KeyShot HDRI Editor Tutorial for Beginners

and today we're going to be talking about lighting in keyshot specifically i want to dive into keyshot's hdri editor a powerful real-time environment editing tool that allows us to practically paint with light [Music] now before we begin i want to shout out my favorite book on the subject of lighting especially for beginners light for visual artists i actually went into this book looking for some inspiration for this tutorial and i came up with and bookmarked a few topics such as creating artificial window lighting mixed color lighting and backlighting all of which basically is talked about in this book but of course i'm going to be adopting these principles and showing you how to create them using keyshot alone okay guys so a lion's share of this tutorial will be walking through all of the various settings you'll find in the hdri editor and how to know what to make and how everything works but then after that we're going to get hands on with a few practical examples and i'm going to walk through the exercises of creating a colorful three-point studio lighting like this as well as a more kind of uh i guess high contrast two-point lighting setup that looks more like this and then finally a really high contrast dramatic backlit setup like this all with just a few clicks only using keyshot's hdri editor and by the time you're done with this you'll be able to make your own really nice lighting using the hdri editor on your own okay before we begin i do want to mention if you'd like to follow along with this tutorial you'll have to head on over to willgibbins.com downloads pop your email address in here that takes you to the file vault where all the project files for all my tutorials are stored so make sure you get the right project file for this tutorial now once you open your project file which is a keyshot vip file it's actually going to have some stuff in it and i want to give you a quick tour before we dive in back to our lighting tutorial so we have our cube environment and in our settings here we have controls for brightness and contrast now i tend not to mess with these settings too often so we're going to go ahead and set those both to one we have our brightness and our contrast we have transform which scales the entire environment we'll go ahead and set this at 4 000 millimeters for now and i will set the ground size to be the same i tend to go with fairly realistic values here but we basically just want to make sure that our environment is big enough to encompass our entire product and how do we know if it's big enough well we can go to our camera i'm going to go to the free camera so i don't change our camera that we're already on and i'll scroll out to zoom out and i'll hit e to show the environment if we zoom out far enough we'll see a circle or a sphere and this is actually our hdri environment with our cube inside it the goal is that this environment is going to be plenty big enough to encompass our product but it shouldn't be scaled down so small that it starts to wrap itself around the product because it will take our reflections or our light sources and spherically they'll be distorted within the reflections on the product so hopefully that makes sense now we're going to go back to that cube camera and back to our environment tab and we have a height adjustment which will simply move that hdri up and down that that sphere that we just saw it'll move it up and down a little bit and rotation will rotate it around its y-axis we'll come back to that in a bit now our lighting environment uh sorry our background mode we are on lighting environment so we can visibly see our hdri behind our product we have the option to go to color if we want and this allows us to place a solid color behind our product as well which is super handy if we want to get rid of the distraction of the hdri and for our uh last option back plate image this allows us to pull in an image that sits behind our product but will not in any way interact with the lighting that's going on in the environment we're going to not talk about back plates today we'll come back to that in another tutorial and now under our ground options we have the choice to turn on or off ground shadows now this is not shadows being cast on a physical plane typically these are going to be simulated ground shadows if we go and look in our scene tree we can see that we do not have any physical plane on the ground we just have a cube so this is simulating as if we had a solid ground underneath our cube and creating some shadows for us we have the option to do something called occlusion ground shadows which i might talk about a little bit later but for now i want to focus on creating lighting okay let's get into the meat and potatoes of this tutorial and that's going to take place within the hdri editor so it's this little sub tab that lives underneath our hdri thumbnail now what does hdri stand for it is a high dynamic range image you can do a little bit of your own research on that i'll probably do another lighting tutorial on hdris but this one is most specifically about how we create lights custom lighting setups within here now i've already set up a single pin and if i turn that off you see that reflection disappears it looks like a square of light with a little soft edge now this thing called a pin inside key shot this is basically a light source but it's painted on the wall of that hdri sphere that we saw earlier so if i go back to my free camera and we zoom out we don't see our hdri anymore and that's because we are using a solid color for our background if i switch back to lighting environment and i look around we should be able to see our light that is on the side of