- So you have your 3D
scene, you placed a camera and decided the focal length,
but then when you hit render, you find the result somewhat
flat, not appealing, simply nah, well that's
probably the lighting. Fortunately, this video is here to help. In it, we will deconstruct
several examples of how you can light your
scenes directly in Blender to help you in your storytelling
needs and really push your 3D renders from good to awesome. (sinister tone) Hello everybody, Martin
here for cgboost.com and I'm happy that I can present to you this much requested video. Last time, we tried out how
to make a very simple scene, how to place a camera to it,
some lights and visual goodies and throughout it, we talked
about general cinematic rules and tips that you can use
in your own 3D artwork. So check the video
description or the info books if you don't wanna miss
the 10 tips to make your renders more cinematic. In fact, I really recommend
that you have a look at that video now before you watch this one. But judging by our comments,
I think you wanted to know much more about lighting one
specific aspect, a character. So that's what this video is all about. To help me out, Juan Hernandez,
our newest colleague here in the CG Boost family was
actually so kind as to lend me his Shaolin Monk character. You may know it from
ArtStation or BlenderNation and this way, I was able
to focus on the stuff I loved the most, placing
the character in the scene, figuring out the shot and
pointing some lights at him. Some call it painting with lights, which I find wonderfully accurate. Anyways, it was lots of fun
and from this experimentation, came out six very different
lighting scenarios which I will be breaking down
today about the importance of story in your compositions
I talked about last time, but today, you will see
that you can do so much more with a proper choice of
lighting angle, quality, quantity and color. Oh, and one more thing,
you can of course sign up for our cgboost.com resources
and there, you can download all the examples I present in
this video and follow along or just create your
own lighting scenarios. You just subscribe at
the provided link and get six Blender beginner's course as well as a shortcut PDF for free. Excited? Good, let's go to lighting. There are of course endless
combinations of lighting setups you can use and yes, I know
knowing it doesn't really help. However, there are certain
questions you can ask yourself before you start lighting and the answers then always help you with
starting out the process. Question number one, what
is the focus of the image? We talked about this in the
previous video and here it is not different, only we
already know that our focus will always be the character,
this time just one character which makes our job a little bit easier. There is a simple rule,
human attention is drawn to the brightest spot in the image or a spot with the most contrast. So that's what we will
be trying to achieve with our monk here. And you know what? Let's name him. So Google Chinese name generator and let's see, male names here. Su, that's nice and simple. So audience, this is Su,
Su, this is audience. Now where were we? Oh, questions. Second question that's
good to ask yourself when lighting a brand new scene is, what is your relationship
to the character? In what way do we want to portray him? Well, that is going to be different in each scenario of course. In this first example, let's
make something pretty common, something you can see in
commercials, model photo shoots or movie scenes that want
to achieve some calmness and general lack of tension. So for that, I first ensured
that I have some pretty neutral composition, like it's
something you see here, 70 millimeter lens, no roll, I also used a so-called high key lighting, which is basically a very
bright setup that fills your scene with light. The opposite of that would
be a low key scenario, which is much more dramatic
and which we will be talking about pretty much
in the rest of the video. These various camera settings,
lighting and color decisions are in fact the third
question you will do well to think about when making your shots. And helping you choose and
understand the right ones for your artistic goal is
what this video is all about. For our purposes now, I
made my environment bright, for example, within an HDRI
like this which you can download from HDRI Haven or another
good site is Openfootage.net. This gives us a nice base for lighting and really if you are
lighting with a high key setup or a bright outdoor scene,
you should always consider using an HDRI and really
take your time choosing it, rotating it around to find a
lighting angle you really like. This will then influence
everything you do afterwards. Now it's time to start
lighting with some lamps. Let's start with this very soft key light, you've heard me talk about light types in the previous video,
so now very quickly, key light is usually the most
prominent light in your scene revealing the character we are lighting. Depending on the position
of the key light, we can achieve many different
lighting conditions, but inevitably, we also create
dark shadows on the face and the body which we then
fill with a fill light if we want, of course. We don't have to as you
will soon see for yourself. And then there is also a
