all the way down you can see how sharp the shadows become or if you move this all the way up you can see how soft the shadows become in my work i tend to work with something where i have semi-defined shadows i don't like to have it really soft because then it loses all sense of direction and i don't like to have a crazy sharp as well because i just find that to be too dramatic so what you can do lights as well is of course you can duplicate the lights as well so in this case once you're happy with the general result like this you can hit shift and d and this duplicates it right away and then you can go in here and you can just start to rotate this light around you can move it into position i prefer to move it into position first and then hitting shift and t and then just moving this in here and what i'm trying to do now is i want to have some kind of rim light on the character so let's hit the g key and then we can just hit shift t and it just wasn't some room like now you can see we're getting some nice rim light here as well if you want to disable the gizmo so you can't see the gizmo at all you can disable you can go up here and click on this key and you can disable this as well so then you can't see anything and it's just a pure render so if you want this to be a little bit off a bigger rim you just continue to move it over and then shift in t and then we can increase this we can try to increase this by x and five once i'm done with my um overall lighting let's say we're done with the with this for now then that's when i start to play with colors i try to get the values first and then we work with colors later on it's also a good idea to name your lights right away so we can name this something like a key light and then we can name this something like a rim light because once you have a lot of lights it becomes very hard to to manage this properly so what i often do is i tend to have some color in all my lights so in my key light i'll just add a little bit of a hue just a little bit you can change this around as much as you want of course you can change the uh the rotation of the hue and then i tend to go into my rim light and tend to make this a much stronger color now this is entirely under personal preference but i think something like this can look quite cool but you can just really get some soft color in this and then you get some really harsh saturation from from something like this one here so we can just move this down a little bit like so and scale it up a little bit a little bit too much and this is really how you light you use just a few sets of lights like this to create some very powerful results now next up we will have a look at the hdri now first thing i'm just going to be grouping these guys up in a premium collection so just select them both hit the m key for move to collection and then we'll make a new collection we'll call this lights and i'm just gonna have underscore call just to keep this nice and clean so now you can see that our lights are now in the collection then we're gonna turn off the entire collection like so just so we aren't gonna be using these slides anymore then we will change the interface in this case i've already customized interface and i've made this into a shader editor now what you have to do is you have to go from object to world if by object this is where you can actually change the shader of the object which is nice but if you go to world this is where you're actually changing the world shader and this is a really cool concept which is essentially it's ambient light if you're looking around your room right now or if you're outside a lot of the lighting most of the lighting will come from an ambient light you can't necessarily see a direct light source it's just kind of light coming from everywhere and that is what this is doing now we have a background node here and this has a color in this case it's black and this is very deliberate to make our lighting a bit easier now if we were to click on this and make this brighter now you can see we get this nice ambient lighting this means that the lighting is coming from absolutely everywhere in the entire scene from over from the environment around it doesn't come from the object itself and this is boring there's nothing fancy at all and this this is just a color with a value of point almost 0.35 and that's it so this is like the most boring light in the world now you can spice this up with color but where you can really spice this up if you are using what's called hdri images high dynamic range images you can get these from sites like hdrihaven.com which is what i prefer to use where you have free hdris you can use and they're absolutely fantastic now before we use that you need to use an add-on called nodewrangler so just make sure to enable the node wrangler and this is going to make a lot easier you technically don't need it but it's going to make your work a lot easier now select the background and hit control and t and now you can see this has created a few nodes for us it has also made our render nice and pink and this is because we now have an environment texture but it's missing in the actual textures and this is a familiar look to anyone who's open on blender scene and the textures are missing so what we can do is now we can go under environment texture and we can open this up and this is where we can navigate to our hdr location i already have a location here where i download a fair view from hdri haven and i'm just going to be picking one here now which one you pick isn't really that important for the tutorial but it is very important for your lighting because this changes dramatically what your lights look like so i'm going to be hiding the backdrop here and now you can see what's happening we have an image which is actually lighting up the scene which means your lighting will feel a lot more natural and particularly if you have reflections it's going to feel significantly more more interesting so what we can do now we can just go into our shader and we can just change this to be a much rougher material so that we can see more of the reflection sorry much less rough of material we want it to be a much shinier material and then this becomes a little scary because you have two notes here and a lot of things here and fancy names like vector well the only thing you really have to worry about now is rotation and z and this is going to rotate the image around the z axis so what you see happening now is that first the background is changing and also the lighting on the model changes drastically which is incredibly cool because this means that you can change the overall light on your on your entire scene or model very fast plus it feels so natural it's really hard to make something like this feel proper natural by using a three-point light setup you can make you can make it look really cool with something like the lightsaber we just had and you can really make it exactly what you want to be but if you want something to feel photoreal you pretty much have to use something like an hdri whenever i do anything with photorealism in mind i always use hdri at least as a base and then of course there's nothing wrong with adding this on top of it because now you can see we're getting nice reflections and the ambience from the um from the hdri and then we can add our special lights on top to really art directly like this so this is what i often do i might be setting the strength to something like 0.3 just to get a bit of ambience and color variation and then i'm using this light here or this light set up here to really make the lighting nice now something you might want to do as well is you want to use a different background for this this is something that you really want to do quite a lot it's where you you want this light but you really don't want this background here for whatever reason so what you do you can add a few nodes to this and that means that you can control the background color completely independently from the lights so the first thing we'll do is we will hit shift a and we will make a light path node so light path and just put this here and then we'll use add a mix shader node and then we'll put this color here or this uh this environment texture into shader one then we'll put the background into shader two then we'll put the mix shader the end result of this under the surface we'll cut away the uh the node here we don't want this the connection here we don't want this to be connected now you can see this blends between the color we have and the actual the actual image we don't want to blend between using just a just a value you want to blend between using camera arrays so in the light path note is camera array you drag from here under the faq and now you can see that the lighting here is entirely independent of the background now if you were to wrote this around now you see the lighting changes but the background colors remain the same so now we can go in here we can change the background color and we can change the lighting here as well this is a really cool trick i use of quite a lot when i really want the hdri to be independent of the background color you could of course just render out a mask as well and do this in photoshop but it's really nice to be able to do this directly in the render like so so that's it for this video i hope you learned a lot about lighting in blender if you have any cool tips about lighting and blender or if there is something we missed in this tutorial feel free to let us know in the comments we would love to hear your tips and tricks about lighting in blender and if you like this video make sure to give a thumbs up and subscribe and we'll see you in the next video you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 86,291

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: 6rNKGVcJy-0

Length: 21min 33sec (1293 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021