How to Light in Blender | Blender Basics Bootcamp Part 5

welcome back for day five of the blender basics boot camp today we're gonna learn about image based lighting and we'll add a couple lights to our scene so we can get a better feel for the materials we create in the next few videos this should be pretty straightforward so let's get to it my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar welcome to stream school so before we actually light anything there's a couple things we need to take care of first of all i'm going to go over to the render properties by going all the way to the right and clicking on the camera icon here i'm going to go all the way to the bottom where it says color management click the drop down and here we want to change the view transform from a filmic to standard filmic is a flat color profile it's really designed to be color graded later i think for our absolute very first blender project we probably want something that looks nice without having to do any additional post processing secondly we want to set up a nice rendered preview window so we can actually see our lighting as we're working on it to do that i'm going to go ahead and make this left panel a little bit bigger then i'm going to go all the way down to the lower left hand corner where my mouse becomes the crosshair click and drag up to split it vertically then i'm going to go up to the upper left hand drop down and change that to 3d viewport at this point we need to add a camera to our scene that'll provide us a viewpoint for our actual final rendered output it'll also give us a nice preview window for our rendered preview so to do that i'm going to hit shift a to bring up the add menu go down to where it says camera and now we have a camera in our scene however we're not looking through it yet so to do that i'm going to go up here to the upper left hit view cameras and change that to active camera the hotkey for that if you want to do it faster is just numpad zero but you're gonna notice we're kind of looking straight into our trophy case which is not super ideal so let's go ahead and fix that i'm going to hit 3 on my numpad to go to right orthographic hold z to go to wireframe then i'm going to hit alt r to reset my camera rotation which makes it look like we're kind of going through like a turbo tunnel or something then i'm going to hit alt g to reset my camera location at this point i'm going to hit r negative 90 on my keyboard hit enter to set that in place so our camera is facing the right way then i'm going to hit g and just move my camera back until we have our trophy nice and framed somewhere around there doesn't have to be absolutely perfect and we can always change this later but this is a pretty boring front on view of our trophy so to fix that let's go ahead and rotate it i'm going to hit 7 to go to top orthographic and now if i hit r you're going to notice that the camera just rotates around its own pivot it's almost like it's shaking its head no which is correct because we don't want to do that we want to rotate our camera around the trophy and there's actually a really neat trick for that so i'm going to select the trophy hold shift s to bring my snap to menu up going to move my mouse down to cursor to selected and then release shift s so now our 3d cursor is on the trophy and here i just have to select the camera and to change the pivot point from the camera to the 3d cursor we just have to go up here to the little chain link drop down click it and change it to 3d cursor now if i rotate my camera by hitting r you'll notice that it's rotating around the trophy which is super useful so i'm just gonna adjust this until i feel like it is correct maybe somewhere around here and again we can always change this later i'm just gonna click to set it down and at this point uh we need to clean up our rendered preview window just so it's not so cluttered with all this nonsense so i'm gonna go ahead and hit t to hide the toolbar go up here to the bow and arrow icon and click that to hide all the widgets and stuff and then finally to get rid of the text and the grid and the 3d cursor on the outlines i'm just going to click this little chain link thing that's highlighted and that'll hide all of that and finally before we forget we need to reset our pivot point or else that's going to be really embarrassing later like in the previous three takes of this tutorial so i'm going to click the drop down and change that to median point and finally we are ready to turn this into a rendered preview so to do that i'm going to go up to the upper left hand panel and here there's a shiny circle button that you can click or you already know the hotkey for this if you just hold the z you can go to wireframe you can go to solid or if you move your mouse up you can go to rendered preview so i'm just going to hover my mouse over rendered release z and now we have the ugliest rendered preview that you ever did see it's just solid gray so to fix this we need to add some lights and today we're going to use two different kinds of lighting the first is image based lighting which allows us to use a 360 degree image to add some lighting detail to our scene unfortunately in the current rendering engine that we're using right now which is eevee the image doesn't contribute to shadows or anything it's really more just useful for fill lighting so the second kind of light we're gonna use is just a standard cg light now to do the image based lighting we need a 360 degree high dynamic range image what i mean by that is an image that has more than eight bits of depth to it which means it can have whites that are brighter than white which blender knows how to use for lighting data which is really cool but you might be asking hey chris where do i find a 360 degree high dynamic range image that sounds like it's probably really expensive and normally you'd be right but there's a really cool new ish at least it's new to me new ish website called hdrihaven.com and they have a whole bunch of completely free creative commons zero free you can use it for whatever you want free 360 degree hdris or high dynamic range images which is amazing it's just such an incredible effort from those guys and the one i'm using specifically is called ballroom and i'll link that in the description down below but if you want to explore the website i'd encourage you to go find an hdri that you like that you want to use on the scene you could even put this in like a snowy field if you really wanted to so anyway to implement our hdri all you have to do is go over to the right to the world settings click on it go over to where it says color click the little yellow dot and here you want to choose environment texture and immediately you're gonna notice that's really pink that's not exactly what we're looking for um well the default when you don't have an image linked in an image texture in blender is bright pink it tells you immediately hey something's