Lighting for Beginners! 💡 (Blender Tutorial)

in this beginner tutorial i will show you how to do lighting in blender so there are three main types of lighting that you can use to light your 3d scenes and those types of lights are the object lights material lights and world lights and i'm going to go over how to use each type of lighting in this video and i will also have time stamps in the video description to break up the video to the different parts if you'd like to just check out a certain part but if you'd like a complete introduction to lighting and blender then i would recommend watching the whole video and i'm also going to go over how lighting is different between the cycles rendering engine and the ev rendering engine and i'll show you how to make lighting look more realistic in blender ev and then at the end of this video i'm going to go over how to do a basic three-point lighting setup to this sci-fi mech robot model that i've created and i have a complete tutorial series on how to create this sci-fi mech robot if you'd like to check that out i'll have the link in the description and if you'd like to help support me and this channel to help me keep on creating blender tutorials and blender content i will have links in the description to my gumroad store and patreon page and on my gumroad store and patreon page you can get the project files for my different tutorials you also get access to other 3d models and my procedural materials and other blender content on my gumroad and patreon and a great way to help support me here on youtube is by checking out the youtube memberships so if you click right down there on the join button that's next to the subscribe button if you join my memberships you'll be getting some cool perks on youtube as well as supporting the channel each month and if you enjoy this video and you'd like to give me a little tip you can also use the super thanks feature here on youtube and i do appreciate your support now during most of this video i am going to be using the cycles render engine because the cycles render engine is much more realistic so the cycles render engine is a ray traced engine and so it actually calculates how the light would look in real life whereas the ev rendering engine is a real-time engine so it's basically like a game engine so the lighting isn't super accurate it isn't super realistic now evie does render much faster the performance is better but it's not as realistic so i will be using cycles in most of this video but i will go over how the lighting is different in blender evie and i'll also go over how to make the lighting and ev look more realistic so to start off i'm going to show you the four object lights that you can use to light your scenes so to add the lights you can press shift a or you can also go right up here to the add menu so i'm going to press shift a and then i'm going to go right down here to light and you can see there are four different light objects so the first one that i'm going to add is the point light so i'll click on point and then i'm just going to press the g key and bring this light over and then to actually preview this in the viewport i'm going to hold down the z button and move my mouse up into the rendered view and so this way we can actually preview the render in the viewport now these light objects in blender can be transformed pretty much just like any regular object in blender so you can press g to grab and that's going to move the light around you can also press s to scale although that's not actually going to do anything scaling the light and you can rotate the light in this case this is a point light so you can't actually see it rotating because it's just a circle but you can rotate lights with the r key and then if you want to duplicate a light again just like any other object in blender you can press shift d and shift d is going to duplicate the light and now you can see we have two lights and just like any other object in blender you can animate the location of the light i'm not going to go over that in this video if you'd like to check out my tutorial on animation for beginners i'll have a link in the description to that but these light objects can be animated just like animating any other object in blender now if you select the light you can click right over here on the object data properties and this is going to go to the light settings now right up here on the top you can actually change the type of light so even though i pressed shift a went right here to light and added a point light i can instead change this just by clicking right here so i can have the point light the sunlight the spotlight and the area light and i'm going to go over all these lights later in the video first let's go over the point light so this point light basically acts like a light bulb because it shoots light out from all different sides so it doesn't just shoot light out in one direction it shoots light out from all different sides and so this is very useful if you want to get some lighting that looks like maybe a light bulb or some other light that shoots light out from all areas not just one angle now right here on the settings i can turn up the power and turning up the power here is going to change the strength so i'm just going to turn this way up i could even type in a number like maybe 500 and now you can see this is much brighter and it's lighting up the scene and then of course i can press g to grab and move this around and you can see blenders actually calculating the light accurately and you can also change the color of the light with this setting right here so if you just click on this color tab you can change it to any color that you want so for instance i could maybe change this to a blue color and then it does look a bit darker now so i could turn the power up even more to maybe like 1 000 maybe even like a 3000 so it's even brighter now this radius setting right here is going to change the light size so if you make this light very very small you can see the shadows are very very sharp and that's because the light is coming out from a smaller point and i could even turn this all the way down to a radius of zero and now if you look here at the shadows from this robot the shadows are extremely sharp they're kind of unrealistically sharp but if i turn the radius up that is going to make the light look much more soft and you can see now the shadow behind the robot is very blurred so a good way to think about this is to think about a super sunny day where there's no clouds in the sky and maybe