the wall so this is our pin this is on the hdri and i want you to think of this image on the left as a globe like a globe of the world and then the image on the right that's flat is like a map of the world so naturally you're going to see if we move this light toward the ceiling it actually stretches out and gets deformed but in the real time view it doesn't get deformed that's because again this flattened out version naturally gets distorted just like a map of the world so i'm going to undo that change and the other thing to consider is that if you want to be able to toggle between seeing the hdri and a solid color background you don't need to go back to this menu every time you can hit c for color or e for environment and you can toggle between these two on your keyboard no matter where you are so if we go back to our cube camera and i hit c for color we now have that solid color background even though our hdri is still illuminating our scene so i just want to make that clear so when we get into that hdri editor as we were we have the section for pins which will be our light sources and then we have a background behind it so if i turn that pin off this background is the rest of our ambient light within our scene that is still lighting up our cube if i were to take this background which is now selected and take its brightness down to zero it'll become pure black and now we don't see any light on our cube our cube is black again this may be confusing because we're looking with a solid color behind our object if we hit e for environment we can go back to the hdri and now we see that we are in a pitch black room or environment with no light whatsoever so it can be confusing to see a bright color behind your object if you hit c to bring back the color and still have this blacked out environment with no light on your object just to clarify so now if we take the brightness of that environment and start to increase it we see we get light on our product i'll set this brightness to one and we're going to leave it at one and i will say that this background can be fully customized we have these two color drops so if i click on double click on one we can make this say red and now we have some red light on the ground if i double click on the white one i can make it say yellow and now we have yellow light as well a fading background from red to yellow and that's going to directly influence the color of our object because the light itself within the environment is indeed colored so something to consider is when you put colored lights up the color in your light will contaminate the color on your product of course and we still have a white ish or a light gray background behind our product because once again we are in color background mode if we go to e for our environment we'll see now we see our hdri i know i'm starting out pretty basic here but i just want to break down the fundamentals so back to c for color i want to undo the changes here so let's go ahead and make this back to white and i'll go ahead and make this red one back to something like a 50 gray maybe 40 so we have the ability to individually adjust these things that are called stops these colors and we can make them brighter or darker we also have the ability to move them up or down or just simply drag them across this strip here and you can add more stops if you need to so if we want to put a black or dark horizon line in the middle we can do this as well i think that's enough for our background now notice this though within this background we have four modes we can choose a gradient like i just showed you or we can choose a solid color a gradient's nice because it tends to give us a change within the reflections on our product whereas color is going to be a little bit more plain looking i guess now we could load an image and this is where we could bring in something like an hdri or something a little bit different and this will recreate a photographic environment but know that if you load an image that's just like a standard jpeg or a png it's not going to work that well to actually illuminate your scene like an hdri does if i go ahead and go to the environment library and i grab an interior and i drag it into my list this is an example if i hit e to show that environment this is what i meant by having a photographic environment we can see that it's a it's an actual location and if we were to look around we'll see reflections of our environment on our product and this helps make it look like it's actually in a more realistic environment all right i'm going to toss that away go back to our cube and my camera let's move to our free camera to discard those changes and go back to cube now if we go and turn on our pin we're going to talk about placing our lights i will say there is another thing called sun and sky but it's just another way to use this hdri editor to generate more outdoor looking scenes again we're not really going to get into that today so when we're in our gradient background and we have our pin if i if i click off of background onto pin now i'm editing the light source itself and all my options down below change so we have quite a few choices this can pin could become a circle or it could become a rectangle and i have the set to rectangular and i've made it smaller so we can actually see its shape being reflected on the object in the real-time view underneath that we have oh and last but not least we have half pins if you click half it will cut the pin in half and this is good for having a sharp edge but then fading the rest of the pin away which we can do with something called falloff but for now we'll turn off half now if we get into color this is where we're going to change the actual color of our