How to Use HDRI Lighting in Blender Like a Photographer (Quick Blender Tip 29)

how's it going everyone this is wimbo today we are going to have another blender quick tutorials in here and we are going to talk about hdri lighting okay so without further ado let's get started so hdri lighting so if you're very new to blender and you don't know what is hdri means then basically hdri means a high dynamic range image so where can you find these in the past this website is called hdr haven i think but now is there called polyhaven but whatever you can go to this website and then go to the asset hdris now you can see a lot of variety of hdris and now you can simply just download one for your particular project but one thing i really want to point out is people don't really understand what is hdri and how to use the hdri the hddri is just a environment and you know any environment you need to have a lighting in order to see something if i just keep scrolling down here there is one is kind of inside of photo studio it doesn't make any difference compared to this it's not about their content it's about their lighting within that environment and also as you can see here usually this website we're demonstrating with different materials gonna see what kind of reflections what kind of shadow you're going to get with these so you can pick and choose so my advice is for hdri image you are not supposed to use hdri as your primary lighting so which means you're not supposed to just illuminating your scenes only use one hdri lighting at least for our further realistic product rendering because we need to have nice control over the lighting uh as a photographer perspective in order to getting best result out of it so how how do we use this hdri then and the first key point is that we're going to use it as a temporary lighting solution so what what that means so if i'm going up in here go to the shading tab so i'm creating a really simple plain and a cube and as you can see here my shading tabs are very clean just one for viewport the other one just for shading shade editors but a lot of times i'm getting reviews from my followers or students and to see their file and very common things is people actually kind of doing all these textures notes on in the under the world tab so which is not supposed to be so you're supposed to go to object mode in order to texture certain items in your scene doesn't matter how many windows you have under your shading tab making sure you're on your left hand corner over here making sure if you selecting the shading shader editors and then making sure you see like the world when you're actually trying to model or texture a hdri image in your scene okay this is very simple steps so next what you're going to do here you see there is a background and there are colors you can change the color or you can just change an illumination on there the reason you won't see any difference because this is still under the solid mode so if we go to the render view so basically these two are very similar so this one is basically is the ev render so you can see there already have a hdr image in here by default the reason you don't see this hdri because the background has been blurred so if we can just kind of getting the blur out of it you'll know oh so we are in a hdr environment just like what we're seeing on the website but the the reason on here this is rendered by ev engine so if we go here of this tab this is supposed to render through cycle engine which is the one that we want to use for our product rendering so this is something that we pay attention on that and then what we need to do here i i just go making sure i click that and then come back to the world you know world then i'm going to select the background and hit the ctrl t and suddenly i have a couple notes come generating in here and if you don't know why the things come out making sure you enable know the regular add-on which is the default add-on blender come with but you need to enable that okay you have you will find how to do that and then next what you're going to do you see there is an environment texture making sure you're using this node because sometimes if you're not using the this type of add-on and you're just thinking oh i need adding an image right shift a to adding an image and you find a image texture and then plug in that doesn't work this is supposed to be environment texture okay is it a small things but i want to clear it out for you all okay for beginners so now you select this you see that now the environment it looks very crazy pinkish that means blender needing a textures in order to make this thing work this is a warning sign okay so what we do need to do we're gonna need open and then just find your actual hdri image so as you can see here i already have hdri image folder built that's some hdr image that i use over the years and then i just put them all together in the folder so so simply this time i just gonna click the this one and you already seen this hdr i've been using in my previous videos which is talk about how to set up hdr lighting as a start up file so you can certainly check that out and so i'm just going to select this and now you will see everything this environment now you're inside this environment it's a dirty bathroom i think it's not super dirty but you see what i'm saying and this is just inside a bathroom now and the lighting go to the go to see the lighting quality is quite nice because very soft and i also have a kind of like a direction and that's simply because that from the the lighting is from that top window right here and then the rest of the areas is kind of like a little bit warm tone white ish so it's actually going to generate a pretty nice fill light for this so this is really nice to have and that's why you are see this for the environment or sometimes you don't want to see the content in the background in the environment you can just go to this camera icon which is render property and go here under the film you can just check this transparent then you won't see anything and you won't see the lighting it's pretty nice right then we go back to the point why we need to use hdri as a temporary lighting solution you know all these objects and all these cubes and everything haven't textured