back light that you use to separate your character
from the background and give it that nice
highlight on the edges. Again, depending on the
back light position, you achieve various effects. If it goes from one side, it is a rim, if it goes from the top, it
gives the character a halo and all this, we can use for
achieving different moods. So back to our first example
here, to achieve the softness of this key light, I made the size bigger. The bigger the size,
the softer is the result and vice versa. This softness allowed me to
have a less dramatic result with less shadows in the face. Also, the stop light
accentuates the cheeks here, which often looks nice
and that's why it's used for beauty photo shoots. I could have easily
chosen area light for this or even point light
though both would give me slightly different results and besides, spotlight is usually the
least performance heavy light. So spotlight it is with a
bigger size and edge softness and white color with a tiny bit of warmth for that good fill. Then I went in and
placed another soft light below the character filling
all the shadows that formed on his face due to the key light. I made it an area light
this time to make it softer because it's coming from a larger area. This way, we achieved that nice glowy fill and filled the face completely. Finally, I added another soft light, and I think you recognize
the pattern by now, and this soft light, I have
placed behind him to the top separating him from the
background as I mentioned. This soft big back light
achieved a nice glow to his hair and if you want, you can
make it slightly colder to combine it with a warmer key light. Human eye just loves complimentary colors. Then of course there are
some settings you can tweak in the rendering tab, I've
talked about most of these in the previous video,
so now just quickly, you can activate this ambient occlusion and raise it like this. Also, sending a bloom
helps with these glints. Screen space reflections
are not that important here, but raising the resolution
of the shadows will help with the result as well. One more thing I've done here
is to turn on the soft shadows to obviously make my shadows more soft. And throughout the rest of this video, I generally left the
settings as they are now. Finally, I added a fog
element to the scene as well, one that we've learned how to create in the previous cinematic
video here on CG Boost. So if you're unsure about the settings, you can watch that one. Also as a final touch, I
added this large spotlight to the background, illuminating it lightly through the window so that
it's not just a boring wall. Shadows help with that because
shadows make everything less boring since they
add contrast and texture. As a last touch, I
imported this dust texture, plugged it into the base color
emission and alpha socket, in this way, you get
dust element in the air, very cheap, very fast. By the way, if you have some
moving video of a dust element, you can add it in as well. Same setup and it works. And there you have it. First scenario done and
now you know how to light your own beauty commercial in Blender. Now for the second
example, let's do something much more dramatic. We wanna crank up the so
called lighting ratio, which means the contrast between
our dark and light areas. Low light ratio means
there is little contrast between the lightest and the
darkest part of the scene while high light ratio
is all about contrasts. Right off the bat, you
can see that our character is standing in a much
more dynamic position at least compared to the last case, I placed him in the middle
of the room and positioned the camera so that it's almost
on the same level as him, only very slightly below
him, which means we will feel tiny little inferior towards him. But not too much, just so that
Su feels more cool than us. Just look at him, his face, he enjoys it. Now you may notice I'm
not using any HDRI here, just plain old RGB
channel with a great color in the world surface shader. While the darker and more
dramatic we get with the scenes, the more I actually like to light just with my available lights,
not with the environment. For night scenes, I actually
only like to use HDRIs if I have scenes with a
lot of reflective materials in which the surrounding
environment would be reflected, which I don't have here. So we shall make our life easier by having just this gray environment
as a background. And since this time I'm
showing the window back here, I decided to add an image behind
it with our landscape here. As you can see, you can do
quite a lot with just images for backgrounds,
especially if you plug them into the emission shader because then, they start
lighting the scene as well. Immediately, this feels
more spacious like we are in some temple on a mountain. That's probably because there
is a mountain in the image. Also fog, you notice from
the previous cinematic video I've made, if you just make an object and plug a principle volume
shader into the volume while making the density very
low, this fog will allow us to fill the scene a bit with it and have very nice light streaks. So let's try it. The first light I added
was actually the background because I wanted to
have some light streaks back on the wall. I don't usually use sun
