How to Make Studio Lighting in Blender

despite the length of this video studio lighting in blender is actually pretty simple to do so first we want to set up our camera and basic angle and everything so add in a camera and i want my uh camera to be pretty front on so in front view mode if i hit control alt as number pad 0 it's going to snap the view directly to this view now the focal length of this camera can play a pretty big role in how things are perceived if you go for a low focal length it kind of looks like that wide lens like you know skateboard videos and that emphasizes the depth of an object and then if you go the other direction and go too far forward it can kind of flatten the depth so that's kind of the difference so i want to go somewhere in between it 50 is sort of the neutral one but i find for something like furniture it does kind of make things closer to it a little too emphasized so i'm going to go 100 like that 100 millimeters and then uh front on is pretty boring so let's just rotate our chair uh so just hitting r and then z ah zed and uh rotate it side on like that about 20 degrees all right and then i want the camera up so that i can just see like the top of the seat here and uh if i was to rotate the camera and you know do it down like this that that's okay but it can also create kind of like a bit of a bat not bad is it barrel distortion it's like perspective distortion uh but there's a little trick i learned you can use shift y and x uh which will actually create like if you rendered like a large image and then just cropped it to that little bit it's that effect i'll put a if you click the little i up there you can watch a video that i i found on it that's pretty good but anyways for that that's pretty good nice okay so let's talk about uh lighting so if we went into rendered view mode we would see this which is not very thrilling why can't i oh there we go so it does have some light and that is because the world has a default gray color to it so i actually want to turn that off to set the strength to zero so that all my lighting is going to come from lights in the scene so let's add in our first lamp so shift a go light point lamp like so okay so this lamp if we were to uh put it you know front onto the camera it would show us the chair but it wouldn't reveal its form because it's hiding the shadow the shadow is obviously being cast behind which we can't see so equally as important to light is its shadow and i'll say that again shadow is equally as important to light so don't fear shadow it's a common beginner mistake so uh we want to position our light so that it is creating some form of shadow on it um and you can see that with the light round about here we've got shadow on this side so it's showing that the object's three-dimensional like a box but there's no shadow across this curve here so it's not easy for us to see that this is a curved backing so this is where the light placement is very important so let's just split my view here so that i can go into top view now if i was to move my light a little bit to the side you can see we're starting to get some shadow there now let me now that we're doing this i increase the light brightness okay something like that so i want there to be just a little bit of shadow coming off the uh the curve there so that i can see see the form of that back there and if i wanted to light up the seat a little bit more then i could increase that and you can also see that that changes the position of the reflection as well so reflection for some objects is more important than the actual lights itself because like if you're lighting uh what's something like a let's say like a knight in shining armor that's fully chrome or whatever um you wouldn't actually see like light wouldn't matter it would be purely reflection so that that's an example of where reflections are really important so anyways in this case uh the reflection i don't want it to be like down here because it can make the lip of this look too emphasized so i want it to be up a little bit and it's also creating some shadow across ah it's lighting the top of my chair there so that is desirable that's what i want lovely okay now before we go adding any more lights in because you know you can see that the right side of this is dark but we want our chair to be sitting on something right to look like it's in a studio environment and that can actually contribute to the light because it'll bounce off it so might as well add in a floor while we can i mean sooner rather than later anyway so i'm just adding in a plane here and that's good we've got shadow we've even got some bounce coming off the plane there which is nice um however i want that uh i want it to look like there's an infinite background right uh not this jutting line there because that can you know if you can imagine like that can disrupt the the look of this object here so it's very common a lot of photographers shoot on an infinite background when i was first starting uh with blender i thought like the the solution to this was to like you know make this plane absolutely huge and then add a sun lamp to light it all up and that was completely the wrong way to go about it it's so much simpler than that all you need to do is just select one edge of your plane uh extrude that up so e and then z like so and that's pretty good however there's still the line there so all we need to do is add a bevel so bevel modifier bevel and you can see we get this now if we increase the segments here watch what happens to that line it just disappears and that's pretty good but then if we right click and go shade smooth it's virtually vanished and if you can still see it you can also just play with this offset and like increase that and that can play a big role the other thing as well is you'll notice that the light isn't even across this right so there is more light hitting this section than there is hitting this section so there is a big fall off between those