Eevee Lighting Tutorial - learn to shape light like a PRO [Blender 3.2]

in this video we're gonna take this scene that i model in blender and we're gonna use the magic of lighting to take it from this all the way to this and this we're gonna take a look at the technical side of things in blender's uv and we're also gonna learn a lot about many basic lighting principles in general in this tutorial i will expect some basic proficiency with blender so i won't explain every little detail like you've never used blender before but we'll cover all the important high-level concepts and some of the technical details as well [Music] okay so i have this model here that i want to make look nice and if we go to the rendered view this is the lighting setup that we get in blender by default which is a gray background and a single point lamp and this is not gonna cut it so we need to do some things but first just to get an overview understanding of how lighting in ev works there's three main parts that contribute to how the lighting looks firstly the render settings which all live here under the camera tab secondly the world settings which seem to live here but actually mostly live here in the shader editor and thirdly of course all the light objects themselves and their settings we'll go a little bit back and forth between these areas and we'll start with the world settings [Music] so what the world settings do is they basically control the background so you can see that if i change the color input here the color of the background changes but it also affects the lighting of the object you can see that if i make it very bright this whole island gets this red tint from all the light coming from the background now in eevee it's not realistic it's not like a physically accurate global illumination or anything but it's just good to keep in mind it's not going to affect our scene all that much because my idea is to make this into a nice and intimate relatively dimly lit evening scene so let's undo the red and i want to make just a simple dark blue gradient for the background to sort of set the tone so to do that we'll need to have the use node toggle enabled and then we can go to the shading tab here and also we'll make sure that we are editing the world shader nodes here shift a to add nodes we'll add a gradient texture node here and we'll change it to a spherical gradient if we plug this into the background color we can see that we don't really get much of a gradient here and that's because we need to set some coordinates for the texture and in blender we now have this awesome feature where you can just drag from a socket and release on empty space and it gives you this search box and we can just start typing coordinates and it gives us all the individual outputs of the texture coordinate node which is what we're going to use and we're specifically going to use the window output so we'll just drop this here and you can see that it automatically connected the window output to the vector inputs so now we have some gradient action going on here but it's a little wonky we need to modify the coordinates a little more and to do that we can just add a vector mapping node from here and just drop it here so what this window output does is it basically creates flat coordinates based on this viewport window that we have here so we can rotate the viewport and the coordinates don't change which is very useful and if we switch to the camera view it switches from this entire window to the bounding box of the camera so we can use this in renders too and here you can kind of see that the origin point of the coordinates is in the lower left corner and it stretches from there all the way to the upper right corner and we can change the location mapping from here so if i slide this x value here you can see that the gradient is moving and we can just type minus 0.5 to both the x and y coordinates of the mapping node and you can see that that centers the gradient to the camera view and also to the viewport view so now the rest is very simple we can just add a converter color ramp node and plug it in between the gradient texture and the background node and with this color ramp we can sort of modify the look of the gradient as you can see so we'll change this from linear to ease to make the transition a bit smoother we'll leave the black as black we'll select the white and we'll change the color to something nice and bluish and relatively dark and then we can dial in the black so that it almost touches the corners there but not quite maybe we'll make this blue a tiny bit darker still something like this simple gradients lighter in the center darker in the edges it's like a cheat code to making a background look nicer without much effort at all it's simple it's overused it works go and use it let's go back to the layout tab so now that we have a basic background we can start working on the actual light objects and that's of course the fun part i'll start by moving this point light roughly above the island and bringing it down a bit and making it have a nice and big radius i'm going for softer shadows and kind of an ambient light source let's switch to the rendered view so we can see things it's way too bright i'll decrease the power i want it to be like a base coat in painting terms i don't want it to stand out i think 250 seems nice so this will act as our base that we can start painting the other lights on top of but you can see that we don't have any soft shadows yet it's very sharp and jaggery and that's because we haven't enabled the soft shadows yet but before we enable them there's a couple other shadow settings that i want to go over because they are easier to see with hard shadows so this first one is very simple shadow resolution the bigger the resolution the sharper