lamps in my Eevee scenes, I find the effect of sun
lamp in this real time engine to be a bit harsh and
sometimes problematic when it comes to shadows. Instead, I just make really,
really intense spotlights, but not in this case because
I wanted to have these shadows back here real straight, which
I would not really achieve with some spotlight that are
usually much, much smaller. You can see that the
sunlight already illuminates Su a little bit, but I
decided to actually add one more proper key light this time, using a very bright
spotlight behind the window. Again, I wanted to use
the shadow play here, that's always a nice
idea to shine your lights through some objects,
vegetation or windows, thus always achieving
more dramatic effect. Another useful tip, this
type of key lighting when the light is most intense
on the side of the face, opposite from the camera,
it's called short lighting or also reverse lighting. Well if we shone the light
on the side of the face close to us, it would be
called broad lighting. Since we want a more dramatic effect, let's go with the reverse one. And while we're at it, let's
also mention that this type of key light, that strong raised up coming from the front of the character is sometimes called paramount
light by the movie studio, Paramount, which going
through its movie production. You will know it by this distinct shadow called also butterfly shadow
forming below the nose. And it also accentuates the cheekbones, that's why it was often used in old movies to make famous actresses more beautiful. Then if we move the light
slightly to the side, we get loop lighting,
indicated by this looped shadow under the nose. Moving key light to the side
is actually a more modern way to light your characters. Also, warm orangy color
will be best for us since we want to simulate
a late afternoon sun. Just careful, don't go too
yellow because yellow by itself symbolizes instability and even insanity. Oh, and also we can
immediately see that the fog is taking effect here and we
have very nice light streaks coming from the window. To finish off the basic
lighting, I have added a spotlight here slightly
behind the character with bluish color and a
small radius for hard effect and also something that
I haven't mentioned yet, you can raise this specular value here. This way, everything
glints a little bit more. And yes, you are breaking
physical correctness with messing around with this,
but it's computer graphics. And Su is not a real human after all, so why not bend a few
rules while we're at it? Let's remember one rule
we shouldn't break though, it's called motivated
lighting and it means we shouldn't make up lights
that don't make sense in the scene. For example, if we had a
green light coming from underneath him, that
would be silly of course. However, our lights here are
coming one from the window, two from the side of the
room where theoretically there could be another window
through which a skylight could come through. And look, there is a window,
so it all makes sense now. I actually remember
someone posting a comment to the previous cinematic
video saying something like, aha, good lighting means more lights then. I'd like to react to that now though because it's not really so. In fact, good lighting means
achieving a great result with the least amount of lights possible and you can see here with just few lights, we have quite a nice result already, but we can go a little further. Here, I have a collection
called extra lights. You can see I did not add
fill light here and I'm not too sure whether it's needed. However, if I'll show
you this extra fill here, let me turn this on, you can
see, it fills the area here, illuminating some of the
nasty shadows in his face. I actually made it so that
this light only illuminates the face not too much more
by lowering the cone angle and adding softness to it, with or without, I don't know, it's up to your preferences really, which is the awesome thing about lighting. It is an art form, so
it's not all set in stone, you can experiment, be creative
and have your own style. And by style, I mean little
decisions like this mostly. Another little decision
is setting a soft light that slightly illuminates
the area on the right side and also the ground like
there really is a skylight coming from the window up there. Again, optional but maybe better. And finally, I added a big
area light behind this window to fill the fog with some
more bluish light spill and also to add a bit of light
and shadow to this area here. You can see that if I
deactivate this whole group, it does not really make
too much of a difference, but these are small touches
that always have a chance to improve the overall look. Still remember, filling your
scene with unnecessary lights is not good lighting. Just as before, I added
these transparent textures of floating dust and
also a new texture set up in the very same way,
plugged into the base color, the alpha and the emission. Only this time, it's light race. Slight effect but again, adding to the overall result, I think. And that's it for this
second more dramatic example. But now, let's go even more dramatic. We are now very low with
the camera to indeed feel very little compared to Su here. Also, we have centered the composition to really focus on him and not much else. Let's bring the environment