light just like we changed the color of our hdri before and this is pretty handy it can be also handy to change the color temporarily if you have other light sources because you may want to see which light source is contributing light to each side of your product so this can be handy but i will say to maintain the most realistic lighting you may be better off using what's called a kelvin scale for your color so when you go and change to kelvin you have the option to go from a warm color light source to a cool color light source and these are based off of more realistic light values if you go somewhere in the middle you're going to be very neutral with your lighting all right another thing to consider is that the color the basic hue of your color if i change this to hsv we can see the value is sorry i meant to say value not hue we go to hsv we can see the value is 77 percent which is not very bright when we had it up to being pure white it was at a hundred percent so by using the kelvin scale you inevitably are going to lose some brightness there so you are going to have to compensate for that by increasing the brightness which is our next option so if i set this brightness to uh 10 we'll see that it gets quite a bit brighter and if we were to make our pin larger if i collapse the size option we can make the whole thing get bigger this will also increase the brightness of the light in the scene because it's multiplying the brightness value by the actual size or area over here okay next we have blend modes and this is where we start to get into some of the more advanced uh or different kind of things i wanted to really touch base on here so add is going to take the brightness of this pin and it's going to add the brightness of the background to it so if we were to set it to alpha you'll notice it gets a little bit darker and that's because we are taking just the brightness of this pin which may be at a value of 10 and not adding the the brightness that would come from the environment behind it so there's a subtle difference there and this is really more useful if you want to place lights and or highlights in different sides or in different areas and make sure that their value matches exactly this allows you to use the same value for all those lights and not have them pick up the brightness of the environment behind it if we go to blend it's going to get darker yet because it's going to find some sort of middle ground between the brightness of the hdri behind it and this light source all right lastly we have screen and it gets a little bit darker yet again these are just different ways that these two lights are interacting with one another if you are truly curious as to know the mathematical operation behind screen alpha blend and other blend modes that you'll find in things like photoshop you can check that out on wikipedia i have not had the stomach to get terribly in depth with that yet but for now i will say i almost always use add or alpha because i'll either want just the brightness or value of this light on its own or i will generally be just going along with the default which is add and that's going to combine this brightness of this light with the brightness of the hdri background behind it next if we get into our adjustments angle will rotate this pretty simple rounded corner is an option if you have a rectangular pin and this will round off those edges or corners i guess as it were so this looks more like a realistic light source or bounce card in photography i suppose for studio next we have this thing called falloff and falloff is interesting because it softens the edge of our light so if i take fall off down to zero we get a sharp edge but you may be noticing it still looks pretty fuzzy and it's got this weird stair step thing going on here what's happening before we forget about it this button up here that keeps popping up says this hdri has been edited we have to click this to generate a full res hdri so when i click on this it takes a second and then the edge cleans up but it's still not as sharp as i'd like it to be what can we do about that well you might have seen this earlier but when we were in the background mode there was a resolution tied to this hdri and a resolution of 4000 by 2000 is not that big for nhdri and if we increase this to 10 000 by 5000 we still have to generate the full res version so we'll click this button but we should see now a much sharper edge so if you've ever had reflections or shadows that were a little pixelated or low res or fuzzy it's because your hdri was a lower resolution than was optimal and we can change the resolution of these hdris as long as we are customizing them and there's no image-based background so hopefully that's clear now if we get back into our pin we see the falloff option so if we were to increase this a lot it gets really fuzzy and if we were to cut it in half and then refresh you'll see that we have that iconic sharp edge that fades away and this gives us lots of options when we need to especially for things like screens and things where we want a subtle reflection um but we also want to show that it's like a glossy or a hard surface all right and whenever we're making changes to this hdri editor we're going to need to refresh or click that regenerate button okay further down the line we have falloff modes and this is another key area that i think is important to understand this shapes the look of our light pretty significantly let's take our fall off back down to zero just to have a pretty strong representation of what this does default is from edge so that means our pin itself is the same brightness edge to edge but then once we get to the very well edge of that light it basically stops and it