two points there and this is called the inverse for in inverse square law so i talked about this in my full lighting series uh which you can watch by clicking up there um that goes into all about the science of lighting and all that stuff but this just the basics of it every time distance doubles so for example the distance between this light here and uh this chair and then let's say an equal point over here uh the the falloff is four times from here to there which is crazy but it is true so essentially it means that uh small amounts of distance uh can actually have really large falloff depending on how far away the light is from the source so given how close this is to the light there we're getting a lot of falloff so the solution is either to bring this in really really close but you're still getting some fall of happening or and this is the solution i'm going to do is just move the light source further away and now when i do this obviously i need to increase the brightness but the falloff will be less because there is less of a distance falloff between now from like uh there to there it's not like that far away right so the further away i make this and then increase this uh the more even the light in the backdrop is going to be and let me turn off or let's just erase those annotations there we go so you can see that that light is now completely even going across here and that is good i'll just also uh raise that up so that i'm still getting some light across across the bow the bow of the seats i don't know i'll just call it that uh and that's pretty good that's not bad so as i mentioned we are getting some bounce lighting coming off of this plane here before it was like totally dark there because just like in space there's nothing for light to reflect off of so you actually get a completely black it's completely black on the dark side of the moon there's nothing to reflect off it so therefore it is completely black with something there we can see it's a totally different effect by the way check it out i've got a viewport denoising this new feature in blender 2.83 beta uh there it is optics ai viewport denoising and it is so cool i'm really happy i think other software's had it for like a couple of years but blender just got it it only works with rtx cards just uh fyi but i didn't think it was gonna make that big of a difference but i'm really i i love it so now i'm i'm gonna use it for everything so when we're playing with the the energy value of a light we're basically making the decision of like is this lit enough is it overly lit like if you go too high you can go like oh yeah that looks a little bit too bright versus going a little bit too low and it looks a little bit too dark but there is a tool in blender that helps you see this better and that's underneath color management you can see by default the view transform is filmic which is what you should always use definitely don't change for a final render off that but you can choose false color and this will actually show you kind of like a heat map of the exposure ranges of the image so gray which is usually like a a slither right like that little gray value there that's something that's properly exposed at kind of like zero ev and then if you go into the slightly cyan color color or aqua color that's like one stop under and then a hot green color is one stop over and then obviously like yellow and then red is even more and more overexposed and you can actually see this when you change the exposure range there so essentially the way i look at it is as long as there is a gray value somewhere on my model i know that i'm in the range where it is uh where it's acceptable the other thing while we're talking about color management is uh generally blender tends to look a little bit washed out um and uh the reason for that is that the look that it applies to it by default is kind of like medium contrast so the look here it says none but it's actually identical to medium contrast if you change that to high contrast you'll see that it almost immediately improves it so whenever i'm doing anything basically i always change my look to high contrast and uh it improves it immensely like it's just there's never really a case where i don't want to use high contrast uh very high kind of just like it punches out it yeah it's the shadows become darker the highlights become brighter very high is a little bit too extreme i just generally find high looks pretty good but there you go and then you can play with exposure if you've you know as opposed to changing the power of the light it's the exact same thing except it's from the camera's point of view so every light source would have an effect of that but anyways that's pretty good that's that's not bad it's kind of got that like bleached like uh stock studio light kind of look i might turn that back a little bit something i might want to do as well is that this side of this chair here is kind of it's in the shadows which is good you don't want to erase shadows completely but you do want in some cases to reveal something about it so maybe i've got like some grain of the wood there that i want to highlight so i'm going to add another point lamp right here point and this is just going to light up just the side of this chair here so you never want to just add in light you always want there to be a purpose so make sure you get into the habit of like why am i adding a light like there has to be a reason for it and then you want to isolate that light so i hide any other lights with uh h and then this light here i can see is yeah it's the only light from this little point so now i'm just going to play with this light and i just wanted to hit the side of that leg there i don't want it to hit this backdrop here because that could uh i could ruin all that perfect uh that perfect flat lighting that i went to all the trouble of getting so if i move this behind the backdrop you can see that i'm really controlling and over here now it's