shader all the way down almost to black. I have left the settings from
the previous scene the same, so I have a fog here
which will again ensure that nice spreading light effect, so very important for dramatic scenes. This in fact will be quite a simple setup, what I want is to create
a very low key lighting, which you can see in
many mysterious scenes in Blockbuster movies. Just have a look at a few here. I will this time, in fact
start with a back light or in this case, it could be
called hair light as well, since it creates this
very strong light rim on the top of his head,
lighting up his hair. You can see an example
of the hair light here. This one's better. I cranked up the specular
power to this light to really bring out the
outline, made the light a bit bigger and also made
the power quite intense. Thanks to the wall metric
shader, it also adds this awesome cone of light. As a matter of fact, this is a
very nice cinematic lighting. If you don't really want to
reveal the character's face, only it's silhouette, you
can even go much darker with the environment shader,
but let's not do it now since this is what we will
focus in the very last example. In fact, let's make it
bluish to get a filling like it's actually a
Moonlight coming from a hole in the ceiling. Nope, this time there is not a hole, but there could be, right? There you have it. When placing this light, be
careful not to go too much above the character, then
you'd be in danger of having this empty eye socket effect. Not the nicest of looks, all
these ghoulish eyes here. Not very flattering as well. No, no, having it back
here will be quite fine. Now let's think about what
sort of other light source could there be? Shaolin monk, monastery, China, night, well how about a torch or a lamp or both? So one light I added, which
basically functions as key light is this orangy light in color of a torch that could possibly hang
on this left side here. I made it a point light
since I wanted it to come out in all directions out of this point here and I pushed it slightly in front of Su to illuminate one half of his face. That gives it a very dramatic
fill and this actually has its name as well, it's
called split lighting. And it effectively divides
the face into light and dark side. So every time you want to
make someone mysterious, you will do well to use it. While we're at it, it's
also worth mentioning another lighting term,
so-called Rembrandt lighting based on the paintings by
the famous Dutch painter who regularly used a
specific lighting scenario where his key light would
be very much to decide but not too much, still
shining over the nose onto the other cheek. There, it would create this
unmistakable light triangle and that's how you know
it's Rembrandt lighting. Another very, very popular
type of lighting this is, especially in movies and in
Hollywood cinematography. But in our case, let's
go with split lighting. Then I just duplicated
this light and put it on the other side right here,
like there is a lamp or candle over here to fill this side as well. This way, I have achieved
a very dramatic effect where the back light is much,
much stronger than the key and the fill, by the way, I didn't want
to have both of these lights down below Su because then it would create the typical campfire
effect, which is creepy, at least too creepy for what
I wanted to achieve here. And also, it reveals too
much of the under chin, which is never a nice place
to see you on a human being, it just makes everyone seem
fat even if he or she is not. Of course I used depth of field, focused on the character's
face to blur out everything that's not needed and if it wasn't enough, I added a spotlight with very low angle to illuminate his face right here. But again, that is completely up to you, that's why it's in the
extra lights collection and in this case, I ended up not using this collection at all. Then again, I sprinkled in the
dust texture and here you go, the third dark scenario was done. Wonderful! So we tried some dramatic set
up, some mysterious setup, but we can go darker still. In fact this time,
something a little evil. There are times when you want
to make some of your bad guys look a little twisted. Sure, everybody probably
knows that famous bad guys are either hidden in shadows
or completely lit by red light to get that extra juicy evilness in there, but that's actually not
entirely what I have in mind for this one. Already as you can see, I have
a pretty intense camera angle placed directly below the character with a slightly lower focal
length and I rotate it on y-axis to give it that
unnatural eerie fill. You can see his towering above us, making him feel overwhelming. What I also did, I took
the world surface shader and tinted it slightly
towards dark greens. I know this is a dark night
and that should be bluish or greenish, well I admit
this is where I allowed myself to go in a little bit more
fantastical direction, pushing the colors to be more cartoony. Still this greenish
tint is actually awesome to instantly make people feel unwell. That's for example, one of
the reasons why most of Matrix is tinted green. Just to justify this tint a
little, I added the green slits to the window, like there
is a see-through glass or thick paper. Also, I have the fog here
