How to MASTER Car Studio Lighting in Blender

all right so in today's video I'm going to be showing you how I lit these three images of this Porsche tyan all in blender so you can see we've got the Porsche here and this is just using a world light inside blender so none of my lights are activated right now and you can see it's a red Porsche uh Tian I think I got this model from Turbo squid I think the or was fisherman 3D I believe um it's got the full interior in it as well really good model so really highly recommend them hkv Studios also do really good models um I've used quite a lot of them in my portfolio so I check them out as well but yeah so I've got this Porsche tyan and I want to light it in sort of a studio setting so really emphasizing all the curves the materials and just making the car look as good as possible so the first thing to do when you're lighting a car is to get the materials right obviously cars are quite sort of specific in how they look so this is my car paint there's a a fair bit that goes into it but maybe I can cover that in another video just you know getting all the Flav getting the scratches and all that stuff but in this video I'll just go over the lighting the sort of general principles of car materials so the general premise of a car material is that it's even metallic or not it has a roughness value of like it's shiny or not and then it has a clear coat it does have flakes as well um some don't some do so that's another thing to consider and then in this shot I also did some micro scratches just to really emphasize um the material that I made so this car is quite metallic and then it's quite uh glossy as well you can see the difference that it makes if by just by changing these values and then it also has this clear coat which is basically just a glossy finish to a car so it could be a matte car but if you put a clear coat over it it would still be glossy and I I went about this car for quite a few days actually I was just looking at references back and forth making sure that I got the metallic value right and the reference value right because there's nothing worse than seeing a car and it's just it's not how the real life world um CS look so I can't recommend enough just look at so many references go outside take pictures and there was a few things that I didn't realize this car had like for example these brake lights I didn't realize it had ribed brake lights because I I couldn't see anything in the in the reference photos so it's a good job I saw one in real life I managed to snab a photo but yeah make sure that your materials are on point before you start lighting because the lighting can sort of emphasize certain parts so you may think it's right but it's actually not oh and another thing to say I made my windows just a metallic black because I really didn't want to see inside and obviously I could just light it sort of like that but I just want to make it easy save render time probably as well and just make them all a mirror so I have my set lighting and then my front lighting here I should probably have each shot in a separate file but clearly I didn't for the job but uh let's turn off this world light you can see nothing's light in it and start by adding in these lights so I'll just go into the material view so these lights are just basically ball gradients that I made in F sh and uh either scaled or whatnot and then plug into an emission and I've used the blender 4.0 light linking you can see just above my head here um so this basically stops this object from lighting anything other than the the things that I've said so this will only hit the studio and the studio is this object here so it won't hit the car and as you can see there's one hit in the car but everything else is just hitting where I've set another thing I've did which you won't be able to see because my head is I stopped them from hitting the glossiness you can see here and that's just because I just wanted a little bit more control over where the lights are hitting and that's another reason why I have multiple lights instead of just one because this light is for this ball and then this one is for that back piece and the the reason for this back piece separately is just really want to control how I'm separating the car from the background um really precisely and also the main aim of this photo is to get sort of this beam across all the photos consistently so that's pretty much it for these lights there are if I go into material view I did sort of mix this with a red because it was going a bit a bit too white and I just wanted to warm it up so you can see there that's that's what it looked like before and then I've just mixed it using the color mix RGB and then plug that into a mission just to make it a little bit more red obviously you could make this procedurally but it's just so quick to make a ball gradient Photoshop why not so if I go into my front angle and I'll show you this is my front shot lighting so there's a area lights there's planes and whatnot I'll just turn all these on you can see it's it's looking a bit odd but if I go into camera view it all makes sense once it's on so I went for sort of the gradient off here into the car but then I still wanted some like highlights just on the car you can see here like on that Wing mirror and then that nice gradient over the screen and you're probably wondering what these black lines are that's just where my planes are um casting shadows and now I've turned it off to shadow in that visibility but it's still showing so I had to do a separate render just to paint them out but we can go through everything that I did so I'll start off with these big boys so this is sort of I guess my specialty in blender so I did a lot of products and product requires like really nice gradients um to emphasize the glossiness but also like curved shapes and this is just really simple to do so how you make this is just you make it you shift a gradient texture plug that into it a color amp and then this just allows you to draw your reflection basically and then you that into an emission and it lights it so I can show you you see the difference that makes so you could have a really harsh highlight if you wanted or you can bring it all the way across but I do think you know less is more um always um you just want to highlight the little details but yeah that's pretty much my main light if I turn that off nothing much happens but this is such a powerful tool especially for gradients because in blender sure we have area lights but you just don't get that nice fall off um that you get with these because obviously if you look here the light is going to be the most powerful at this white point and then you can see that it's getting darker and that's that's fall off that's basically gradient lighting which just makes I guess people use it as a cinematic sort of word but if you were just going to do this with an area light I'll show you shift a area light you just don't get the same effect now you can go into the light settings and change the spread and that sort of does something but with highlight um with glossy objects it doesn't really do it so the best bet is to just use these uh color ramps and then just position it in a way that you like and it is at a weird angle but I think that was the only angle where it covered pretty much most of this front Bonnet if I turn it you can see it it starts to change but yeah that's basically