the shadows the cascade map is for sun lamps and the cube map is for every other type of lamp so you can see that if i increase the resolution the shadows get much more sharp and defined and more detailed i usually just max out both of them this is something that you need to just see what your computer can handle and then basically use the biggest possible resolution you can so the other thing i wanted to look at is here in the light object settings in the shadow tab here and it's this bias value so because av is not a ray tracing engine there's a possibility for objects to sort of cast shadows on themselves like even on the light facing surface you can have these shadowy artifacts and it can look pretty bad if there is some so what this bias value does is it sort of clips the shadow from very close to the objects and the bigger the value the further away it clips the shadow from so you can see here this trend of grass doesn't have the shadow going all the way to the root of the grass and i find this default value of one being really high and you can see that if we decrease it we can get much more realistic shadows and we can pretty much go all the way to 0.001 without seeing pretty much any self-shadowing at least i don't see anything so usually i leave a bit of a buffer like .01 or something but i tend to go pretty low to get the most realistic possible shadows and most of the time it makes it possible to not use these contact shadows which are a screen space effect and they usually don't look that great and enabling the soft shadows also further helps with any self shadowing problems so we can just now go back to the render settings and shadows and enable the soft shadows and you can see that we now get a much nicer looking soft shadow here and what this setting does is it still treats lights with big is internally kind of like tiny point lamps but it varies the position of the light inside this radius so with every sample the light is in a bit different place and with enough samples all the different individual sharp shadows will sort of blend into one soft shadow and i think it also just happens to be a great visualizer for why a big lamp will produce softer shadows than a small lamp the name soft shadows is a bit misleading here though because it doesn't necessarily turn everything into soft shadows even if you have a lamp with a radius of zero and you want these sharp shadows it's still a good idea to have the soft shadows enabled because it makes the edges of the shadows be much more refined and less jagged [Music] so now let's go back where we were and start spicing things up so one of the defining parts of this scene are definitely these hanging light bulbs and setting those up is more of a material thing but we'll just very quickly go over how i set them up so let's select the instance object and we'll go to the material settings this is a very simple model i've already set up different slots for different things on the model for the glass i'm just gonna increase the transmission to one to allow the light to go through the glass except it doesn't go through the glass because i need to go here and enable this screen space refraction option except it still doesn't go through the glass because i need to go to the render settings and enable this screen space reflections except it still doesn't go through the glass because i need to go here and enable the refraction option and now the light goes through the glass and we can go here and select this bulb material that's the inside of the lamp here just a simple sphere and i have an emission shader here so i can just make the emission really strong and now the small light bulb is lighting up the entire outer glass and now we can go to the glass material and adjust this ior value so that it only lights up parts of the glass so we can sort of see through it i found that a value of 1.12 works nice viewed from far away like this and it creates this nice rim light effect around the light bulb so now the hanging lights look okay but to add that final touch we are obviously gonna enable the [Music] this is another one of those ev cheat codes so you just come here to the render settings and click this button blue and it'll add this very nice glowiness around any bright parts of the image there's not really all that much to explain it's pretty self-explanatory the most important settings are this threshold value which controls how bright a part of the image needs to be before it triggers the bloom effect and this intensity that is the intensity of the effect so i'll just set this to 5 and the intensity 0.05 i think looks nice it's simple it's overused it works go and use it don't overdo it though a little goes a long way [Music] now because we have the screen space reflections enabled we already get a little bit of lighting from these light bulbs here you can see how they seem to be lighting up the leaves around them but it's actually just fake light it doesn't actually light up the surface it just kind of lights up some of the specular highlights of the leaves emissive meshes like the little spheres inside these lamps can't actually light things up in ev so we'll have to fake the light coming from these little light bulbs here we could just use actual light objects in the place of every one of these lamps but that would slow down the rendering quite a bit and we can achieve a much more controlled and cheap effect with just a couple well-placed lamps so shift a and we'll go to light and we'll add an area lamp and let's bring it up here under these lamps something like this and from the settings of the lamp here we can change the shape of the lamp from square to rectangle which will allow us to make a non-square lamp so we'll just decrease the x size to make this into a skinny area lamp like