it's like noon or the early afternoon and the sun is very bright when you're outside if you look down at your shadow the shadow is usually very sharp however on a cloudy overcast day when there's lots of clouds everything is much more gray and so the shadows are much more soft so if i turn this up it's going to make the light bigger so the lighting has more surface area to come out of and so you can see that the robot's shadow is very grayed out and it actually is pretty hard to see whereas if you turn the radius much smaller there is just one little single point of space where the lighting is coming out of so the shadows are extremely sharp and then if for some reason you don't want the object to cast a shadow you can also just check mark the cast shadow button that's going to get rid of the shadow but for most things i would leave this on because you can see that actually looks very unrealistic it doesn't actually look like the robot is standing here on the plane because there isn't any shadow so now let's delete this light and i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to go here to the next light which is the sunlight so as you may have guessed in the name the sunlight acts just like sun lighting so i can press the r key to rotate the sunlight and that is going to rotate where the sun is pointing and you can see the shadow is moving and then i can also turn the strength up if i want to make this brighter so i might turn this up to maybe like a four and then of course i can change the color so if i wanted to make this look a little bit more like sunlight maybe i could turn this to a very slight yellow color and then just like with the point light there also is this angle right here so the angle is going to determine how sharp the lighting is so if i turn the angle way up now you can see that shadow is very subtle and you're barely able to see it at all or if you turn the angle way down now the shadow is super super sharp i would at least have the angle turned up to a small amount just so there's a little bit of a blur but you could turn that angle up if you wanted to and then of course there is the cast shadow button as well but for most things i would leave the cast shadow on now something to note about the sunlight is that it doesn't actually matter where the sunlight is the rotation is going to change where the light is pointing but the location isn't going to change how the light looks you can see if i move this light really far away the lighting isn't actually going to change and that is because this is a sunlight so what the sunlight does is it shoots light on the scene from all positions and it shoots it from the angle which the light is pointing so even if i put this light underneath the plane it's still going to shine light down onto this robot and that does make sense for sun lighting because if you're outside maybe in a big field and it's a sunny day there's going to be even light over the entire surface because the sun is so big and it's really far away and so it's shining down on the earth and so there's even lighting all over the surface so this light works really well if you are doing outdoor lighting so i'm going to delete this light now let's press shift a i'm going to go down here to light and let's go to the next one which is the spotlight so the spotlight acts just like a theater light or a stage light so just like any other light i can rotate it and then i can also turn up the power here to make it stronger so let's just turn this power up quite a bit and then i can also change the color so maybe i'll make this kind of like a blue color so you can see this light acts just like a stage light or maybe a searchlight or a light in a theater so this light only emits light from where the cone is so if i hold down the z button go back into the solid view you can see this light has a cone with a circle and it's only going to shine light out from this area so this light will also work really well for something like a flashlight so if you're adding a flashlight into your scene and you just want the light to come out from one area you could use this light because the light is only going to shine out from where this cone is and you can scale this light if you want to make the circle bigger so i can press s to scale that's going to scale the entire light up now you can also change the cone size if you open up the beam shape right here so i can just change the spot size that's going to make it much bigger so if i want to make it a really big cone i can do that or i could also just make this really small so you've probably seen on some flashlights that you can actually change the size of the beam so this would be very useful if you want to make like a flashlight with a very small beam now the spotlight also has this radius setting and if i turn this setting up it's going to give more of a fade to the edge of the light and then if you want to make the edge of the light even more smooth you can also go right down here to the beam shape and you can turn the blend up and as i turn the edge up you can see it's going to add even more of a fade on the edge of the light or if i wanted the light to be very sharp i could turn the blend down and i could also turn the radius down and now that edge is going to be sharper and sharper and then there's also this show cone button and this is very useful if you want to be able to visually see where the light is going to hit on the objects so i could click on the show cone and then i can hold down the z button and go back to the solid view and i can now just rotate this light around i can scale it so in the viewport it's going to visually show me what objects it's going to hit and then just like with all the other lights there is also the cast shadow button if for some reason you don't want to see any of the shadows now a really cool feature of the spotlight is that you could actually have the spotlight project images now this won't work in the ev rendering engine it'll only work in the cycles engine but let me show you how to do this so what we need to do is we need to go right down here and we need to click on the use nodes button so make sure you have the light selected and go here to the object data properties and click on use nodes because we actually need to use the shader nodes for the light and then what i can do is i can move my mouse right up here and i can click and drag when the crosshair appears and i'm going to split this window and then i can click right here to change the editor type and i'm just going to change this