wrong and i need to fix that so anyway over on the right if you hit the brand new open button and find your texture which by the way i have three different versions of the ballroom a 2k a 4k and an 8k resolution ballroom hdri and that's because i like to work with the lower resolution one to get my scene looking the way i want and then for the final rendered result i swap it out for the gigantic massive 93 megabyte one so i'm going to go ahead and double click my 2k ballroom hdri image that's redundant hdri image but i'm just going to double click it that'll bring it in and now it's immediately affecting our lighting and the other cool thing that hdrs do or hdris do is they add reflections to your scene as well once we have some metallic objects which is going to be super useful in the next video but anyway this is now affecting our lighting but if we pan if we rotate around and zoom out you'll notice we can also see our 360 degree image in the 3d viewport which is super cool and the first thing you might want to do is rotate it you might want to adjust where the light is coming from and that is very easy to do so for that i'm going to go down to the lower left hand corner i'm going to change this panel to a shader editor we're not going to work on any object shaders in this video but we're going to work on the world so i'm going to go up here where it says object click on it and i'm going to change that to world so navigating this little panel the node editor is exactly the same as everywhere else in blender you can hold your middle mouse button down to pan around or you can use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out and i'm also going to hit n to hide the properties panel over here just to give us a little bit more real estate to work i might even make it a little bit bigger just so you can see what's going on so here we have our ballroom texture going into a background node where you can change the strength of the lighting and then that goes into the world output which is where all of whatever you're doing with the nodes sort of gets compiled and turned into your world in your 3d scene so to rotate this we need a vector input for our ballroom 2k hdr and i promise we're going to go way more in depth on the nodes in the next couple videos but just to bear with me for this point and it's really easy i promise so i'm just going to hit shift a go down to input and i need a texture coordinate node this these are different options for coordinates that we can use to manipulate the position and rotation of our background image so i'm going to click to set that down then i'm going to grab the very first dot the generated texture coordinate and drag that into our vector dot notice how all of these are purple and this is purple that's how you know it's the same data type so next i'm going to hit shift a go down to vector and i'm going to add a mapping node and that's going to come in attached to your mouse but if you hover it over the line you're going to notice the line highlights from gray to white when it's highlighted white if you click down it's automatically going to connect your node in between which is super useful saves like maybe 10 seconds of work it's great so anyway if you zoom in we only care about the rotation parameter on this you can rotate this any way you want you'll notice it updates in real time in the viewport but the only one we care about is z if we want to keep it realistic if we rotate this on the x-axis all of a sudden we got a pretty weird-looking room so i'm going to leave these at 0 and i'm going to adjust the z until it's rotated maybe yeah maybe we'll get this at like i don't know 35. it doesn't really matter because you're about to change it some more because if i hit zero to go back to my camera view and i start rotating this you'll notice that this actually affects the lighting in the scene which is exactly what we want honestly so i'm gonna rotate this around until it looks about right to me i'm thinking maybe about 60 degrees seems pretty cool and the next thing you're going to notice is that this image is super bright and it's not contributing any shadows to the scene so we're going to need to add some traditional cg lights to the scene to get some shadows but we also don't want those shadows to be this bright so if we want to use this as just sort of a fill light we probably want to turn the intensity down to do that i'm going to go all the way over to the right to my world settings and i'm going to change the strength from 1 maybe down to like .175 seems pretty good to me so we still get some nice colors and lighting from our hdri but it's not gonna overwhelm the other lights so now to add our other lights all we have to do is hit shift a go down to light and here we have four options a point light is an infinitely small point that projects light in all directions and then you can also make the point light a sphere so if it's bigger and it's projecting from different points of a sphere it'll create nice soft shadows the next type is a sun this one doesn't matter where you put it in the scene it only matters what direction it's pointing it acts like almost like a real sun kind of where all the light rays coming in are completely parallel this is the ideal light type if you're working on an outdoor scene next we have a spotlight which behaves just like a spotlight in real life you can change the radius of it and everything and finally we have the area light which is my preferred light for this scale of a scene this is either a rectangular or circular light that points in a specific direction but since it has size to it you can create really nice soft lighting effects kind of like a soft box in real life uh so i'm gonna go ahead and click on area and that's gonna come into our scene it's not really affecting anything yet but if i rotate around and i move it around you'll notice it does have an effect but it's really really dim so before we change the brightness i want to go ahead and put this into a position where it would look pretty cool so i'm going to hit three to go to my right orthographic i'm gonna rotate the light to a decent angle click to set it down hit g to move it back closer to the camera you're going to notice because it's so dim it has it has literally zero effect on our trophy anymore so move this right here and then finally i'm going to go to the top orthographic view i'm gonna rotate it like this and then i'm gonna move it over because i think directional lighting looks way cooler than lighting that's pretty much coming from our camera so i'm gonna move this over to the side some and finally it's time to change the brightness so if we go down to our lighting properties which is super intuitive it's the one that looks like a light bulb i'm gonna click on it and here we can change the power from 10 to something super bright maybe like 750 maybe like 800 maybe 8.50 wow okay yeah we'll get this pretty bright um so at this