Easy HDRI Lighting in Blender 4.0!

lighting and blender can be tricky setting up lights can be timec consuming and even then sometimes your model will look flat or look like it's missing something in most cases it's probably missing Reflections and the best way to get both Reflections and lighting is by using hdris so in this video I'll show you how to set up a hdri and also how to create a drag and drop hdri setup so that you can easily create lighting for your scenes a hdri or high dynamic range image is an image that contains lighting information it combines multiple different images of the same scene at different exposures and saves them in special file formats like hdor orex exors if you ever change the brightness of a hdri it will then be able to give you the correct lighting information for that brightness whereas changing the brightness of a regular image especially darkening it will only make the image darker the bright parts of the image will turn gray because it doesn't have any other information to use you can use hdris to light your entire blender scene but the result changes depending on the render engine using hdis with Eevee will only give you Reflections however Cycles uses the hdris for both lightning and Reflections first of all we need a hdri to use and you can find them on tons of sites but the one I mainly use is poly Haven they have thousands of free hdris just select whichever one you want and download it you can choose whatever resolution you want but 4K is more than enough you can create your own hdri by using a tripod on a camera but it's a lot of work you have to take enough pictures so that you can stitch them all together into a 360° image and then you also need to use different exposures to capture brighter or darker images for each angle alternatively you can use a 360 camera but they can be expensive unless you have some very specific needs just download your hdris for most people it's just not worth the trouble now that we have our hdri we can set it up and blender I've created a very simple scene here with a metallic sphere and a plane just so we can see what the reflections and shadows look like I'm going to use cycle so we can see the full effect of the hdri we need to go to the world tab on the right and this is where we can change the world color you can change this and it will change the color of your entire SC scene but we want to use an image and we can do this by clicking the yellow circle and choosing environment texture the whole scene will turn pink and this is just blender's way of telling us that it can't find an image now what we have to do is Click open and choose your HD your right and there you go you have realistic Lighting in your scene you can change the strength to change the brightness it would also be nice to be able to rotate the texture and we can do this very easily by changing the vector from default to mapping and then change the mapping type to generated now we can use the Zed rotation to rotate our texture now we've set up our hdri but I would love to be able to reuse this and drag and drop it into any scene and again we can do this pretty easily at the top of the world tab you'll see the name world we can give this a name in this case I'll just match the name with hdri and then we can right click the shield icon and choose Mark as asset you won't see anything change but if we expand the timeline and open the asset browser window you should see an image with the name of your world this is an asset blender's asset browser allows you to easily save models materials geometry not group whatever you want to save as assets and these assets can be reused in any scene all you have to do is go to edit preferences and go to file paths then under asset libraries choose whatever folder you want and all blender files within this folder that have assets can be used at any time so you can create anything you want and as long as they're marked as assets and the blender file is saved in that folder these assets can be used in any blender file let's give our hdri asset a nicer thumbnail create a new camera in your scene if you don't already have one then position your view so you're facing straight onto the sphere then we can press control all to numpad zero to snap the camera to our view from here you can move the camera or just change the focal length so that we can't see the background change the resolution of the camera to 1024 x 1024 you can actually click and drag downwards on the resolution Xbox and this will highlight both of them letting you change both values at once you can do this anywhere and blender if there are multiple boxes on top of one another you can drag up or down to select them all at once with our camera in place we can start rendering but we need to change some settings first back in the render tab underneath the render settings we can change the max samples to 64 these thumbnails are going to be pretty small so we don't need to use that many samples if you want to get rid of any noise just enable the D noise checkbox you don't need to change any settings now just save your render and then back in the aset browser we can open up the properties panel by pressing n or we can change the image under the preview section just select the folder icon and then choose your new image now let's create another hdri asset beside the blue asset icon click the new world button this will duplicate your previous hdri so now just select a new image change the strength and rotation give it a name and then right click the shield again and Mark a asset now just render your image with this new hdri setup and set it as the preview image for your new asset I like to rotate the hdri so that the Shadows are all facing the same direction as it makes it easier to compare them now you can easily just drag and drop either of these assets directly into your blender s scene if you ever want to change your world settings you can either drag and drop the asset into your scene or you can select the world icon and it will open a drop down menu in the asset browser you'll see that your assets are currently in the unassigned section you can leave it like this or we can create a new category for them on the left we can change it from all to current file and this will allow us to click the plus icon and create a new category or catalog by default it will show all of the assets the blender has loaded from the asset libraries but we can't add a category from here so changing it to current file will allow us to add a new category now just drag your world assets into this new category if you want you can also add tags to the Assets in the properties panel and this will allow you to easily search for them using the search bar at the top for hdis I like to use the tags cold warm and neutral sometimes you want warm or cool lighting and you can easily search for these and find a hdri that suits your scene now all you have to do is go through the same process again setting up your different hdis marking them as assets and rendering the images and eventually you'll have something that looks like this a nice custom library of hdis that you can use in any scene and just to prove that it works I'm going to open a brand new scene and open up the asset browser and as long as we have the asset Library set up in our preferences we'll see all of our hory your eyes and then we can just drag them into our scene to get realistic lighting instantly so now it should be much easier to light your scenes and the results should also be much better so I hope you enjoyed and thanks for watching

Channel: Vertex Arcade

Views: 8,175

Keywords: blender, blender 4.0, blender lighting, blender hdri, hdri, high dynamic range image, blender 360 lighting, blender realistic lighting, blender realism, lighting tutorial, tutorial, blender asset library, blender asset browser, drag and drop blender, blender cycles, blender environment texture, blender world setup

Id: pbuNJb_gnpA

Length: 6min 34sec (394 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024