the key light um I think I have another plane not sure what that's doing well we can just say so pretty much every other light is just a point light source so you can see here I've got this big one and then these little ones and here I used the the spread value on some of them I think yeah 159 so I'll turn these off you can see what they're doing so this one where is that oh yeah so this one is to highlight this sort of edge here just to get that separation really subtle but you can see it's getting that separation and then this one is for the grill obviously this one again that front sort of fill it's giving and then this one is that big light with a really low spread you can see the difference with not changing anything at all and then reducing the spread turn the power up that's what it's doing it's just adding a bit more light on that front so that's without it and with it let me turn that other light back on so let's just add in some f light so this this one was quite simple honestly it's just about understanding where you want to go with the lighting and um showcasing the glossiness of an object or showcasing how m and objectives um and using them gradients but also mixing it with the area lights um and you get a really nice effect so that that was pretty much a it's quite a simple lighting setup that one so I'll go on to uh another shot so let's go to the back of the car so this is what it looked like with that room lighting and then I'll go back and again there's a weird Shadow so I had to render out separate path for that but here it is so I'll turn this off start with an area light so 60 spread this I think when you're using AA lights and it's for objects which aren't just like a pure metallic mirror it's really useful to use a spread because you get sort of a hard light under few surfaces but obviously on a glossy surface it doesn't work as good so I Ed a low spread of 60 on that it's just highlighting the glass and also this back bumper and then I used another one of these planes so I show you material view just another one of these and in the color ramp this time I've actually not got it white I've got it s P because when I had it Pure White I just thought that was a bit too harsh and it looked a bit sort of sterile but adding that little bit of pink into it I just felt like it sat a lot better um let's skip that one for now this one I'm pretty sure this was a composite so you you can see here it's creating a shadow here but I didn't want that but I really wanted this sort of highlight here so what I did was basically what I did was just render out a version of this image just with this playe active and then I just paste that um this one is another gradient light I believe yeah and this one is just all white um and it's just creating this effect here and you may be wondering why did you do that the car is looking nice it is but it looks too matte at the moment so if I turn it on when at first clinch you're like yeah that's glossy but without it you may still be sort of om andarin and also it just makes without it it just makes the car look really fat but with it it adds that shape to the car and then a final light was just to get that background so it separates the car and I also get that pulse now for this plane here you can see that I'm getting some lighting on here on the car however this isn't even a light this is just a mirror so a mirror is basically 100% well zero roughness all the way metallic and it's literally just reflecting this top light up here into there and then balancing the light so like in photography studios a lot of the times instead of just adding another light when you know lights studio lights are quite expensive so you just get a mirror and it will bounce that gradient or light whatever back onto your object so it's a quick hack um instead of adding another light it it just lets you control it and it also it's kind of realistic obviously you wouldn't have a full size car mirror but in terms of like how the lighting would react is quite quite cool I'm not sure if that would increase render times because obviously the light's bouncing off that mirror onto the object so that's more light rays but who knows um but yeah that's the back back shot quite simple again now the brake light is a bit different so this is the brake light and if I turn it on see this is what I did and again these shots were to mainly just highlight the materials that I've made that I'm going to use on all my future car shots and with that was this this scratch sort of generator that I got on my my textures because pretty much all cars no matter what will always have these micro scratches from like wiping the car down and that's what I tried to get through here obviously you may not have these many smudges on your car um but I just wanted to emphasize this material and also the reason why they're so prominent is for this gradient over here I didn't just want a smooth transition I wanted to show that this car you know it's a bit worn it has all these scratches it has the smudges because most cars do obviously in a studio setting You' clean it loads but this is a material that I'm going to use on all my projects but anyway to light this was again quite simple the same thing so another color amp I think this may be the same one as the the front shot and that's just doing that nice gradient again if I justed a area light shift a area light and I'll just bring that up over here just get it in the same spot you can see that just looks ugly and even if I reduced the spread it looks ugly compared to this lovely like sharp gradient into a nice sort of feathered look it just looks so much better professional it shows the curves of the product so much better you got to use these color ramps um the second light was to highlight the glass here and that's another color amp again and with this I use the the light linking again just to hit just the just this object and I also hid it to camera otherwise it would be in the view and then these four lights here were just to add some sparkles so obviously I didn't need to add a light here but adding it showed the paintwork off it showed that it was glossy and it just highlighted this these areas and that's again that's it for that shot now you had this sort of weird reflection which I posted in Photoshop and I also closed this Gap a little bit in Photoshop as well I just thought that was a bit big but yeah that's again quite simple now all these lighting setups won't always work for the same shot because you're going for different things so it's good to get different liting setups for every camera don't just settle for uh one Li set up for the whole thing obviously try to keep it in unison but you want to try emphasize every part of the car as much as possible so yeah that's pretty much it for lighting and how I did this car it's just using Color amps and then mixing that in with your area lights or Point lights um to get the effect that you want so I hope that was helpful again if you want to see how I texture my cars um I've got it all as an asset browser here so I can essentially use my material and then just stick it on I never have to do it well never have to um tweak it after the fact so yeah let me know if you want to see that but thanks for watching

Channel: Ethan Davis

Views: 4,612

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Id: xN6T2tC7IU0

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2024