this and then we can just rotate this around and place it here so that it sort of simulates some light coming from these light bulbs here maybe we'll turn it facing the tree a bit more so that we get the trunk lighting up a bit more realistically and then we'll decrease the strength something like this looks nice i think and i'll also make it a warm light source so a bit of an orange color here by the way we'll come back to the colors of the lights later so just make this one something slightly orange for now yeah and then we just do the same thing for the other part here you can shift d to duplicate and we can place this lamp here and rotate it to roughly match the shape of the wire here except i want to make the angle of this a bit different than the previous one because we have this root of the tree here that's very prominent and we'll add some rim lighting later on on the back side of the tree here so i want to preserve some darkness around the root so i'll just rotate this slightly more forward like this so we'll have some more contrast later on when we add the rim lighting [Music] okay so far we've kind of just simulated some basic things that would happen in the real world you know we have some environment light from above and we have the light from these lamps here but now we can forget what would happen in the real world and we can start to feel the model more and trying to figure out what we actually want to do with the lighting and this is where we come to the art of lighting and where teaching becomes a lot more difficult because you can place lights anywhere and it doesn't have to be realistic in this case we're going for a stylistic approach we are not going for photo realistic lighting so there's really no rules it doesn't matter if in the end there's dozens of lights a single light can have a very minor effect in one small area but it can still be very important in the big picture and on the other hand there is definitely such a thing as too much light or light in the wrong places but i'll just continue going through how i would approach lighting a scene like this and hopefully something sticks with you so now that we have this solid base to work with i'm thinking with this scene i want to highlight this bench area a little more because this bench feels like the sort of the main focal point of the entire scene so i'll just go ahead and add an area light and i'll bring it somewhere up here sort of like closer to the front of the bench like this and i want to make it a bit smaller to not have the shadows too soft and undefined i don't want to have them very sharp either like this but i want to have just enough softness that it's not too noticeable and not too undefined something like this should be fine and we'll rotate this lamp a little bit to face the bench a bit more but not too much because as you can see here in the leaves if we rotate the lamp too much we get all this light here in the leaves and it sort of kills the contrast between this environment light that's coming from above so i want to keep some of that contrast and i don't want to waste the dark areas here because in lighting you're always painting light on top of darkness and eventually you run out of darkness and that's when you run out of contrast and interest so you always want to keep the darkness around in places where you don't need the light speaking of that i want to make this light a little bit dimmer i think it's a bit too bright so i think something like this would be nice and again i want to make this a warm light source as well and again we'll come back to the colors later and by the way while we're at the bench i'll just quickly assign an emissive material for this lantern candle here that looks nice and i will also lower the shadow bias value for this lamp as well and i will continue doing that but i won't mention it for every lamp so just keep that in mind so the reason i put the lamp closer to the front of the bench here instead of putting it in the middle like this is that if you do put it in the middle you can see that this whole bench is now lit very evenly from side to side and you kind of lose all the contrast a very important principle in lighting in general is that you want to use the light to emphasize the form of whatever your lighting and one way of doing that here is to put the light closer to one side here so that we get this very slight but still noticeable gradient across the bench and it sort of adds depth into the lighting here and while we're at this bench here you can see that it has these really nice curves and i kind of want to try to accentuate the curves as well using lighting and since we have these lamps hanging around here i think it makes sense to add a skinny area lamp up here just on top of the bench so i'll just grab this one and i'll duplicate it shift d and we can sort of rotate it to roughly match the rotation of the bench something like this and we can make it a little bit uh shorter since the bench is also shorter something like this would make sense i think so if we switch these lights on and off you can see that we get this nice highlight on the top of the curve there so looking at the general front lighting of the island these corners are pretty dark i want to add light here and i also want to add some more light on the leaves up here just to further accentuate this central focus point of the scene so we'll just come here and add an area lamp and we'll bring it up a little bit and make it a little bit smaller something like this rotate it to face the corner here it's a bit too bright at the moment but i want to show you a fun trick to finding the best direction for the light to come from so just orient the light to face the center point of where you want the light to hit and put your 3d cursor in the