fades away so this just fills in the entire uh pin with the same i guess brightness when we go to rectangular and then refresh it's not going to look a whole lot different this is a rectangular pin but if we increase our fall off we're going to see that it takes place and has more of an effect so let's go ahead and refresh this and this is basically rounding off those corners but using not so much fall off it's actually it's actually like fading away so instead of a rounded corner where there would not be a gradient as it gets closer to the edge this one does create one if we go back to from edge you can see where it was sharp we have softness all the way around but the center of it is still the same brightness now if we go down to linear we see that this looks like a little football so we're basically fading from the very center of this light outward with a subtle gradient and if we bring the fall off down quite a bit this will give us this kind of more of a natural light that hits the center and then fades out we have the option for quadratic which you'll notice is less aggressive than linear so again these are more mathematical terms but the quadratic is going to fall off faster and it means that we're going to maintain the same brightness and then as we get toward the edge it does the a more aggressive gradient and then exponential let's go ahead and increase this so we can see this one's going to be a little harder to see the difference but this exponential is going to have more of a hot spot criss-cross in the center and then it's going to fade out as we get towards the edges but this one still ends up let's do 0.1 there we go some for some reason my falloff value got really low there let's try 0.3 there you go that's a much easier way to show this off so if we take this you'll see it's kind of got this more star-like highlight and we can increase the brightness and really push that if we want all right we also have something called circular and we'll drop the fall off a little well actually let's increase it this is going to give us a well kind of a circular fall off like a like a more like a circle shape [Music] and it's going to more fade off the top and bottoms more so than the sides which is pretty nice with this rectangular pin and mind you all these fall off modes are available even with a circular pin or a rectangular pin so depending on mixing you know how you mix and match these you can really get the types of reflections you want ideally without loading in image maps of actual studio lights which would be a lot more effort so hopefully that gives you an idea of how these work again for more natural lighting i do mix and match these i do use them all but i will say pretty frequently i'm using something called linear and let's refresh that and it's too high when it's set to one so let's bring it down i do feel that um i like the linear as well as the typical from edge which is the the default and then i also use the uh i think i used the exponential one as well quite a bit this guy okay so a lot of kind of boring textbook type stuff but you know if you've never understood this stuff or never took time to get into it hopefully there is some value in this for you next we have our transforms this is just a way to move things left and right or up and down just very simply now we didn't talk about how we placed this pin so let's get into that now that you understand all these settings we can have fun with creating lighting setups and placing pins and stuff like that and highlights and yeah okay now let's go ahead and turn this pin off so we don't have any pins here but we do have some ambient light from our background now we can use any one of these four buttons to add different types of pins but we're gonna focus on this basic pin type and we're going to do so by clicking the set highlight button when you do this you get a little menu that pops up at the bottom saying that control and left click will add us a highlight so if i hold ctrl on the keyboard and left click on the edge here that adds a highlight now this is a flaw with keyshot unfortunately with a fairly recent update they made a change the code that inherits the settings of the last pin i'm not sure that i'm a fan of that because i just added a pin but since we had the last one turned off it added a pin turned off which is not useful anyone who wasn't paying attention would probably just think the feature didn't work so let's turn this on by checking this box and we can see that we've added a pin and once again it inherited those settings rectangular blend modes add falloff of 0.3 brightness of 18.72 whatever so it inherited those settings so let's go ahead and create another highlight using this set highlight tool and just as before if we hold ctrl and we left click we can add another highlight and we can continue doing this as long as we hold ctrl and we keep clicking we keep adding more of these pins to our scene now this looks pretty ugly but i just wanted to make sure you understood how to add those highlights and what's nice about this tool is it's actually reverse engineering it's placing the highlight on the surface and if we were to zoom out and look at at our hdri with e e for environment we've basically placed a bunch of pins and we didn't have to know where to place them on this globe all we did was say based on our point of view or our camera point of view we want the light to hit this surface and keyshot reverse engineered that and place these where they need to go now we can also take these pins and you can see that one of them is selected it's blue both in the list and it's got a blue dot we can click and drag it around our scene and it will either be reflected on our object or