to the shader editor so i'm just going to go into the rendered view just to preview this in the rendered mode and then i can press shift a and shift a is going to bring up the add menu and i'm going to search for an image texture i can just drop the image texture right here and then i can click on open to open up an image and then i will be using this free image right here from pixabay i'll have the link in the description if you'd like to download this or you can use any other image file so i'm just going to click on it and then click on open image and then what i can do is i can just take the color and i can plug this into the emission so instead of using this emission color right now this is just using a single color but i can instead plug this image texture into the color now you're still not able to see the image that's because i need to press shift a and i need to search for a texture coordinate node so just add the texture coordinate node we're going to stick this right here after this image and then we want to take the normal we want to pull out a wire and put that into the vector of the image and now you can actually preview this image so it is actually projecting this image with light and then you can see the image is a little bit blurry so i'm going to turn the radius all the way down to zero and now it's just projecting a perfectly clear image now i don't want it to repeat the image so i can click on this color here go to the repeat and i'm just going to click on the clip so now it's only showing the corner of the image and so i want to move the image over so to move the image over i can press shift a i can go here to the search and i can search for a mapping node and we're just going to put the mapping node right here between the texture coordinate and the color and then i can use the mapping node to move the texture around so i'm going to move around the y location so bring that over and i'm holding down the shift key to make my movements more sensitive and then i can also drag like the x value bring that over and then if i wanted to i could click drag down and then i can drag back and forth here on the scale and i can make the scale a bit smaller so now that i've centered the image i can like make the radius bigger kind of blur that a little bit i could also go right over here to the strength and i could turn the strength up to make it brighter and so now we get this really cool effect with different colors because you can see right here there's kind of a lighter color and there's like a blue color so this is a really cool effect of actually projecting images as your lighting and you can only do this with the spotlights so this is super useful and you can get some very cool lighting results all right so i'm just going to bring my mouse right up here when the crosshair appears and i can click drag over and then let go when the my mouse turns into that arrow and that's going to close that panel and then i can just press x and i'm just going to click on delete to delete that light so let's press shift a and i'm going to go right here to the last light which is the area light so let's just add the area light in and again just like any other light you can rotate it and you can scale it and you can move it around so the area light is basically a plane it's basically a flat plane and it only shoots light out from one side so you can see there's that line down there and that is which side the light is pointing so again just like any other light i can turn this power up and that's going to make it brighter and then i can also change the color so maybe i'll make it like an orangey color so if i rotate this light over it's not going to shine light out from this side of the plane it's only going to shoot out light from one side of the plane and i do really like the area lights the area lights are definitely one of my favorite lights now you can also change the shape of the area light so right over here again if you go to the object data properties there is the shape settings the default one is square but if you click right here you could instead change it to rectangle and if you change it to rectangle you have an x and a y value and so you could make a very long light kind of like a beam of light and i really like using a rectangular shape if i want to create a rim light so we'll go into this later in this video but a rim light is basically that light which is on the very side of the character and it kind of pops the character out of the background and adds just a little light there so i like using lights like this if i want to make a rim light or if you just want to have a very thin light and then you can also click right here on the shape and you could change it to the disk instead and so this is just going to be a circle and just like the other lights if the size is very small there is light coming out of a smaller area and so that shadow is going to be much more sharp whereas if i turn the size up there is more surface area for the light to shine and so the object's shadows are going to be much more soft and then again of course there is the cast shadow button if you want to turn off the shadows and then also right here on the shape there is also an ellipse so the ellipse is just like the disc but you can change the size so i could change the size y and the size x so if you wanted to create a rim light but you wanted the rim light to be more round and smooth you could change it to the ellipse and then just change the size here now the area light also has this beam shape and i can open this up and i can change the spread value and this is going to act kind of similar to the spotlight because if i turn this spread way down now you can see the light is much smaller and it's just shooting out at one area and the area is cut down quite a bit or i could turn the spread up and then it's going to shine out from more areas so basically it's going to change the angle of where the lights are coming out of so if i wanted to get the effect of a search light or maybe a flashlight or maybe even like a little beam of light which is coming through like a doorway which is slightly open i could do something like that and now you can see there are some really cool shadows there behind the robot and there's that cool room light in the back and just like any other values in blender the light values can be animated as well so this isn't an animation tutorial if you want to learn how to do animation in blender i have a beginner tutorial on animation links in the description if you'd like to check that