Lighting Fundamentals: Master One Light in Blender

how's it going everyone today's video is all about lighting in blender this is a comprehensive lighting course that you will not find anywhere on youtube it covers all the lighting fundamentals and a few practical lighting setups that i'm pretty sure you will love it and i want to give it to you for free to appreciate your support on my youtube channel for those of you who are new to this channel my name is wimbo zao i'm a product photographer and 3d artist based in sydney i post my very first blender tutorial in the last year august 8 months later i have over 4k of subscriber now and i have produced over 60 videos and two master courses for my audience during this eight months i found blender community need more professional content related to lighting and the photorealistic product renders if you are a product photographer or designer who are interested in learning 3d in blender please consider subscribing my channel without further ado let's get started as you can see here these are the topic that we're going to cover in this video let's just get started with the invert square law here's a setup from a top view basically what's happening here this is just a light and this is just a regular a a texture here what i want to demonstrating to let you guys see the light actually coming from one point but it is going to quickly fall off the intensity of the brightness along the distance so the further away from the light source there is going to be the darker and the closer to the light source the places is going to be illuminated a little bit brighter you may say well wimbo everybody knows this this is nothing special why do we need to learn inverse square law what is that it means okay so what i would do next i'm just going to show you what's happening here and then i'm going to pull a photoshop file to illustrate what exactly inverse square law means so now we're inside the photoshop you can see here we have a render image of exactly what happened for that texture and this is just a light intensity fall off from the one side to the other side for this demonstration i just want to let you guys know i break down this gradient into squares okay so each square representing a distance and they're exactly even distance the reason i'm using a square it's trying to let you guys to see the differences when the lighting intensity fall off along the distance so as you can see here the left hand side is the 100 brightness and then when the distance go in up like two times three times or four times the lighting intensity is going to fall off so for the second one this you can see here these are two these two gradient squares has a very similar look but they're kind of have a twist as you can see here for the bottom line that's for the second line as you can see here these two are start really fading away and they're having pretty similar intensity because they're pretty dark and you are saying well wimbo i still don't see what you're saying and if i'm actually enabling all these numbers you probably will understand better so this is a hundred percent intensity and for most people people just think um in general people think when the distance go two times further away the intensity is gonna cut in half so three times further away it's gonna continue cut the half in half so it's gonna be multiplied by another half so we're just gonna continue going this way the top line representing the common mistakes most people think light intensity will fall off with a linear relationship with the distance so basically just like keep continue to cut in half this is not what the real world's happening the real world is actually happening with it as an inverse inverse squared relationship so what that means is if i'm enabled this the brightness and the distance having a special relationship uh it means if i increase the distance two times eventually the brightness is going to become a quarter of in brightness compared to original so what that means is when i increase the distance by two times right here and then it was 100 percent or one right now it's become a quarter to make these intensity of the brightness looks much easier to understand i just gonna enable all these percentage so you will know what i mean so the top line is still the wrong way people think let's continue cut in half which is going to decrease in this way the light and the distance doesn't work like this this is wrong okay so what's going actually happening is so when the distance going up two times it's going to become a quarter if uh the distance going up three times then it's going to be one-ninth of the original brightness so which means you can see that the brightness of the light is actually fall off way quicker than you thought it would be in this linear relationship it's actually in an invert square relationship so as you can see here the quickly you fall off from 100 quickly fall off to six percent in the wrong way when you're thinking was that still 12 no from the beginning once the distance increased you lost 75 of light immediately so you only retain 25 i know most of creative is not really good at numbers and i'm just trying to illustrating a point that what is the inverse square law and you really don't need to remember all these you really don't need to do any calculation but i just want you to see a relationship so what's the take-home message for the inverse square law and why people need to understand this to know light better when sometimes when we're having a scene that we have a multiple items multiple subjects we want to do to having the subject illuminating very evenly so what strike we do now as you can see here each square is representing a certain distance and if we increase the distance the lighting fall off quickly however as you can see here if you see these four squares i mean you won't see the line obviously but because they are intensity it looks very close but this is actually four units all right so within this range when you're putting your subject into this range and anything put in here will be illuminating very similar because the light intensity fall into this big range of distance is going to be relatively same okay so this is something that you will pay attention so now i'm going to continue expanding the ideas what the inverse square law really means in the actual photography world and if you're really into a photography a little bit and you have tried to purchase some of the equipment and for the most beginners people think well the camera body the the lens is very expensive to be honest for professionals the most expensive item is actually the light because this inverse square law issue because the light intensity falls off really quickly and falling off a lot of light that we're just quickly losing from using that in the real world so you will see some super high power strobes why do people really even need to use to have all these 1200 watts a second of a light simply because they need to light a bigger scene so what does that means so usually when when the beginners were usually light illuminating things they can just put into the position that really close to the light so you're saying you put your subjects in here which is fairly close to the light source so you work at a majority of the light and everything looks illuminating you can utilize in light however think about if you need to illuminating a car or a group of people so you need some physical space so you wouldn't be able to fit everybody into a one tiny distance in here and you're probably