if we move too far away it won't be reflected on the object so we can manually move light sources around by just dragging them about or we could use the set highlight tool whatever you're more comfortable with i think set highlight is much faster generally speaking all right let's delete some of these pins we don't need them and now that we've talked about all of our settings i think it's time that we're going to create some basic different lighting scenarios using a practical example uh one more thing i will mention once you have a pin in your scene if it is selected you can use the set highlight tool to move it so let's say i want to move it to this other face the rest of this dialog says lmb left mouse button and drag to position or we can simply click and it will move to reflect wherever we're clicking or you can click and drag like it suggests sometimes it gets a little buggy all right there we go we're not going to really touch on the gradient pin the image pin or the copy pin you can play with those on your own time and find out how those work for now let's get into our practical example let's move on over to studio number two and here we get to see this cool ceramic carafe it's some vintage design that i you know referenced as a 3d modeling exercise a long time ago and you can see it in our startup environment and it sure does look plain it is bland nothing exciting going on here now i did want to go ahead and leave it white and that's because we're going to use our lighting with some color with our lighting and i didn't want to make things too weird mixing colors so let's go ahead and check this out here so we are in our startup environment and we want to go and create some more dynamic lighting and maybe i want some lights on some of these surfaces we just don't want something like this so let's create a new environment and we can either duplicate this one or create a blank environment map so we want to create a blank environment map go ahead and click that we'll call this one karaf and we'll make sure in studio two that we are using the environment called karaf there we go and we are still on our solid color background so where we hit see if we hit e it will show our environment and it's all gray because we have added no light sources we just have this gray background ambient light let's start by making our resolution 10 000 by 5000 and now we want to add a light source so we're going to set a highlight and before we do that let's go ahead and hit c on the keyboard to go to our white background now i'm going to click set highlight and we will hold ctrl and i want to add one highlight a little off to the side here and i clicked on the surface and notice this pin is below the horizon line and that's because it needs to be a little lower to reflect on this surface which is pointed downward all right to add another light source we're going to go ahead and hold ctrl and i will click somewhere in the middle so now we have a light source on this plane and i also want to separate the object from the background so i'm going to hold ctrl and click one more time on the left hand side and we get this edge light here and now that i've added my three light sources i want to go ahead and hit done we're going to create what's called a basic three-point lighting setup it's very common in photography and what we have is the last highlight we set is got a blue dot in it that's pin number three so this is the one on our side that should be separating our object from the background and notice it's not quite going to the very edge that was my fault so i want to move it on over and we can nudge it over using the azimuth slider i should click and drag and as i move it's going to update and it will move left to right so if i drag to the right i'm going to move it until we have this bright white edge along the kind of outline of our carafe we could change the size using the radius slider and that just makes the pin bigger so that light will spill onto more surfaces and i do want this pin to be pretty large in order to again capture the edge of this product next i want to work on the first pin we set which is this little one to the right up top this is going to be i guess my key light sort of it's going to be a little uh well it may be the secondary light but the point is um you know we're going to play with it so let's go ahead and first increase its brightness notice the one on the edge is significantly brighter looking even though they both have a brightness of one the reason the one on the edge is bright is because of something called the fresnel effect which you can look up as well it's spelled f-r-e-s-n-e-l and it states that light at a grazing angle on any material is going to appear brighter okay so let's take the pin here and with it selected we're going to add some brightness we'll make it say 3 and now we see it's not only reflecting here on this surface but we're getting a little bit reflected light on the top and the edge here of this piece and some bounce light down below so one of the nice things about an hdri is when you add these pins you do get light in multiple areas on your product as opposed to using a physical light which may not behave quite the same way so from here i may want to keep the light from spilling around as much so i could make the radius smaller and i could try to focus this light a little bit more intensely in one area and this just comes down to moving it around a little bit to see if we can get it exactly where we want and you may find that you actually cannot get it exactly where you want without affecting other surfaces and this is why a lot of people use physical lights like area lights but again for now we are focusing on the hdri editor