out but you can animate pretty much any value in blender so just to show you i'm gonna like add a keyframe on the power here then i can move the timeline over and then i could turn the power down to zero and then add another keyframe and then if i scrub through the timeline you can see the light is getting darker and darker and you can also animate the color too so maybe i want the color to start out as blue so i could make this a blue color and then add a keyframe and i'm adding a keyframe by pressing the i key with my mouse hovered over the value and then i can just move this over here on the timeline and then i could maybe make this like a red color and then press the i key again to add another keyframe and it is a little bit noisy so it's kind of hard to see that light but it is changing from blue to red now another cool feature of lights that i want to show you is you can actually track lights to an object so if you're moving a light around but you want the light to always be pointed at an object instead of having to manually rotate the light every time you want to point at the object you can instead add an object constraint to tell this light to always be pointing at one object so to do this you can just select the light and then i'm going to click right over here to go to the object constraint properties now right up here you can click on add object constraint and i'm going to go right down here under tracking and i'm going to click on track 2. and then right here on the target setting you can click on the eyedropper and you can click on any object that you want to be tracked to so i'm going to click on the armature and this is the rig for my robot character and it's going to track to that object so if i select the object i can move the object around and you can see the light is following along with it or i can select the light and i can move the light around and you can see the light is always going to follow it i'm going to hold down the z button go back into the solid view just to show you i'm also going to go right over here to the light settings and i'm going to click on show cone so i can now move the light around and it's always going to follow the object or i could also move the object around and if i want to have multiple lights i could select the light and i could press shift d to duplicate and i could move the light over and you can see the light is always going to follow the object because it has the track 2 object constraint so this is super useful if you want to quickly move the lights around but always have the lights follow the objects alright so i'm going to delete these lights and we're going to go on to the second type of light which is the material lights so this is where you actually have a material which is emitting light so if i go into the rendered view you can actually see we already have a few of these and that is this light right here which is on the robot so i have a tutorial series on how to create this robot character and right here we have a red light and so this material is an emission so it is actually emitting light and so you can see there is a little red button there of course that light isn't very bright though but i can press shift a and i'm going to go right here to mesh and i'm going to add a plane but you could really add any object the object just needs to have some faces because if the object doesn't have faces then it doesn't have anywhere to actually emit the light out of so you just need to make sure the object has some amount of faces so i'm going to go back into the rendered view and then on this object here i'm going to click on new to add a new material make sure right over here on the material properties so we've added this new material and i can just rename this to like light one and then right here on the surface i don't want to use the principled shader because i actually want this to be emitting light so i'm going to click on the surface right here and i'm going to change this to the emission so now that it is set to emission it's actually going to emit light and i can turn the strength up to make it brighter and i could also scale this and rotate it and move it around just like any other object and then i could change the color by clicking right here and changing it to a color so let's go with maybe like a sci-fi blue color now these emission lights don't actually work in the ev rendering engine if i click right over here on the render properties i'm going to click here on the render engine and i'm going to change this back to blender ev and you can see that it's not actually emitting light even if i go here to the material properties and turn the strength way up to a really high number it's not actually emitting any light it does appear as though it's bright because it is very white but it's not actually going to emit light now you can sometimes see some reflections like right over here there is some reflections on the robot but it's still not actually emitting light it's just reflecting the bright plane if i change the render engine back to cycles though you can see that now this light is very bright and this is because cycles is a ray traced render engine and so it actually simulates the light realistically but when you're using blender eevee blender ev is a real-time render engine it's basically like a game engine and so it can't actually simulate the light realistically so if you are using blender ev then it's better to just press shift a go right here to light and you could for instance add an area light to replace this light so i could just scale this up rotate it over and then right here over here on the object data properties i could turn the power up and i could make this like a blue color so you can see this light is going to work in blender evie but this light will not now let me just delete this light real quick and i'm going to bring this over here i'm also going to press shift a and i'm going to go right here to mesh and i'm just going to add like a monkey head so this will be a little bit easier to see so if i change this to the cycles render engine you can see this light is very bright and it is lighting up the scene but if i change this back to ev everything is very dark but if i really want to use a material light in blender evie then what i can do is i can actually bake the lighting and baking the lighting will also work for any of these lights as well so it's basically just going to make the light much more realistic in blender eevee so to bake the lighting you're going to press shift a and you're