How to Light your Scenes with HDRIs in Blender

in this tutorial I will show you how to light your scenes with hdris in blender so the first thing you need to do is get some hdri files and there's many different websites where you can download hdris but my favorite website for downloading hdris is polyhaven.com and when you go onto polyhaven.com you can just scroll down here and click on browse hdris and they have very many different high quality hdris and they're all completely free and licensed as Creative Commons xero and they also have a patreon page if you'd like to help support what they do so you can just choose an hdri to download I'm going to click on the blue photo studio now here on the download options I like to use the 1K version because the 1K version is a much smaller file size and so blender won't have to use quite as much memory now the 1K version will look a little bit pixelated in blender but usually I'm just using an hdri to get realistic lighting but I'm not actually going to be seeing the hdri in the render so I usually like to download the 1K version and then here on the type I just usually download the HDR version and then you can download the hdri so in blender I'm going to be lighting my sci-fi macrobot and I have a tutorial series on how to create this Mech robot link will be in the description if you'd like to check it out so to add in the hdri you just need to click right over here on the world properties on the side panel and you can click on new to add a new world and I'm going to hold down the Z button and move my mouse up into the rendered view so we can see the world so to add in the hdri you just need to click on the yellow dot here next to color and you can choose environment texture and then you can click on the open button and here's my folder with all the hdris that I've downloaded and I'm going to be adding in the blue photo studio so I'll double click on this and you can see now it's been added in in the background and hdris are very important if you're going for realism because they're going to have many different Reflections in many different colors and you can see it looks very realistic on the robot and especially for very reflective materials like metal or glass hdris are super helpful for getting realism and to change the brightness of the hdri you can just drag this strength value right here now if you want to edit the HT your eye further or even rotate the hdri you can click right up here on the shading Tab and so over here in the Shader editor I want to click on the object and I instead want to change this to world and this way we can edit the world nodes now if you want to change the rotation of the hdri to change the rotation of the lighting then you can enable the node Wrangler by clicking here on edit and going to the preferences and over there on the add-ons tab just search for node Wrangler and check mark the node Wrangler add-on so with the node Wrangler enabled you can select the hdri node and then you can press Ctrl T and that is going to add a texture coordinate and mapping so then you can use the rotation Z value and you can rotate this around to change the rotation of the hdri and then if you want to edit the colors of the hdri you can press shift a and you can go here to color and you can add any of the color nodes I'll just add the RGB curves and you want to add the color nodes in between the hdri and the environment Shader so just drop it here and then I could kind of play around with the colors so I could make it more contrasty I could also click on the r RGB for red green and blue and I could change the colors I could also press shift a and go here to color and I could add the Hue saturation value and I'll drop this here so the Hue is going to change the colors the saturation will make it black and white or very saturated and then the value is going to make it brighter or darker now if you want the hdri to light up your scene but you want the background to be transparent so you can't see the hdri then what you can do is click here on the render properties and then you can open up the film Tab and then you can just click on that transparent button so this way the hdri is still lighting the objects but the background is transparent and you can't see the hdri so that's how you use hdris in blender and if you'd like to learn all about lighting and blender then definitely check out my lighting for beginners tutorial and I also have a tutorial on how to create your own hdris with blender so those videos will be up on the end screen and also a link in the description and if you'd like to help support this channel then some great ways to do that or by checking out my gumroad store and my patreon page but I hope you found this helpful and thanks for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 26,498

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, HDRI, HDR, lighting, realistic lighting, world lighting, HDRI Lighting, add hdri, how to use hdri, use hdri in blender, blender hdri, blender lighting, light blender, realistic light

Id: QNr7lwhW0h4

Length: 3min 59sec (239 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023