yet we're only adding texture for the world so we needed to go back to here to switch to object then we can adding or doing texture for this and we can just simply add in one and then to do a color change or whatever you can see we can texturing that why i'm saying this is a temporary lighting solutions because our hdri lighting have a pretty strong color cast so that's something that we we need to pay attention because for product rendering or for for certain items that you want to making sure your color is very accurate and neutral so that would be much further realistic when you kind of creating some nice looking catalog image for your product render okay and also the hdri lighting have strong directions so you don't really want to just set the lighting by default when you load it in you need to have some certain control and if you're saying well i just love this lighting quality i don't mind this color how can i do anything for control the the direction you certainly can you can just kind of do a rotation so kind of changing the your hdri image by doing all these or location whatever you can see this is changing the direction a little bit so you can do that but that's very difficult to manipulate and it's it's just kind of like like flip a coin and hopefully you get a really nice lighting uh through that so that's why i'm i'm highly recommend you guys doing hdri just temporary and then what you need to do next once you get your objects everything kind of like settled down it feels like a similar maybe and then what we need to do we're gonna go back to up the world just unhook this thing and it's completely in dark and then you can adding a light or whatever kind of light you want you can scale it up and uh just dragging them in here and adding a light properly so we can do just say 5000 to start with so you will see some details in here maybe we're going to need a little bit more because this is a much bigger scene okay you will see that still remain that kind of grayish then you can finalize your lighting you can you can do any complicated lighting do that and then start tweaking that that way because in that in this workflow for much better and accurate color result for your final render okay so that is one that's not the key point number one here we come to the lighting tip number two only use it as a fill light or ambient light let me grab a file that i created for one of my clients job as you can see here this is a cosmetic product with some environment in here and looks like this being shot inside of like a forest of wood and then you certainly can see that there's some kind of greenish color cast within there as you can see here this is my world tab where i'm using hdri image as a environment fill and the one i use in here is as the one i'm actually i can i can just reload it in this is hdr image i use the one right here it's it's called some grain secretary so this is kind of like inside a forest and then i load this in i certainly change the strength to 0.5 because i really don't want to have the full power for this one and and also you will see here we have quite a bit of lighting in here going on quite a bit lights so that's not really just simple uh hdri loaded in you will see there is a quite a bit lights in here so it's this one just feels like over lid a little bit but i'm trying to getting everything i want uh closer to the final result so as you can see here there's quite a bit lights going on here okay so anyway so but this is kind of perfect example that uh how to use the hdri as a simple fill because without it you can see here without this the scene looks a little bit darker and less contrast compared to what we have done here but if i bump up all the light i have it looks very artificial it doesn't give you the vibe of of the environment but having this kind of coffee is gonna casting some very nice greenish color light although you can change any color for all these to a greenish light but a lot of times you won't have that accuracy that natural look from the a very uniform the shape of lighting in here so that's kind of like the benefit of using hdri it can creating a can bring in an environment that you probably never going to be there and it's impossible to produce but now you can do it inside blender or any other 3d software you can do so for for pay attention on this for this this type of a way i use hdri is because i'm i really want to creating a atmosphere for the ambient in the same time this hdri image have a pretty strong color cast that greenish color cast works very well with this theme so you don't really want to have this type of light to apply to other scenes without thinking about it you think well it works very well in this scene and one must be great in the other one probably not another thing we can do here we can add in a hue and set note shift a and hit the hue and saturation click here and then we can just kind of plug it in here and we can dial all these saturations go to zero so that's a kind of black and white hdri environment come out but if you pay attention notice uh if i want to dial this thing down and everything the tone looks a little too warm compared to what we used to have so you can see that that actually effect on the mood of what we're trying to accomplish so i'm thinking just to do one and this is what we are default hdri colors give it to us so as you can see here it's certainly adding something to the scenes and you should consider use that and still lighting this product using your knowledge and making sure you're getting the best result you want okay so good so let's go to the number four already because we already covered the black and white hdri so let's go to number four so to use hdri as a background or backdrop hopefully you have done this before but i'm going to show you one another file that i i've done right here i'm just grabbing here real quick so you can see here this is a very simple scene and very simple props and the background looks pretty nice right it's kind of like an ocean view and also kind of sunset warm tone and this works very well for the the products for the overall feeling it's very feeling very soft and you know this type of thing so actually the background is not a a image plane it's actually a hdri if