FAST, EASY "NO LIGHT" LIGHTING IN BLENDER

hello everyone and welcome I'm Derek Elliott from dirk.com and in today's video which is sponsored by the kind Folks at Squarespace more on that later I wanted to share with you a super cool super flexible no lights no hdri setup for product lighting of course that's how I use it but you could use it for lighting a character or maybe even environments or really whatever you can think of but what I have set up on screen now it's pretty much a default blender scene to which I've added a model of some headphones if you want to know how to model those exact headphones and you can follow along with the tutorial on my channel that covers exactly that besides the model I wanted to also mention that I'm rendering in Cycles this method works pretty good with ev2 but Cycles is obviously going to give you a lot nicer lighting so I would suggest that but I have a couple of view for viewports set up here this one on the left is just a regular 3D viewport and the one on the right is another 3D viewport that's looking through the camera I've added and that is in our rendered View now direct your eyes to the top of the screen and you'll see that I have a Shader editor which is where we'll be doing most of the work today so let's go ahead and get started with the setup normally in a Shader editor you'd be working with your materials but you can also view the nodes for your world settings if you click here in the top left and set this to World you'll have access to those nodes and see that we have our default gray background with this yeah nasty gray color plugged into the output which gives us the most Bland and boring lighting ever possible in blender but for some reason is the default a cold-hearted treat to any beginner who enters the rendered view in Cycles but fear not we are about to obliterate this boring world to kick things off with a little more excitement I'm going to press shift a and add in a sky texture I'll plug that into the color on input of our background and if you've never seen the sky texture before then feel free to just close this tutorial immediately and have some fun because this thing is a beast you got a lot of control over this nice Dome with a variety of different realistic settings I'll leave everything pretty much default but I am going to uncheck this sun disk box now if you've done much lighting before you'll know whether in photography or 3D software like blender you'll know that to create dramatic lighting you don't want too many lights in your scene we're going to emulate that with a texture to reduce the amount of light in the sky so that's less of a full Dome and more so just spots of light so to do that I'm going to press shift a and add in a boronoi texture then what I'll do is plug the distance output on the texture into the strength of our background now if we spin our view around you'll see what that's doing the distance is outputting values from 0 to 1 which is reducing the strength of our background based on that texture and although this is kind of cool I want to reduce it even more so that we get some greater variety and to do that I'm going to add in a converter color ramp and then if we pull these stops together you'll see that we kind of get these circles happening which are basically a function as lamps for us right now the circles are black but we want it the other way around so let's just move these stops so that the white is on the left and the black is on the right and now you can move these however you please but something like this is going to work pretty good for our setup now one thing we can do is adjust the scale of this texture to give us more or less lights basically but this is rather limited so what I want to do is add in a texture coordinate node which will allow me to have some more control over the mapping of this texture and I will take this object and put it drag it into the vector so that to get this you know set up a really powerful I'm going to add in an empty to our scene by pressing shift a empty and I'll make that a cube then I'll use this little dropper here to select the empty now when I move rotate or even scale this empty it's going to have an effect on the look of our Vernon Verona boronoy texture and right now you can already see the power of this setup and its ability to create a variety of different looks with very simple input just by adjusting the empty you could of course animate the rotation or scale or location of the empty to create an animated light setup if you add some keyframes there similar to some of the examples I shared at the beginning of the video and on my Instagram but before we go too much further let's take a quick break stretch our legs and learn a little bit about the sponsor of this video Squarespace stop calling yourself a freelancer and start calling yourself what you really are a business owner it's time to ditch that hourly work quit that race to the bottom and get serious with a professional website from 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then whenever you press Q in one of these viewports here you'll quickly have that setting available to you so you can toggle it on and off easily when you're making adjustments now another limitation of this setup is that sometimes when the sky is oriented a certain way you might have a light kind of going straight at your object and you may know from more traditional lighting setups that you usually don't want to light anything directly from the front because it kind of creates this nasty flat look that just isn't very exciting and one way I like to avoid that is by just adding in an object to block light from the front so that no matter what orientation our sky is we won't have any light hitting the object right on from the front so to do that I will press shift a add in a plane and just move that to the front a little bit scale it up a tad you can even press e to extrude this out X to delete that base so that we just have this kind of nice filter blocking any light coming in from the front it's obviously also blocking our view of the object because it's in front of the camera so in the settings on that object under Ray visibility I'll uncheck camera so that our camera does not see that object but it's still blocking light from the front now for this object I'll add in a material and just delete the principle Shader and that'll just give us a kind of shadeless black light blocking material so the setup is basically complete but there are a few more things that you might like to do to make this a little bit more powerful the first of which is going to be having a little more control over the power of the background strength so the way that I'll do that is by adding in a map range node after my color ramp so the color ramp is now outputting values from zero to one black to white which means that our Max background strength is one but you might want it to be a little bit higher so I will drag this value up to something higher like a four or five maybe and now we have a much brighter setup another thing that can make this quite a bit more exciting would be to add in a hue saturation value node after our Sky texture in this color field and this will allow us to make the colors Stronger by increasing the saturation and also allows to change the colors by adjusting the Hue you can see when we kind of play with that we've got you know a lot more interest happening here you can start playing with different colors besides the default ones that are being output by the sky texture so the rest is totally up to you but with a relatively simple node setup we can start experimenting with a whole range of lighting setups that you could use in a final animation or just use it kind of like I do for experimenting and getting ideas the whole setup is going to be available on my patreon where you can download the sky texture how I have it set up here and that will also include a few of my models from past tutorials in the file so that you can experiment with those but of course I encourage you to try it out with your own but thanks for watching hope you all enjoyed if you end up using this setup definitely share it with me on Instagram or Twitter or wherever you like to share things tag me I would love to see what you come up with be sure you like And subscribe give the videos a thumbs up leave a comment do what you do enjoy your day thanks for being here I love you so much goodbye

Channel: Derek Elliott

Views: 55,438

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, blender 3d, 3d tutorial, derek elliott, derrk, blender animation, b3d, blender materials, blender principled, 3d animation, product visualization, blender for design, industrial design, blender modeling, best blender tutorials, ducky, blender lighting, full tutorial, blender course, blender furniture, blender product, rendering, 3d rendering, nft, 3d nft, getting started, product design, keyshot, rhino, cad, professional, fusion360, lighting, sky, hdri, design

Id: yGcT-i1qdc0

Length: 8min 54sec (534 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023