really just hitting the side of this leg there so that's kind of ideal for what i want and if i change the size of this lamp it's going to change how soft that shadow looks so that's something else i didn't show you but yeah the size of the uh the shadow is very important as well so let me just get this right that looks pretty good now let's bring back our other light you can also a common trick is to make one light source a different color like you could make it blue and that's it's okay but it can kind of start to look a little bit urban you know like if you go like sort of like hot pinks or anything you know that look it's kind of like like if this was an outdoor furniture perhaps like a park bench or something that might be what you want but it tends to things look a little bit funky it can be done creatively yes but i've got a whole video on lighting color if you want to delve into that but generally if you stick to white um or at least if you're gonna go into color like keep it to warm or cool those are the natural tones according to the black body temperature uh but anyways i might just go slightly cool like that just to make it a little bit interesting but not in your face uh so quickly the the size of the shadow right so if you look at uh the shadow coming off this leg here the size of this lamp source here is being decided by or it's being shown by the size of this circle around it so as i change the size here it's changing that and that is you can imagine it like it's a ball of light and if you were to put a mirror there you would see that blender renders that as if it is a solid ball of light so the larger you make this just like when you've got an overcast sky when it's like lighting up a whole cloud um the shadows become softer and softer right and that can be desirable for some things like generally the female form like you don't want to emphasize things that might make you look old like wrinkles or saggy things or something like that if you wanted to make a model look younger you would want to go for soft lighting whereas if it was like a masculine male model perhaps you want to get like some jawlines or something you would use a uh a sharper light source so generally the larger the light source the softer the form kind of hide the detail whereas the sharper the light source the more the detail is emphasized so um in my case i don't want to go for something like you know like a sun lamp i don't want it to look like as as sharp as that i don't want it also to be like soft like overcast but sort of somewhere in between it um i don't know if that's a little bit too exaggerated i mean it there's also no right and wrong answer like the trends of like product uh product design you can see i was just verifying before i talked about the inverse square law uh it is it is a four-time reduction but the trends of studio lighting um it changes all the time so uh yeah you can go like sometimes people are doing like these sort of sunny photography um they're putting them with like natural materials like concrete and marble it just changes with the times you know the trends of photography like maybe in the old days having like an infinite background was like oh that's crazy cool but now everyone knows how to do it so they're shaking it up with different things um but anyway play around with it see what you like something that is quite trendy is to change the color of the backdrop to be kind of like uh i don't know like the kanye west uh yeezy pastel kind of this type of color or to like go like tutti frutti so basically like something desaturated but like a random color uh tends to be yeah it tends to look a little trendy it looks a little bit more interesting than an infinite white background so that's something i will do let's make it a little bit slightly saturated like that and that's pretty cool i don't know what this says to the viewer maybe that it's like childish or playful or it's bold and it's cool and aren't you cool for buying the cool chair um i don't know something like that like it's all it's sort of like getting into advertising that's kind of cool i like that like a pastel that's kind of nice so i'll go with that so let's do the render okay so let's go 200 samples we'll see how that goes something i do want to use is denoising so in your render passes i'm going to turn on of course in my render passes you'll have to do it at your end denoising data which we'll use in just a second so hit render on that with f12 and there is our render rendered in nine seconds yours might be a little bit longer since i have two rtx titans i know it's like the first time in my life where i have like a computer which is like top speed i used to be just like a teenager and i'd like save up like 50 bucks for like a card that was five years old and now nvidia has given me two of the best cards and i'm i'm very happy anyways so denoiser it's underneath filter denoise so you add this in then you go noisy data normal and then elbeta i wish there was just a checkbox that just built it into the render but for now it's like a separate node which is a little bit annoying but now that cleans up the render right so this was this was what it looked like before with a little bit of noise there and then when you put this through it uh it just cleans it up magically which is which is great that's what we want okay now something else as well is that uh so often times you have so much bounce lighting going on that there isn't as much shadow in the corners of objects as there should be so for example like maybe right in here or up here it can be a little bit brighter than it should be in real life so something to counter that is ambient occlusion so if you go into your world properties you'll see there is a tab here called ambient occlusion but i don't want you to check the box because if you do that it'll build it in and it'll like brighten stuff up as well you want to leave it unchecked but the distance there is important distance is