going to go right down here to light probe and then you're going to add the irradiance volume so this irradiance volume object is going to be used to bake the lighting and blender eevee and make it look more realistic so i'm going to press s to scale i'm just going to scale this object up and i want the smaller cube to be covering the entire scene and i could also scale this down on the z-axis if i wanted to so just make sure that that smaller cube is covering all the objects because that is the part in the 3d scene that it's going to bake the lighting now if you click right over here on the object data properties there are some different settings and there is also this resolution right here and this little dot grid inside the irradiance volume is the amount of resolution so instead of changing it to four i could click right here on the top value drag down and then let go and i could maybe just change this to like an eight so that's going to double the resolution and that's going to be totally fine for baking the scene so if i hold down the z button go up into the rendered view you can see it's not looking very good this light is very bright but it's not lighting up the objects so what i'm going to do is click right over here to the render properties and then make sure you're in blender eevee when you're doing this if you want to bake the lighting you're going to scroll down here and you're going to open up the indirect lighting tab and then right here you can click on bake indirect lighting and so it's going to bake the lighting and it's going to look much more realistic now you can still see it doesn't look super realistic there still are a few issues here and there but it does look much more realistic now if you move any objects around or move the light around then you're probably going to want to rebake it because if i move the objects around sometimes you can have some weird issues here and also if you move the light around you can see if even if i move the light way back it's not going to change how it looks and that is because we just need to rebake it so let me just move this back over here maybe i'll put this up at the top and i could click on the color here and i could maybe make this like a red color instead and you can see the bake isn't updating so we just need to rebake it so again we're just going to go right over here to the render properties and we can just click on bake indirect lighting again and this time it's going to bake it again and now that looks realistic because the light is up here and it's pointed down and it is a red color so if you're trying to get more realistic lighting in blender ev then this irradiance volume does work really well but if you're trying to get super realistic lighting then i would definitely recommend using the cycles render engine because the cycles render engine is much more realistic and you don't need the irradiance volume the cycles render engine is automatically going to simulate realistic lighting so now i'm going to be showing you the third type of lighting which is the world lighting so it's the lighting which is way back here in the world and to add the world lighting you can just click right here on the globe icon and that's going to go to the world properties now if i hold down the z button go up into the rendered view you can see right now i don't have a world so everything is fully black so i can just click on new right here to add a new world and when you add a new world it's going to be very gray on default so everything is just gray in the background so that doesn't look very good to make this brighter though i can turn this strength value up and then i can also change the color by clicking right here and i can change this color now instead of just using one single color you could also use textures in the sky so what you can do is you can click right here on this yellow dot next to the color and you could choose something else instead of just the color so for instance you could use like a magic texture this is just a procedural magic texture you could also click right here and do like a procedural noise texture or also i could click right here and change this to a wave texture so you can add different textures into the world background and the world lighting also uses nodes as well so i could just split the window or i could also click right over here to go to the shading tab and in the shading tab i have the 3d space right over here and then i have the shader nodes right here so right now it's just going to show us the object nodes but instead of previewing the object nodes i can click right here on this object and i can change this to world and this is going to show us the actual world nodes so here is our background and then here's the strength the background and here is also the wave texture that we added so i could unplug this and you can see right now it is just the default color but if i didn't want to use this if i want to actually use a texture i could plug the color in it to the color right there and now we can actually preview a texture in the background world now blender also has a really cool built-in sky texture so if you want to add this in you can click right here on the yellow dot and you can go right over here and you can change this to the sky texture and then you can see it's updated right here in the shader nodes you could also press shift a and search for the sky texture and then you could just plug the sky texture in now it is way too bright right now so i'm going to turn the strength value to just like a 1 so it is less strong so now if i look around here on the 3d space it is giving us a basic sky texture in the background and there's still also some different settings you can play around with so there's actually three types of skies you could use this one right here this one's kind of more of a gray one and with this one here you can also drag around this circle here so you can drag around the sphere and that's going to change where the light is pointing and if you drag this way over here to the corner you can see this kind of looks more like an evening scene or a sunset and there's also this one right here and this one looks a little bit different as well this one definitely looks more like a sunset and i could also drag this around so if i kind of drag this towards us then it looks more like daytime and then there also is one more type of sky this one right here and this one has some really cool settings so it has air and dust and ozone and so this is pretty cool if you want to make your own