same place and then you can just change the transform pivot point to 3d cursor from here and then you press r twice to enter the trackball rotation mode and then you can just rotate the light around your focus point like this which is super cool and it's a super fast way of testing out different directions for the light and for this case i think the light looks best when it comes a little bit further back from here something like this i think looks very nice so we can then just decrease the strength and make it somewhat dim i think i will go as low as 2 watts here something like this it feels like it might be even too dark but it still adds a lot of character here as you can see and we don't want to overpower the central elements of the scene so i think this works nicely and we can just shift d to duplicate this and bring it over here and just find a suitable angle for this as well yeah this also looks better when the light comes a little bit from behind something like this i think looks best and for the leaves up here i'll just add a point lamp make it a bit bigger something like this and i kind of want to make this very warm even orangey to bring out the leaves and the warmness of the green even more something like this let's see how it looks uh yeah it's okay maybe we want to have it even bigger and even a little bit brighter like this maybe yeah this is nice because it also adds light here you can see if i switch this it adds a little bit of light and warmness there also and i like that and of course it makes the light here a little bit more prominent yeah so that works okay so you've noticed that i've been placing all these little lamps here very close to the surfaces that i want to light up and you might be thinking wouldn't it be more efficient to just have one big lamp here that's lighting up everything at the same time and the answer is yeah it would be more efficient but it also wouldn't look as good so let's quickly hide these lamps here just to show and we'll add a bigger point lamp here like this and make it very bright and warm maybe not so bright something like this let's maybe move it a little bit like this to make it a little bit more nice looking something like this so you can see that yeah we get the light on the corners here we get the light on the bench we get the light on the leaves but you can see how much more flat and uninteresting it looks now because the light is falling everywhere and we lose a lot of the contrast that was there before so let's disable this and bring back the earlier lighting you can see how much more exciting and defined the lighting is and because we have the lights close to the surfaces we have much more control over where exactly the light falls and where it doesn't fall we have this darker area here for example and these darker leaves here and all around it just feels a lot more alive and immersive and exciting especially if you are going for this type of very intimate and sweet lighting style there is of course a time and place to use a very minimalistic and simple lighting but here with this example we want to play more with the light falloffs and the darkness [Music] okay so all of our light right now is this warm slightly orangey color and that's very much on purpose you know there's one basic scientific fact regarding lighting that's very important to know because it ties into the most important artistic principle regarding the color of light so in nature there's warm red light there's white light and there's cold blue light but there's not really any green light or pink light in the natural environment in fact pretty much all natural light falls roughly somewhere on this line on blender's color wheel this is because of a thing called black body radiation and we speak of a light color temperature when describing where on this line a specific light source falls on color temperature is usually expressed in kelvins it's a whole thing and we don't really need to dive into that right now it's enough that you know that if you want to simulate natural light sources use colors that fall roughly on this line and i do want to use mainly natural feeling light sources in this scene so that's why i went for this slightly orange color and that brings us to the principle which is don't use just pure white light everywhere unless that's a specific intentional choice so the most cliche way of doing the multiple light colors thing is to have specifically both warm light and cold light in a scene usually so that the warm light illuminates most of the main subject and the cold light falls on the background or creates a rim light effect or both so that's exactly what we're gonna do and we'll use the most cliche version which is to have a cold rim light okay so we'll just go ahead and add a sun lamp somewhere here the sun lamps position doesn't really matter it's the rotation that determines where the light ends up so the idea is to have the sun lamp illuminating the backside of the island so that we only see sort of just these edges of the model light up and we'll change the color of this sun lamp to be something blueish like this and then we can start fine tuning the strength of the lamp and the direction we are already getting a pretty nice rim light effect if i rotate this i can try to fine tune how i would like it to work i want to have it pretty much affect only the edges of the model so i don't want something like this where the light bleeds a lot to the big surfaces of the island so i want to have it oriented so that it only lights up the rim so i think something like this would work pretty nicely and i will increase the angle of the lamp to something like 10 15 degrees and what that does is it just softens the shadows just as with the size of the point lamps the angle does the same thing with