like how much how far should it look for an object which is close in order to create extra shadow 10 meters is insane i have no idea why that's that of why that is the default value unless you were making like a city block scene and you needed the different buildings to bounce like it's crazy high i'm going to go for 20 centimeters or 0.2 meters and then rather than checking the box if you go to your render passes and then enable ambient occlusion uh you need to give it another render and there we go it shouldn't have increased the render time at all really although it has by half a second or whatever it doesn't matter um if we uh preview what this is by control shift left clicking until it shows a0 you can see that this oh hang on alt v no alt v zoom in there it's uh that's what it's doing it's just adding an extra shadow where there might logically be some so even like the top like underside of this chair it's adding a little bit of shadow on the top of the top of that slat there so now to combine a uh almost purely white map but with slight amounts of darkness to it you go into yeah before your denoise pass because i guess there would be samples in there and if we add in a color mix node drop this in here so make sure a noisy image is going into the top input the bottom input we want to be the ambient occlusion and then if we look at this you'll see that it's just going to show us the ambient occlusion but if we set this to multiply it's only going to use the dark values and it's going to ignore the white values so this is it with nothing right so that if we well actually that is a really big difference so this is with nothing this is where it turned up to maximum so it adds like a lot of extra shadow in there so generally i just sort of choose a value which feels nice so somewhere around about like a 0.4 can look kind of nice somewhere 30 40 percent um it just adds a little oomph especially like around the corners of the uh the chair leg there it can help it feel a little bit more grounded than it did previously it kind of feels like it's just sitting in on space a little bit whereas if you add a little bit of this oomph it just a little bit of shadow just helps it feel grounded it's not as important as it used to be before you know unbiased rendering and global illumination bounced lighting off everything but it is still a little bit important uh and finally because a lot of people were asking how i did the turntable animation it's so easy that i can throw it in here without ballooning the length of this tutorial right where my seat is right there place my cursor there and then i'm going to go shift a add in an empty and this is going to be the pivot point for my camera so i take my camera and then i parent it to this empty control p keep transform and now you can see that as i rotate this empty my camera is rotating around it like it is on a circle like a circle we used to i don't know why i did it years ago but like whenever i used to do this i made like a busier circle and then i added a transform to look at it and it was like a lot of work and now i realize like why did i do all that you can just add an empty and then rotate the empty so anyways then if you uh i've hidden my timeline but we'll bring it back timeline uh let's go 100 frames home and then go to the first frame and if we add a keyframe here rotation and then if we go to the last frame um actually i want my animation to end there so let's do the inverse of that well let's add a keyframe there and then go to the first frame and then let's make the camera over here so r and then z to rotate my empty around it to where i want it to start and then i'll go i rotation and now if you play it back you should see that it pans around but you can see it like eases into it because it's using bezier it's like ramping up speeding up and then slowing down so rather than that if you just right click with these keyframes uh selected and then just go uh interpolation mode linear now you shouldn't see any uh any fall off any bezier effect it should be like a constant something like that and then we'll just do a render animate the whole thing so there you go our final uh animation didn't take too long and uh looks pretty nice for a minimal amount of work as a final outro i wasn't going to include this in the tutorial but you know might be something that some people want i have an add-on called prolighting studio which basically does this you select the object that you want to light and then there's a bunch of pre-made lighting setups designed off of like professional photographers uh general aesthetics and you can just like quickly cycle through them so it just kind of adds in the light like for you and does it really quickly um because you often don't know what lighting setup will look good until you see it so yeah we basically created this as a way to yeah basically trial out a bunch of different lighting setups without having to go to all the work of adding in the lights yourself it also adds in like the floor for you you can add like a texture to it it's designed to be like super fast and you know does a does a bunch of interesting stuff so if you're interested in that i'll put the link in the description um and you can check it out but otherwise hope you enjoyed this a little quick tutorial on making studio lighting setups thank you for watching uh give it a thumbs up if you found it useful and i hope to see you in a future video and if you follow the entire chair sobog uh tutorial series well done because that's the finale the true finale uh you made it right to the end so our congrats on doing that and uh yeah well done that's all i got to say see you later

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 474,663

Keywords: blender, tutorial, chair, studio lighting, lighting tutorial, blender lighting, turntable animation, blender simple studio lighting, blender 2.8, how to

Id: 5UCc3Z_-ibs

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020