How To Use Lighting In Your Renders | Blender Tutorial

all right so I'm going to show you a few of my techniques for how I light my scenes so we're going to go through three different pieces I'll just put them up on the screen here um so yeah the first one is this kind of temple one the next one's going to be this outdoor like sunlight environment then the last one is this sci-fi kind of thing I'll show you how I did the lighting exactly what I did for each one um and it's all like really simple um simple techniques and hopefully you'll see that lighting it can doesn't have to be very complicated you can you can get by with just like usually I'll show you here like one light in the whole scene um so yeah let's let's do this so I have this file open here so I just moved all the lights that I'm using into this one collection here so um if I just isolate this you can see these are all the lights that are actually coming in from the left side here there is like there's one more thing in the middle here but it's not this this isn't really doing anything if I just hide all these you can see it's there's just this one thing in the middle so yeah if I take these just isolate them you can see there's this one here uh just this one million watt light bulb right here that's doing pretty much all the heavy lifting this extra stuff is kind of useless let's actually turn this off um so you can see this one right here is just doing like basically nothing this one is doing again like a little bit but basically nothing and then this one is doing a lot here um so if I if I deleted all of the lights in the scene except for this one here it would basically look 99 as good and that's the way I like to approach this is you add one light in here and you just move it around into um you just tried a bunch of different angles and locations for it and find one that works with the scene you're using and one that just hits the hardest yeah so let me show you exactly how I would have done this so I'll just hide all these and add a new one so let's say you're working on your scene here um and you've got like some sort of idea here and then you want to light it and it looks something like this you have maybe it's all black maybe it's like just one little thing in the corner or whatever so at this stage I would just add um so in this case I ended up with a spotlight but um so let's just add this in I'll just crank it up to something crazy and then I'll just start moving it around into different places and kind of just play around with it and see what might work here so you can see this is kind of the angle that I chose for the final one but you just kind of I like to keep um the the rendered view from the camera's point of view so that I can see what the actual image is going to look like as I'm moving this around so I'll just put it there and yeah you just move move this around and find different angles that might work one thing that makes it easier is if you set your uh your pivot point here to the 3D cursor and then just put this put the cursor around like the middle of your image now you can just rotate the light around like this and it makes it just really easy to try different angles so something like that might be kind of cool too so you can see there's a lot of different options we could go with here and it's just about finding the one that works best with the the like the scene that you're working with so yeah there's something else that could uh might be cool maybe let's add another zero in here um and yeah so that's there's really not much more to it than that like these other lights that I added in here um I kind of just duplicated the main one and then lowered this uh intensity down a bit but um if you're gonna do that just make sure they're all pointing in the same sort of Direction so it looks like they're coming from the same light source from the same thing but um yeah that's it for that one one other thing that's important here is having volumetrics so or having a volume here so you can see this is just if I go to the Shader editor I just put a cube over the entire scene here and I just put a volume scatter um in there all right so the next one here is going to be this piece so um this one's even more simple than the last one basically we're just using the sky texture from uh from blender you can also just use a sun lamp so what we're doing here is um if I take this out it's just pure black there is a sky that I added in the back here I'll show you how I did that um so together it's this is the final piece so let's just uh I'm just gonna hide this guy here and and just go through this so the way you do this is by default you're going to have a background in here right so this is going to be it's going to be something like that all you have to do is just take that out search for Sky texture and just add that in if you don't if you're in a different software you don't have this um just a sun lamp will work the same okay so yeah what you do here is you just add this in and then um you can tweak the elevation and rotation from here so yeah same thing as last time just play with different angles and find something that works for the scene that you're working with here and yeah one thing I like to do here is you can see in the final one the angle of the sun is sort of coming from the side of the scene so that just gives it some nice interesting Shadows rather than if the sun's pointed uh like if it's coming from behind the camera um or right in front of the camera everything's going to be kind of silhouetted so if it's coming from the side I usually like that just to create nice shadows and everything so one more thing you can do here when you're using a sun lamp or the sky texture here is if you add an image plane in the back of the scene that just has a picture of a nice sky on it um it's kind of like a substitute for an hdri but I'd like to use this because it just gives me a bit more control so what this is is um just a giant plane that I chucked way in the back uh just a principled Shader here and then um there's just an image of a sky this is from unsplash and then it's just running into the emission color here and it's also running into the base color so it's reflecting a bit of light from the color of the sky texture but then it's also emitting a bit of its own light just based on the colors of this image here if you don't want to do that you can also just run it straight into an emission node and then run that out that can work just as well yeah and then just add that into your scene and that's how you get really natural realistic looking Skies is because you're using a picture of an actual sky okay so here's the last one I want to show you um so in in sci-fi scenes like this this is where things can get a little bit trickier with lighting so in a lot of sci-fi scenes like this it's really easy to like end up with just a bunch of different lights in your scene and it gets really chaotic and it's it's hard to like have a focal point of your scene because everything is just bright and neon and glowing all over the place so if you can try to use the same tips as last time it's like as you know try to minimize the amount of light sources that you have that is one of the best ways that I found to just kind of clean that up and make it easy to look at so you can see here if I hide all the lights here there's a few extra random emission like vending machine things in here but these aren't really like casting a lot of light onto things they're not super bright so I don't think there's really a problem here so let's just go through this uh one by one so the main thing here is this neon sign in the front so it's just um a couple of emissive planes here okay so let's look at these things right here if I just isolate this um you can see it's just a couple of uh planes here and then this is just some random image I downloaded from like unsplash uh Sim with this one so then what's happening is I'm just taking that image that I downloaded here running it into the emission color here but we're doing some stuff in between so the main one is this red one down here um so it's just going to this this uh here this this one so this is just running into this curves node here it's just making it a bit brighter um just to kind of give it a more like blown out kind of look and then that's running into this Hue saturation node here so it's running into the value socket here on this node so that means any color that I pick at the bottom um the entire image is just going to be that color and then the value here is going to determine which parts are bright and which parts are dark um so if I just look at these signs here it just looks like this it's just yeah and then that's just running into the emission color and the strength is turned up pretty high on this one the one above it here you can see I'm doing the same thing just running it into um it's just other image and it's running into uh this one that's just making it blue but the interesting thing here is that if we look at the strength here this one is at 66 and this one's at uh one tenth of that so what happens when you when you start adding a bunch of um like colorful lights in your scene that are all really bright like if I turn this up um it looks cool but it's it's just a bit too much for me um so I think when you start having a bunch of lights and you're seeing they're all really bright and they're like multiple different intense colors it's really easy to for those to kind of clash and it just gets really messy really fast so you can have those different colors but I like to just keep that a bit more subtle on the second one so that I just wanted one main kind of light here to uh one main color so yeah if I hide those um again it's just all black except for there's just one light in the back which I'll show you uh just one point light which is so yeah there's just this one point light over here try not to worry too much about the actual uh values uh like of the intensity of the lights because it's going to change so much depending on like different scenes and how big things are and how far away it is but it's uh this right right here if you can just see that not doing a ton but it's just um kind of balancing things out a little bit in the back so if I get rid of that you can see um it's not doing a ton but it just kind of fills in some empty space in the back there okay so I think that's everything I wanted to show you so hopefully that kind of shows how um lighting doesn't have to be super complicated if you just kind of find the right place to put things in um you don't have to do too much else other than that um yeah follow me on Instagram subscribe if you want peace

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 80,506

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Id: qxNzfllPSJc

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/crnjanski_milos]

Great video!