custom sky so this sky texture is pretty cool but it's actually not very realistic because with a real sky you're going to have the sun you're going to have different reflections like maybe buildings or trees and things you're also going to have different clouds and lots of different colors and so this is where hdri lighting comes in so what an hdri lighting is is it's an image which is taken in the real world and it is a 360 degree image so when people are creating hdris they sometimes use these special cameras which can take images from all 360 degrees and then they will often use a program to put the images together or to create hdris with a single camera there's also different programs which will allow you to snap different photos all the way around in a 360 degree angle and then you can put all the images together and create a 360 image and because hdri is our images taken from the real world they are very realistic and with hdri lighting you're also going to get lots of nice realistic lighting and reflections which will make your scenes more realistic so i'm going to show you how to add in hdris so what i'm going to do over here on the world is i'm just going to click on this exit button and this is going to get rid of the world and then i can just click on new here to add a new world now to add in an hdri you can just click right here on this yellow dot and you can go right here to environment texture and then you can just click on the open button to open up an hdri now you may have heard about this website before but if you haven't there's an amazing website called polyhaven.com and this website has tons of very high quality free hdris so i'll have a link in the description to poly haven if you'd like to check out their hdris and these are just a few of the hdris that i've downloaded from their website now the hdri that i'm going to be using for an example is this small cave on poly haven so the link is in the description if you'd like to download this or you can just download any hdri that you want to use now right over here on the download settings i like to use the 1k version and why i use the 1k version is because this is going to be the smallest file size and if the file size is smaller then blender will actually render the scene faster and it also won't use up as much of your computer ram when it's rendering now if you choose the 1k version the image might look a little bit blurry or a little bit pixelated but for most renders i don't actually show the hdri in the background because i have something else in the background and i just use the hdri for the lighting so you could download a higher quality version but if you downloaded something like the 16k it's going to take longer to render and it's going to use up more of your computer ram and then also i usually just use the hdr version but you could also use the exr if you wanted to i usually just use hdr and you can just click on the download button to download the hdri so back in my file browser in blender i'm just going to select the small cave hdr and then i'm going to click on open image and you can see the hdri in the background and if you look around here you can actually see the image and if you zoom into the robot you can definitely notice that this is much more realistic because if i navigate right over here you can see here is the cave entrance and where the cave entrance is there is more light coming in and so it is brighter and so right here on this side of the robot the robot is lit up but then the robot is darker kind of back here in the back of the cave and there's also lots of different colors and reflections because you can see little bits of yellow you can also see little bits of green and little bits of brown all over the robot because in the real world there's lots of different objects with different colors and different lighting and so there isn't just going to be one color there's going to be lots of different little colors so hdri lighting is really an essential for photo realism so i pretty much always use hdris for all my lighting because it is so realistic and of course you can combine an hdri with other lights so you could use this hdri in the background but then you could also press shift a you could go right here to light and maybe i'm going to add an area light i could rotate the area light over i could turn the power up and make this brighter maybe even scale it up and then i could make it like a yellow color and so now we have a combination between this object light and the hdri lighting now something that's very cool about blender is that you can actually create your own hdris within blender so if you've created a 3d scene you can actually render out a 360 image within blender and so you're basically creating an hdri out of your 3d scene and if you'd like to learn how to create your own hdris and blender then i created a dedicated tutorial on how to create your own hdris so i will have the link in the description to that tutorial if you'd like to check it out and i also have a free download to the hdri that i created in blender and just to show you i'm going to add in that hdri so you could add in the hdri right over here by just clicking on the file icon to select a different hdri or you could also do it right over here in the world shader nodes so i'm just going to click right here on this file icon to change the file and then here is the hdri that i created in blender and again i have a tutorial on how to create your own hdris with the link in the description so i'm just going to select this image and then click on open image and then i can hold down the z button and move my mouse up into the rendered view and so if i look around here you can see that this was actually a 3d environment that i created in blender so i used blender's sky texture and then i also added some cubes here and i also added like some monkey heads and then i also added a big bright light here kind of shining down in the sky and of course in the middle and the eyes you can see that it's reflecting the light so if i zoom into the robot's eyes you can see it is reflecting the hdri and it's reflecting that blue color all along the middle of the robot now there's also an amazing blender add-on for getting realistic outdoor lighting and sky lighting and that is the physical starlight and atmosphere add-on and i recently created a dedicated review video on my youtube channel of this add-on so if you'd like to check out my add-on review video i will have the link in the description and in the description i will also have