again, I can play with its color and emission color and
then also some lights. Now to achieve that proper
and easy evil result I want, I decided to combine red and green. So the first light I added was
this very intense back light. It's always nice to silhouette
your evil characters with red color like you
see here for example, but this example is also
red when compared to let's say this one. Do you see the distinct
effect this combination of red and green gives you? More sickening, and
that's what we are after. Of course not always
do get such an effect, it very much depends on what
shade of red or green you use. For example here, it's combined
with pink and that gives you more of a feminine feeling, but again, combined with something a little twisted. You would hardly look at
this character lit like this and say, yeah, she's completely okay. To capitalize on this look,
we can add a spotlight to the opposite side of
the character to act as rim with a green tint, higher
specularity and not too large a radius to make it harder. That gives a very nice
contrast to the first red rim we created and helps
achieve that sickly feeling. Finally, I decided to add
a small angle spotlight on the opposite side of his face just to get rid of these ugly
shadows that make his eyes bulge and also at split lighting,
dividing his face to two, as I mentioned, it's a powerful
tool for all mysterious and dark lighting setups. The last optional light I've
added was this little point light down here with a
distance lower to reach only to his hand and the thigh
and mostly illuminate just the ground here to give
more justification to the fill, maybe there's some kind
of lamp lying there. One little note, you can even go in and tint dust the particles
to a certain color. Just take an RGB curves
node and plug it in between the emission socket
and raise for example the green value. And there it is, even with
this otherwise cute shelling monk Su, with a proper pose expression, camera angle and lighting
setup, you can create a real movie villain, no problem. In this fifth scenario, let's
try out some other techniques we have mentioned but not yet worked with. So for example in this scene,
I wanted to show you that a very low focal length
at about 15 millimeter, which is the lowest number
we have worked with in this or the previous cinematic
video, does not necessarily mean that the composition is
going to look ominous. Will it? Yes, because still you have
this very wide angle view unlike anything our eye
is actually perceiving. But that does not automatically
mean that the viewer will feel uneasy. You can see that once we
have placed the camera above our character, it
can actually feel dynamic. And since we can see quite
a lot, not just a narrow cut of the whole scene, this in
fact gives us a nice overview of the environment around him, making you feel positive
about this composition. This way, I can even
afford to roll the camera quite significantly to about
seven degrees and still it gives you more of a
dynamic feeling rather than weird uneasy feeling. Compare it now to a
similarly set up camera, but from below of our characters. See, the placement of the camera
below or above the eye line matters quite a bit. I already mentioned it, what I
go for here is a dynamic shot where you can see the
character quite clearly as well as his stuff here. Also, I don't want an
extreme colors this time, I just want the character
to pop from his surroundings and I don't care about the
environment behind him too much. So to divide him from the background, I've added strong heart
spotlight behind him, slightly to the side and above. This way, his body is
highlighted as well as the stuff. And then, I added another spot
this time bigger and softer filling the opposite side of
his face with bluish sky color. I restricted the distance to
not hit this pillar back here since that would detract
our attention from Su. Finally, I added another fill
light, this time in form of a point light, I put it in
front of him and slightly above. This filled the nasty dark regions. And again, I restricted the
distance to only illuminate him. I used point light mostly
because it gives me this nice radial glow in the
corner of the image here. Actually you can now see here
a very interesting technique called checkerboard lighting. Basically just like a checkerboard, it works with alternating
dark and bright regions. So we have a very bright
top part of his body with a very dark background
and a dark bottom part, contrasted with a very bright floor. And since the human eye
is drawn to contrast, as I mentioned, this helps
Su to stand out a lot. I mean, it's not just
nice to know these names for these techniques, it actually means that you know what you're
doing and you don't just arrive at these results by an accident. In the extra light folder,
I actually have one more bluish light like this, a
spotlight that I put above him and behind him and it just nicely mixes with the yellow glow. Also in this scenario,
since I wanted something less dramatic, we're actually
lighting with the broadside key light focusing on the side of the face that is closer towards us. I then again added some nice
dust in the air and that was it for this scenario. One last lighting set up