and i'm not um unhappy with the way this looks in fact i do want it to be back closer to the size it was i thought that looked pretty nice and let's go ahead and make that 30 and let's add some light to the middle here so if we go to that other pin we can set the brightness once again up let's try three and now this one is going to really brighten up the whole front side and this is a product that's supposed to be white or fairly close to white so i want to dial in my lighting so that the product itself doesn't look too gray that means our highlights are pretty much going to be pure white almost so let's try a value of 4 not 45 but 4 and that looks pretty nice there so from here it would be time in my opinion to start worrying about some of or you know taking care uh for some of the details on this so if i want to take my blend mode um actually i'm gonna leave it set to add but fall off mode is what i'm gonna play with now so if i go to linear we see it gets a lot darker and um that's because it's it's the lights fading from a bright center to a less bright edge and i also want to increase the fall off to really have a soft edge so now the thing is very subtle but if we increase the brightness we can bring it back up so let's try 10 and notice 10 is too much it's it's blowing out and clipping to pure white here and it looks almost metallic like an ugly reflection so we'll bring this down a little bit and again i would say your highlight should pretty much you want them to stop before they go to pure white and that looks pretty nice now here's another problem with going with something with a lot of fall off is this is a glossy material therefore the reflection itself should be pretty sharp and by making this have a smooth fall off uh or you know kind of linear falloff we're losing that sharp edge and that's confusing because this is supposed to read as a hard shiny ceramic and now it's no longer it's a little it almost looks like it has roughness because of the way the lights behaving so maybe i don't want a lot of falloff on this so i might bring this back down to 0.1 and maybe i want to go back to using from edge of course i have to reduce the brightness in that case and maybe even a little lower maybe down to 3.5 and we can continue to play with these but what i would say next that might be a little bit more interesting here is to add some color so if we want to add a splash of color we can go and grab one of these pins say the one that separates it from the background and if we want to get really crazy we can make this really really warm and that's going to pump some color into our scene same with these other lights so maybe i want to go with something that's quite blue off to the right side and then maybe in the center we want to go something a little more neutral but maybe a little still still a little more on the cooler spectrum notice the whole thing got darker again as mentioned before we're going to have to go higher on the brightness because all of these colors we just added here are not as bright as pure white which is what we started with [Music] cool so now we have some kind of bright contrasty more interesting light going on and now this is one thing that you have to consider we have a fairly gray background that background is also affecting how gray our our product is so if we were to take this background color and increase this to be more white we're going to fill in the areas between the lights with more white or light color the problem is now our lights are too bright so we could go back and forth with these it's one thing you have to kind of be a little bit careful of [Music] cool so there you have it that's how i would go about making a standard three-point lighting setup and we've also shared how you can introduce some color into there for some hot you know some more interesting effects the next type of setup i want to show you is something a little more dramatic and it's going to be called backlighting and this is more of a cinematic sort of dramatic effect where the light comes from behind the object and we get this cool dramatic silhouette that is really good for things like promotional imagery or packaging stuff like that so i'll go ahead and create a new blank environment map and this one's going to be quite a bit simpler than you think we will add a highlight and i'll hit hold ctrl and click and then we want to hit done and with the single pin we need to move it to the back side of our product so we're going to go ahead and change the azimuth until it disappears behind our object all right so we're wanting to see that our lights now behind our product and i want to change it to rectangle and we'll go ahead into its size and make it taller with y so increase the y value and we want to bring it down lower so it's not quite so high so we'll take the elevation down a bit and now i'm starting to see this white silhouette around my product but it's pretty tough to see so we want to go ahead and do a couple of things to make sure that it's there with a white background backlighting makes no sense so we need to go into a darker we need to change our background to be more dark so let me go ahead and quickly rename this to backlight and then we'll go to our settings and our color for our environment color background we're going to set this to be pretty much black it's going to go very dark and now you can start to see the silhouette of our object is being lit from this pin which is really nice if we go into our hdri editor now we want to take this pin and make sure it's plenty bright enough so it's at one now but let's try two or three or four we want to make sure we have enough to go pure white around the edges and we also want to take the hdri itself