the sun lamp [Music] so this looks pretty nice already if we switch it on and off we can see that we get a nice rim light effect but i think this is a good place to talk about one more little trick i like to use when i'm working on lighting and it's not much of a trick it's just that doing this with the strength here doesn't really give me the full range of options especially because with sun lamps it's soft capped at 10 here it doesn't let me drag it past that i can see that if i bring it to 10 it looks better but the trick is just that it's good to go a little crazy sometimes let's type 500 in here now that's a lot of rim lights that's obviously too much i don't like it being that bright but you get the idea maybe you want this kind of very drastic effect and if you don't you can just start coming back here and start decreasing this and you might notice that when we get back to like under 100 or so you start to realize that the 10 we had earlier was really pretty dim and this scene might actually benefit a lot more from a rim light around 50 or so if we fine tune the rotation just a little bit more something like this you can see that we found a much better value than the 10 we had before which looked like this so yeah let's put that back to 50 and now we're getting somewhere now this looks really nice and the island really pops out of the background and we have warm light in the front here and we have a cold rim light and we have really nice contrast overall the cold light is still bleeding maybe a little too much here so we'll fine-tune the rotation just a little more something like this and maybe we'll make it even more blue like this yeah i like that and even though we used a sun lamp here to cover most of the rim light in one go we can still uh fine tune the rim lighting a bit more for example i'd really like to have this grass patch here be more affected by the rim light so i think we'll add another light here a spotlight and we'll bring it here and really hone in on the grass specifically and here we can again use that trick of placing a 3d cursor here and changing the pivot point to 3d cursor and then we can go back here to the front view and we'll quickly make this to be blue also and we'll also go crazy with this value 500 doesn't really even do anything let's try 5000 now we're getting somewhere and then we can fine tune the rotation of the spot lamp it seems that we can actually get this patch of grass also with the same spot lamp which is nice so maybe something like this could work and we can bring this value down a little bit to like 2000 maybe yeah that looks really nice and it really highlights these patches of grass here so now we're getting pretty close to the finish with this lighting setup there's just a couple more little things i want to do and the first thing is this bottom here which is very dark i want to bring some light under here also so we'll just add a new point light bring it somewhere here and make it a bit bigger and brighter so that we get this very subtle lighting under the island we'll make this be blue also maybe not very blue just slightly cold like this and again we don't want to lose all the darkness if we bring this light too forward like this we lose a lot of the contrast we had there and this ends up looking much more flat so we want to have it pretty far back there and only really light up a little part of the edges here to get a little more definition maybe we'll move it a little bit like this and then further back increase the strength just a little bit to something like this and i think that looks good turning it on and off we can see that we now have much more definition on the bottom side of the island also [Music] and the last thing i want to do is to break the rules we just set so because all of our lighting here is natural colors falling roughly on the black body radiation spectrum we can add a little extra spice by introducing a completely different color here so let's just go ahead and add an area like here and make it pretty small something like this and this area has been pretty dark and i think we can afford some extra light in here not this much though we can make it a little bit dimmer we can maybe rotate it a little bit like this and try to find a nice looking spot for the light maybe something like this closer to the tree it actually brings out this root and this rock pretty nicely it's still a bit too bright something like this might be better so let's play with the color wheel a little bit and see if we can find something that we like i actually think this pinkish purplish color looks pretty interesting in here it adds a little bit of this magical feel to this lighting it's maybe a tiny bit too saturated we'll take this back a little bit like this and we'll also take it a little bit further from the tree maybe something like this and i might actually replicate this pink up here in the leaves just so that it's a bit more of a feature of the lighting let's put it there and increase the strength a little bit and maybe we'll make this more saturated to make it more visible in the green leaves yeah i think that works pretty nicely just a tiny little touch and the last thing we'll do is we'll go to the render settings here and enable the ambient occlusion here and increase the distance a little bit something like that and in this dark scene it doesn't do all that much but you can see that if we go to the leaves here for example it adds just a little bit of extra shadowing here in some places and it's generally a good idea to have some ambient occlusion in ev renders and in brighter scenes it can really be very handy and what do you know our lighting setup is ready just like that and as you saw in the beginning i also made another sunnier setup for the same scene and we're not