i'm going to come out you can see that's the scene we're using this is the hdri image we're having now here and i'm just using this as a background so how do how to manipulate getting all these done so you can see here i do have a i can just hit m to mute this and we have building a scene for sure and here and we have external lighting for sure so as you can see here that's quite a bit light over here and you can see we have quite a bit of lights going on here all right the lighting the scene if i close that you won't see nothing okay so that's the primary lighting for the hdri is simply using on the background in this way so what i have done here i'm just loaded in a sky hdri image right and then the next another thing i did is i'm using some kind of like rotation on the z-axis just returning this entire environment so that's you can positioning the exactly background that you want you can just do that if i'm right now it's 255 so if i rotate it a little bit more you see the world is going to come with you if i'm rotating to this degree if i'm go to the zero on the camera view you will see a different view over here right it's not that we want but it's certainly did see some content in here so if i type back to 255 and then you will see the beautiful background we have so obviously you don't need to go to the environment like that on the beach on that time to bring all these resources to taking pictures and you want to have beautiful backdrop but you can certainly get it done using a hdri as your background okay so of course you can use a hue and saturation to changing everything but for the colors and you can even just making the background a little bit more saturated you can do that you see but but definitely you can you needed to really do a good job to control what you want to do and also you can switch the hue of the background see that's kind of like a blue color ish but you can do quite a bit of things with hdri so and this is the number four we got it already done here and the very last is to use as a reflection so what that means so let me grab another file in here so basically this is a product i have done for one of my clients is a cosmetic mask and basically it's everything here is going to be illuminating with light so your your skin is going to be treated in that way anyhow but this is the product we want to do and you can see here under the world tab i use hdri image to getting some reflections on the top of it okay so you can see here we can we will have some key light in here it's not really easy to control so we can certainly just close a one or two as a key light and if i unhook this hdri you will see the key light is looking like this we can do something about it but i feel like this texture is not really presenting in the best the way it can and because the texture is more like the transparent glass or plastic it's really reflective well when you doing with this type of materials it doesn't looks like other examples already made they are kind of matte ish for this type of materials the hdr environment is very important because it's reflecting a lot of content to onto their surface so if i'm hooking this hdri into there you will see there additional light has been added on and also some reflections from the environment this is going to be add and if you open up the image you can do a different you know places you see i'm just going to use this one the the green one you see how it goes if i put it in yes i'm telling you it looks terrible because it's reflecting all the leaves and green in the forest it doesn't work very well compared to the one we we have so you can certainly kind of utilize in this pay attention to to getting the result you want you see this one is a little bit too flat it doesn't give you that contrasty and for these hdri i believe you can either find your way but i've kind of purchased that from a jewelry website it's that selling you hdri image on there so that's just for a contrast so basically sometimes you can even make this in yourself in the in the photoshop just a black environment but with some white highlight areas so if i click this you're gonna bring more high contrast reflections on there and there's tons of websites to selling this kind of like a special hdri image but if i were you if you don't want to invest all these please invest yourself to making sure you understanding all these concepts and how to use this before you're putting a lot of time and money to purchase all these to testing these and feel frustrated but that's just part of a learning process but also i wanted to know to invest in yourself your understanding is more valuable than just simply buy some quick solutions because eventually you want to be the artist to providing solutions you need to understand what you're doing okay so we can just randomly select everything in here and then this one have pretty good uh cache light on the background so it's very easy for for for lighting so i'm just using one single light and getting a hdri image to give me some reflections to show off this texture okay so that is conclude everything we want to cover in this short tutorial hopefully it's short enough and thank you for watching if you really like this type of content please hit likes and comments below and to tell me what kind of topic do you want me to cover and please consider subscribe my channel uh all my content is primarily talking about photorealistic product rendering because i was coming from a photographer background hopefully this type of lighting content is really gonna help you to bump up your render qualities in product rendering okay thank you so much i will see you in the next video bye

Channel: Wenbo Zhao

Views: 59,968

Keywords: HDRI lighting in blender, HDRI light, hdri lighting blender, hdri lighting, lighting in blender, lighting in blender 3.0, lighting in blender 3, how to add lighting in blender, product lighting in blender, how to make lighting in blender, realistic lighting in blender, environment lighting in blender, studio lighting in blender, Product lighting, product lighting setup, product lighting photography, product lighting blender, blender tutorial for beginners, blender tutorial

Id: -ZbPcm7jgdw

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022