that's now gray and we want to take that background and kill that ambient light so take the brightness down and honestly you could go to pure black and all the light that we see in our scene on our product is coming just from this pin behind it if we were to show the environment with e on the keyboard we see if we were to zoom out this pin is behind our carafe so now that we're looking here let's go back to e for a color let's click c for color sorry and how can we make this look a little more attractive well there's a couple options the first thing i would do is consider maybe some illumination on the ground so if we go to our lighting tab we have ground illumination on but if we double click on our ground plane we'll see it's got a ground material and our specular value is set to black which means it says no light is being reflected off the ground plane so let's turn it on to white and now we have light reflecting on that ground plane and we can add a little bit of roughness if we want 0.1 and now we have some cool light on the ground that's being reflected and last but not least i would say we want to go to the image styles and let's turn on our bloom so when you do this it's actually going to come on with the values of 0 and then i think 5 and 0. what you want to do with bloom is start by making it all the way is like 1 and then take your bloom radius and make sure it goes as high as you want so let's say like 40 to exaggerate and then we take this bloom threshold and we increase it and this makes it ignore the areas that aren't so bright and then we take our bloom intensity and we reduce it so it's not quite so distracting you can play with the size if you don't want it to glow quite so much also my environment light is super duper bright this pin is four and it's very large so let's make it a little bit darker so it's not quite so quite so um bright and then back here we can go in and refine these settings if we'd like take our threshold way down there we go and that's a cool way to really you know get your product um you know kind of veiled in mystery so to speak um and then you could come in and you could add a light you know a little highlight from the front if you really wanted to and i mean that kind of looks cool just as as it does i i mean i guess that works pretty well too just the right amount of brightness there um that's kind of cool and then i could maybe reduce it just a little bit if i wanted to um but there you go you know there's some some cool ways now this isn't considered completely backlit when we have this front light in the center here but you get the picture and then last but not least we could move around one of these lights so it doesn't come from totally behind but maybe it comes from the side a little bit and then we could take the other one and do more like a two point lighting set up like this and then maybe take this one in the middle and make it not quite so bright and now this would be um kind of in the middle so it's still dramatic and and it's coming from the edge a little bit but it's not it's not quite so severe i guess so the other thing to consider is now our white product may not look very white in the middle here but as long as our highlights and these like um sorry the lights that we've added are bright enough to convey that the product itself is white um this can still read as a white product even on a dark background uh the last thing i'll mention is if we go to our background color though and we make it not black but you know light gray or something else you run the risk of your product looking too dark so the brighter your background color the brighter your lights have to be if we go somewhere in the middle this still looks passable but once we get a little bit brighter we're going to want to go in and take the other light source that we have and we're going to want to increase this so it doesn't look too gray but really that's all there is to it this is just being lit with two pins two big rectangular pins and in my opinion it looks pretty nice like that's some pretty cool lighting and it took you know even though this tutorial is already pretty long you can create this in just a matter of a few clicks so when you're done with this let's say you want to save one of these environments i will say you can go ahead and click on the floppy disk save to library and then you can name this and put it in your own folder if you want i don't tend to save custom hdris like this just because they're always unique to the camera angle and the product i'm working on so i just make them from scratch every time the nice thing too is that these are procedural they're generated within keyshot and they're saved in your vip file and there you have it ladies and gents thank you so much for watching this tutorial apparently i am incapable of making short tutorials anymore i like to explain things so tough luck but if you happen to follow these tactics and create your own nice renderings using custom lighting setups please share them on instagram with me i am at will gibbons design and i will do my best to share your renderings with my community because i love seeing what you guys create so until next time happy rendering [Music] you

Channel: Will Gibbons | 3D Rendering

Views: 33,663

Keywords: render, tutorial, rendering, how to, keyshot, keyshot 9, keyshot tutorial, lighting tutorial, dramatic lighting, hdri editor, hdri editor tutorial, keyshot 9 tutorial, keyshot lighting tutorial, keyshot hdri editor, keyshot lighting, keyshot studio lighting, studio lighting, cgi, render lighting, rendering studio, beginner tutorial, easy tutorial

Id: d6lf7bGdeKs

Length: 45min 46sec (2746 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020