gonna go through making all that but i do want to show just a couple little things from that setup so this is the sunny setup and here are all the lamps i used for that so i used all of the same principles so even though i have this sun lamp here illuminating most of the big surfaces i've still come here and added all these extra little lamps to bring in some more light it really does add a lot even in a brighter setup like this so you can see if i take these lamps here and hide them like this you can see that it becomes a bit more flat and when we bring them back we get this more round and full lighting but the main thing i wanted to show you with this sunny setup is the world shading you can see that we have the same kind of gradient set up here but this is something that we didn't use in our dark setup so what we had in our earlier setup was like this where we only have this one simple background shader and if you have a very bright background like i have here you can see that we get this really washed out lighting on the entire island and you can try to fight it with this ambient occlusion maybe trying to have it really strong something like this and it does kind of work a little bit but it's a screen space effect and it doesn't work in all cases and there's a way to get much more control over this world lighting which is to just duplicate this background node and feed the same color there and to add another node input light path and this is a very useful node there's a ton of outputs in this node but we are mostly interested in this is camera array output and what we can do is we can add a mix shader node like this and we can mix between these two background shaders and we can decrease the strength of this other one to something like 0.3 or something and we can use this camera array output as the factor of the mix shader so what this camera array output does is it returns white when there's pure background visible for the camera and when there's not pure background visible like with this island it returns black so we can use that as a factor to mix between a less intense and a more intense version of the same background and this strength slider now gives us full control over the amount of light we want to include from the background and in this case something like 0.3 looks pretty nice to me maybe 0.25 or something but you get the idea you can decide how much of your background lighting you want to bleed into the geometry which is very handy and something i use all the time so that little tidbit concludes our tutorial i really hope you enjoyed it and i hope you learned something thanks for watching the tutorial and let's get to thought tinkerine [Music] [Applause] okay today we are talking about suffering i know what an absolutely riveting topic but i i swear it's very interesting so about a month ago i made a cover of adele's easy on me on the songs for humanity channel and in that video i spent a lot of time exploring this topic and i'm gonna attempt to make a shorter summary here so if you get interested you can go over there and listen to the cover and the whole conversation about suffering so i think i find interesting about mental suffering specifically so things like anger anxiety worrying jealousy etc is that it doesn't have anything to do with anything external outside of yourself suffering always exists in one's mind or the conscious experience there can be things in the outside world that will trigger an experience of suffering but the suffering itself doesn't come from the outside it forms in your mind makes sense right and because it exists in your own mind you can study it just by introspection and looking into yourself whenever suffering arises and you can see how it comes about and what you'll find out is that there's a common pattern so the only thing we can experience directly is the present moment we can think about the past we can think about the future but the only thing we really have right here is the present moment and anytime there's mental suffering there's something you resist in the present moment something in the present moment is not how you would like it to be and that resistance towards the present moment is what suffering is so for example if you drop your ice cream on the ground and feel frustration you often subconsciously feel like it's the dropping of the ice cream that causes your frustration but really what it is is you have a mental image of you still having the ice cream and you are still wanting the ice cream and that causes a mental resistance towards the present moment where you don't have the ice cream anymore now obviously this is a very crude and simple example but even in more complex situations the basic mechanism is the same and the real kicker in this whole thing is that because mental suffering is just resistance towards the present moment suffering actually becomes sort of optional so while it's very difficult it is possible to train your mind so that it doesn't keep resisting now emotional reactions will continue happening i don't think it's possible to stop having emotional reactions and i wouldn't even want to do that but most emotional reactions are surprisingly short-lived if you don't lengthen them with this active mental resistance that resistance and negative thinking reactivates the emotional reaction as long as you keep doing it so that's a short summary of the topic if it picked your interest make sure to go watch the whole talk over at the songs for humanity channel and thank you for watching this video have a very nice day and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Sketches For Humanity

Views: 28,717

Keywords: sketches for humanity, songs for humanity

Id: ZeKodExfp_4

Length: 40min 25sec (2425 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2022