an affiliate link to the add-on on blender market if you'd like to check it out and that is an affiliate link so if you purchase the add-on through that link then i will earn a small commission and that'll help to support me so once you purchase the add-on it's very easy to install in blender's user preferences so once it's installed you can just head right over here to the world properties and you can see there is this physical atmosphere right here so i'm just going to click on the new button to add a new world and then i can just check mark the physical atmosphere add-on and then you can change all the settings right over here in the world properties but you can also press the n key and the end key is going to open up this side panel and you can click on the atmosphere tab right here and there's all the different settings right here so when you turn on the physical starlight and atmosphere add-on it's going to add this sunlight and i can rotate the sunlight around and when i rotate the sunlight around it's actually going to change the time of day and this add-on really is very realistic for getting outdoor lighting and sky lighting and i really love the fact that i can just rotate this sunlight around and it's going to change the time of day so if i wanted to have an evening scene i could just rotate this light over and now we have this really nice evening lighting with the yellow lights or if i want to make it look like noon i could just rotate this light over and now it's going to look like noon lighting and if you continue to rotate the light down more and more you're actually going to be able to start to see some stars and of course you can change all the settings right here on the side panel so you can see there is sun settings there's atmosphere settings there's also the star settings so i could like turn the stars up if i want to see those stars better and there's a bunch of different settings to change the clouds and the ground and other controls and if you'd like to learn more about the add-on then definitely check out my dedicated review video of the add-on where i go into more detail all right so to finish off this tutorial i'm going to be doing a basic three-point lighting setup on this character here and you can of course use any 3d model that you want to use i'm going to be using my sci-fi mech robot from the tutorial series that i created now a three-point lighting setup does work really well for faces or characters or different subjects but if you are doing something like an outdoor scene or maybe like a big landscape or something like that then you may not use a three-point lighting setup and of course you don't have to use a three-point lighting setup when you're lighting scenes i would definitely recommend playing around with the lighting and just kind of seeing what works but a three-point lighting setup is a very great place to start when you are lighting a character or some other subject and i am also going to be using an hdri as well to get realistic lighting and reflections so let's first add in an hdri so i'm going to click right over here to the world properties and then i'm going to click on new here to add a new world and now that we've added a new world you can click right here on the yellow dot next to the color and i'm going to choose the environment texture and then i'm going to click on open to open up an hdri and then i'm going to be using that same hdri that i used earlier in this video so the small cave and i'm going to be using the 1k hdr version and i'll just click on open image so i can now hold down the z button and move my mouse up into the rendered mode now i want the hdri to be a bit less strong so on the strength value right here i'm just going to turn this to like a 0.5 and that way it's still going to help to add more realism but it won't be quite as bright and then also i don't really want to be able to see the cave in the background so to hide the cave in the background i'm going to go right over here to the render properties and i'm going to go right down here and open up the film tab and then right down here you can click on the transparent button and this is going to make the background transparent so it is still there but you just can't see it in the background so in a three-point lighting setup you have the main light which is going to light up the character then you have a secondary light which is going to help to make the shadows a little bit less visible then you're going to have a secondary light and that's going to make the shadows a little bit less dark and then you're also going to have a backlight or a rim light which is going to help to bring the character out of the background and help to see the shape of it a bit better so let's first start with the main light so i'm going to press shift a and let's go right here to light and i am going to use an area light but of course you could use really whatever light you want i'm going to be using an area light though you could also use a plane object with an emission material but i'm going to be using this light right here so i'm going to press g to grab and r to rotate and i'm going to rotate this light up here and i'm going to bring the light over so it is kind of towards the front but also a bit on the side and then i'm going to scale the light up more a bit and then let's click right over here onto the object data properties and we can change the settings of the light so i'm going to turn the power up so it is quite a bit brighter let's turn that up even more maybe to like a 2000 so it is pretty bright and then because this is a sci-fi robot i thought it would be cool to maybe add some sci-fi colors so for this main color right here i'm going to make this like a blue color kind of like a sci-fi blue color for the main light and let's also make it a bit brighter so maybe make it like a 500 i'm actually going to go with a power of 2000 so the light is pretty bright so let's now add a secondary light and this secondary light is going to help to fill the shadows a little bit now we still definitely want shadows because shadows help to show the actual shape of the object if you eliminate the shadows and make everything super bright and blown out then you're not actually able to see the shape of the object very well and it just won't look very realistic and it'll look kind of flat as well so i definitely still want shadows but i do just want to fill in the shadows a little bit so i'm going to press 7 on the numpad and that is going to take me to the top view and i'm actually going