point you'll notice we have some nice looking shadows and stuff the light is doing what it's supposed to uh but we do have a couple issues here for one we have some light bleed coming through our trophy cabinet which we do not want so to fix that we can change some lighting properties so i'm gonna click the shadow drop down and here i'm gonna change the clip start from point zero five to point two now in a lot of scenes you're not going to have any light bleed and you don't need to change this just now you can mess with this property if you need to fix light bleed so i'm gonna set that to about .2 maybe even 0.25 looks pretty good and it's not completely fixed but that's okay for now uh so the second thing we want to change is the shadows so if you come down here you'll notice shadows aren't projecting completely from the corner of the object and there's a really cool feature for that called contact shadows to implement that you just have to go back to the lighting settings and you guessed it probably you have to check the contact shadows box so let's actually zoom in on this and when i check contact shadows you'll notice we get some nice contact shadows around the base of the trophy and right here so i'm going to turn that off and on a couple of times just so you can see what that adds to the scene it's not perfect because this rendering engine is more of a game rendering engine than a path tracer like the other rendering engine but it looks pretty good uh so at this point i think i want to make the shadows a little bit softer so it's like it's coming through a window or something and to make shadows softer with an area light all you have to do is scale it up and down so if i hit s to scale this up and click and give it time to resolve you'll notice that the shadows are getting much softer and if you want this to not be so jagged and stuff we can change some render properties later but for right now we just want to get this about as soft as we want when i first started in cg i used to go super overboard on soft shadows um so i would be like bam ultimate soft so much softness uh but you don't ever wanna go overboard on that you don't want your scene to basically just be completely soft lighting you just want some nice looking shadows so i'm gonna make mine about the size of a window and i think that looks pretty cool and now we're just going to add one more fill light to the scene so i'm going to hit shift d to duplicate my light x to duplicate it on the x axis move it over here closer to the camera i'm going to rotate it towards the object maybe move it even over further maybe even down some we just want this to be a nice fill light just position it where you think it should be positioned i'm going to hit r to trackball rotate it closer to facing the camera and here right now it's too bright it's it's competing with our key light so i'm gonna change this by clicking the power slider and i'm gonna change that down to maybe like 225 and you'll notice if i hide it by hitting h and unhide it it's having a very small effect on our seam which is exactly what we want we just want a little bit more control over those shadows so we can pump in a little bit of color i'm going to add some of that pixar purple personally i think that's looking pretty cool so at this point we just need to change some render settings to make our scene look better these are like magic check boxes that instantly make your scene look better so i'm going to go back to the camera button and here i'm going to enable ambient occlusion and it's really hard to tell what's going on just by looking at it so i'm going to zoom in uncheck ambient occlusion and you can see that starts to add a little bit of darkness in the crevices and the nooks and crannies which just adds that much more realism to your scene and again back in college i used to pump this all the way up to max by dropping it down and i would pump it up just all all the freaking way just 200. i went way way overboard on the ambient occlusion back in back when i was getting started with cg because i thought it looked grungy and cool but really you want to keep this minimal so i'm going to keep it down at like 1.25 and i think that looks pretty good if we turn it off and on but you can mess around with it come up with a value that you really like and the second thing we want is screen space reflections again since eevee is more of a game engine game rendering engine kind of it's like blender is a real-time rendering engine um it's it's using tricks and sheets and hacks to make it look like a lit scene this is a rasterization engine versus a path tracer and i will explain that more in a future video but just know that all these things are hacks just like in video games um so we turn on screen space reflections that'll allow things that are in our camera view to reflect off of each other so you can notice it's already starting to have an effect on our trophy which is really cool just adds one more level of realism to our scene and then if we want if we really really really want to we can up the resolution of our shadows as well by changing the cube size to 2048 and that'll up the shadow resolution and then if we want this to resolve more for our soft shadows so it's not like so spread out and it's obvious that it's a whole bunch of tiny shadows um we can change the sampling of our viewport up to 64. you'll also notice that our render sampling is already 64. this just matches that so we can see what our actual rendered result will look like in our viewport if you have a really crummy pc this might not be wise but for now i think it's probably fine and at this point i think we are ready to start working on materials in the next video so i guess i will see you all in the next video at this point you should have some basic lighting in place for your scene and i know i still sound like a broken record but i really want to encourage you to explore here play around and come up with something truly unique to you if you found this video useful and want to stay tuned for day 6 make sure you hit that like and subscribe button and ring the bell i'll be releasing these basics videos on a daily basis for the duration of the course and if you want to come hang out with me live i'm live at least every friday over at youtube.com oraclefish also if you want to download my example files or just support what i do here on the channel make sure you check out my brand new patreon link in the description until next time my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar and passes out you

Channel: Stream Scholar

Views: 371

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, blender 2.8, blender 2.9, blender beginner tutorial, how to light in blender, lighting in blender, image based lighting in blender, blender basics bootcamp, blender 2.9 tutorial, blender 2.9 beginner tutorial, blender lighting tutorial

Id: a6gwyb7U77I

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021