remains and this time, let's get very mysterious. This will be the most extreme
of the cases we've shown so far, however, it also
might be the simplest to make if you know what you're after. What I wanted to achieve was
a very mystical atmospheric and supernatural shot. Often these silhouette lighting
setups are used in movies, especially for [her
Flakes] to hide someone, even if they're already in the shot. You can just show the
shape of the character but nothing else. And in the process, you can
create some very nice dusty light streaks we all love. So how to do it in Blender? Well, first off, I turned a
world surface shader color almost all the way to black,
which ensures that we don't get any unneeded fill so we
can just work with lights. Then, and this is the key to
this whole lighting scenario, I took this fog with
principled volume shader and increased the density to
0.1 to make it much more dense as well as the [NSL Tropic] to 0.8. And that is exactly why
I was able to achieve these beautiful light shafts
immediately when I added this single spotlight to the scene. Now let's have a look at the light, it has quite a lot of power
to it and most notably, it is purple pinkish tint. Mysticism, science fiction,
and yes, even eroticism, all of these are usually
symbolized by this sort of a color. Also, especially in these types of shots, it even matters where you put the light. If you put it down below, it
is a more mysterious effect, but still something earthly. Well, a glow such as this
behind the character's head feels almost divine and saintly. Of course, this would
work better with white or orangy light, but that's
not what we're after now. We will leave it purple
and put it down here since I don't want it
to be too supernatural. After all, he's just floating in the air, so yeah, almost normal. Truth is at this point, I
didn't really want to add any more lights. I had some extra lamps
set up here, for example, this orangy left fill
made with soft spotlight and also the smaller spot fill
focused only on Su's face, which is great technique to reveal just the eyes of a character. But in this case, he has his
eyes closed and I find it much more powerful to just
have to silhouette here with a little hint of the face. Thanks to the not completely
dark world surface shader. So let me hide these
extra lights and instead focus on something else
because we can do much more this time, using 3D objects
and textured image planes. So in this overlay, I have
some hidden collections full of visual awesomeness. For example, I added these little spheres to break up the boring
background of the character. Little effect, but already
something catching light back here, and it's always a good thing. Proceeding with this idea,
I added cubes in front of the spotlight to add some
variety to these light shafts. See, a very simple
technique but so powerful. If you want to make
things feel more natural, an evenness is everything. Next, I added the dust
particles you already know, maybe turn their emission a little lower so they don't shine that much. In another texture set
up in the very same way, I added these fog overlays
and put them in space in between the pillars. Adding fog, it's always so awesome. And by the way, I added one
above Su's head as well. He is apparently being so
mysterious that he is steaming. Finally to push the levitation
theme of this image, I decided to add some floating stones. Luke had those, so why not Su? And just like that, this
very dramatic mystical scene was created directly in Blender. And I think that now is a good
time to appreciate the fact that we've been able
to do all this in Eevee in real time without
any waiting whatsoever. I still remember a time
when each light added meant a long wait for another test render. These days, it's all too easy to forget that this awesome realtime workflow is not a matter of course. So five seconds of appreciation, please. And with that, we
successfully went through six scenarios for these
extremely different types of cinematic lighting setups. Hope you like them. And there you have it, my friends. I hope this video was useful
for all of you starting out in 3D graphics and maybe
even the more experienced among you picked a trick or
two on how to light your scenes and how to work with Eevee. Again, I realized that this
was a very quick overview of the tools that I used when building my lighting scenarios,
but if you're still unsure about Blender, you can
of course jump right in. I mean not only it's
free but as I mentioned at the beginning, at cgboost.com, Zach has a free introductory
course for it as well. You just have to sign up at CG Boost site and then if you download these resources, you will also get the project
files for today's lesson so you can try out your own compositions and lighting setups. Also, I was able to very quickly texture the whole environment
with substance painter for which surprise, surprise, I have a course at CG Boost as well. So you can learn this
piece of software too. If you go through the provided
blend files for this video and create your own lighting
setups, definitely let us know, just send us a message or
share it at social media using the tech that you can see below. Until next time, I wish you a
wonderful time and as always, stay creative, my friends. Martin out. (sinister tone)