to go back into solid view to do this so i'm now going to press shift d that is going to duplicate the light and i'm going to rotate this light over and also i could scale it down a bit and bring it down here maybe also bring it down a little bit and rotate it up and then let me go back into the rendered view so i can see what this is looking like so for this light i want to make another sci-fi color so i'm going to click on this color here and i'm going to make this kind of like a red color so something like that and then let's also turn the power down so i'm just going to maybe try like a thousand maybe even less strong maybe only like a 500 just play around with the strength of the light and the color of the light to get something that you think looks pretty cool and let's also make this a stronger red color and maybe even make it a bit darker so maybe just like a 300 so it's even less bright and of course i could try switching the type of light so i could maybe change this to like a point light and see how that looks so a point light does look pretty cool um but i think i do prefer the area light and maybe back here on this blue light on the main light let me make this a bit brighter so even like a 2500 so i now want to add a backlight or a rim light to kind of pop out the character from the background and reveal a bit more of its shape so what i'm going to do is select this light again let's press 7 on the numpad for top view and i'm going to hold down the z button and go back into the solid view so i'm going to press shift d that'll duplicate the light let's press r to rotate i'm going to rotate this over and then i'm also going to bring it down and rotate it over a little bit and you can also double tap the r key double tapping the r key is going to turn on the trackball rotation you can just kind of rotate that around now because this is a rim light i want it to light up the whole side of the character so i'm going to click right here on the shape and i'm going to change this from square to a rectangle and then i can change the size x to make this longer and i can make this kind of a long light and then i can hold down the z button and move my mouse up into the rendered view and you can definitely see that rim light right there on the back of the character kind of on the edge there you can especially see it right there on the edge of the robot's neck there's that little bright light there and that's going to reveal more of the shape and kind of pop the character out from the background and then i also want to change the color of this rim light so i'm going to make it mostly white but just make it a little bit blue and then i also want to add a camera so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to go right here and click on camera and then i want to bring the camera right here to our view so i'm going to press ctrl alt numpad 0 control alt numpad 0 is going to bring the camera to our view and then i'm also going to change where the camera is so maybe i'll bring it back a little bit kind of zoom it in there and make it a square image and if you'd like to learn all about how to use the blender camera then i do have a dedicated tutorials just on how to use the camera and blender link is in the description if you'd like to check that out now you can see this bottom leg here is a little bit dark and i do want it to be a bit lighter so i'm actually going to click on the main light right here and i'm going to go to the light settings and i'm going to click on the shape here and i'm going to change this to rectangle as well and then i can bring up the x size and i can make that bigger and this way it's going to shine more light right down there on the bottom of the character i could also add some other lights down here so i'm going to press shift a i'm going to go here to light and i'm going to add a point light and then i can just bring the point light over here kind of bring it towards the leg of the character and let's turn the power up a bit and then i could change this to maybe like a blue color as well i could also select the red light right here and i could press shifty to duplicate it and kind of rotate this over so we have another red light coming down here on the side and if you want to add a rim light to the other side of the character you could also select the back rim light here you can press shift d that's going to duplicate the rim light and then i can rotate this over on the z axis and just point it at the character and then maybe for this rim light i'll make it darker so maybe just turn the power of this rim light to like a thousand so it's not quite as bright and now you can see there's a bit of a rim light on this side of the robot as well so there we go we now have some nice lighting for this robot character so i will just give this a final render now and here is the final rendered image and then i also did a little bit of compositing to make the background black and then also in the compositor i added a denoise node and a glare node to kind of give it that glare there and also smooth out the image and get rid of some of the noise so there is the final render with the finished compositing and if you'd like to learn how to do compositing in blender i do have a tutorial on compositing for beginners link is in the description if you'd like to check that out so with that finished this is gonna wrap it up for this tutorial on lighting for beginners so thank you so much for watching this tutorial i hope you found it helpful and i hope you learned a lot from it and if you'd like to help support me and this channel to help me keep on creating blender tutorials and blender content then i will have links in the description to my gumroad store and my patreon page and the youtube memberships those are all great ways to help support this channel and i do really appreciate your support and as i mentioned earlier if you'd like to learn how to create this sci-fi mech robot then i have a tutorial series it's completely free on my youtube channel where i show you step by step in real time how to create this sci-fi mech robot again all the links are in the description but i hope you found this video helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 81,598

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, lighting, beginner tutorial, lighting for beginners, blender lights, blender lighting tutorial, 3 point lighting, hdri, realiatic lighting, hdri lighting

Id: aafyp5g1CjI

Length: 44min 53sec (2693 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 14 2022