going to go with this kind of bigger range but within this range you have some very even light illumination so from the first person standing in here the last person standing here it doesn't have a whole lot of lighting or brightness differences that's why people paying a lot of money to purchasing the light because although we still have only about four percent to 50 1.5 percent of light saved here but think about it if i have a super big light power source this number can go up easily i can just need to dial the number the brightness go up so it doesn't means this range is going always going to be dark it just simply means these range of distance is going to be evenly illuminated right now if your head has been twisted i'm totally interested in this i would recommend you to watch this video many times and also put your thinking and the practice into your day-to-day work with lighting so you will understand this more and that you will eventually figure this in out the inverse squared law took me quite a while to really understand this because it's related to a lot of math once i understand one single light and how it falls off i can quickly figure out where should i play i will i will figure out where should i place my actual life the distance relationship to the subject i want illuminating so let's just put this idea in your brain and the sink a little bit okay and let's go to the next point the topic number two is talking about the quality of the light while the quality of the light usually is referring in the photography world we were talking about the shadow looks and shadow shapes as you can see here we have three different scenes in here you will have overview of doing these and you can see that the shadow density and also the shadow quality is a little bit different as you can see here this type of shadow is really soft that's referring the soft because it doesn't have a really clear edge line but this one have pretty nice and defined edge line and this one's a pretty long edge defined line as well well what why we're need to talk about the quality of the light be simply because a lot of times we've been overly used as soft light or probably using the soft light in the wrong way so in photography the quality of light it means a one rule is if the light is relatively bigger than the subject and the light is going to generating a shadow that is really soft you don't see a defined edge this is what we called the the soft light well when you when you see a light is relatively small and compared to the subject size and this is going to generating some very defined and harsh shadows in here so that's kind of the the big take of home message is talking about the relativity of the site what it means relativity because if i'm just talking about the physical size from the size of the lighting and subject that's easy to understand but a lot one thing that a lot of beginners who who forget is that also the relatively distance so if i'm putting the exactly same light size like this they are the exactly same size of the light however the distance from the subject so also need to put into consideration if i put this light away from the subject like this one is actually putting away from the subject and definitely the brightness is going to go down just because the very first rule the inverse square law and we can quickly just bump up the the light in here as you can see here we are using like 235 uh times of strength to in order to illuminating this one uh items which is the top one and it was in the in the middle and we're using the just a five the strength and only use five on the shader to actually illuminating the scene and if i'm putting the same size if i put if i'm use the same size of a light and put it away that actually does become a smaller size just think about this in the in the real world we all know the sun is way bigger than the earth however the distance relatively distance compared to the size of earth and in the sun is very long so which means although this is a relatively big source of the light sources compared to the subject physically however the distance is very far away so this has become a smaller light source so if i'm really just kind of select this one if i'm pushing away from the subject just dragging that see like that the gx and drag away as you can see here light intensity went down and also the the light quality the shadow is going to become more defined more harsh if i can just simply bump up the light that's okay we can re resume the brightness of the scene that's okay however the the shadow shapes or the the softness went off permanently so that's something that i wanted you to point out to allow more people to understand what is actual the the quality of light means so whenever you're shooting a subject or you're trying to light up a scene you're trying to using a bigger light and to creating a nice softer shadow and if you're using a smaller light then you're going to creating a defined line well people most people think well always going to be the soft the light is going to be better i wouldn't say that it all depends on your subject matters and what you try to uh to say using lighting so for example if you are going to photograph a cosmetic product or just for example a sunscreen and you probably not not necessarily has to use the soft light to illuminate it because you want to use the harsh light with the harsh shadow to representing the sun right to to trigger that emotions with viewers when you illuminating a scene because the sunscreen so basically sunscreens usually sit under the sun just give you that as a environment for for the purpose of the light okay so that's something that you want to pay attention there's no good light or bad light it's all depends on the photographers or three yards to really understand what you want to try to accomplish still lighting and this isn't point number two the quality of light let's talk about the point number three the density of shadow well just this is very easy to understand is we're talking about how dark is the shadow side of the subject as you can see here we have a monkey and we have a light over here and i one thing i really want to point out is there are a lot of times people ask me about lighting ratio is it between two different lights or multiple lights is there a golden ratio do like the people saying one two two or one two eight is there any really tricks that have a perfect lighting the simple answer is no we don't and the lighting is a form of art every artist or photographer have their sense of taste about lighting but for the control in order to control the density of shadows there's a lot of ways to do that and in the real photography world when you photograph a product or subject then typically you need to have a light for sure a lot of times we use we don't have to use a second light because a lot of time we can work around with it because in the real world the lights will bounce around and inside a blender there's a huge thing that people a lot of people don't know what's going on because and this is not really photorealistic environment if i'm pulling out in here go to the shading editors and go to the the world as you can see here what i'm working now in the this world is completely disconnected which means there's zero light if i'm hiding this light it's gonna be completely dark you want to not see anything in here in the render view under the cycle so basically this is not really a realistic environment unless you put a hddri image with a kind of like a lighting environment in here this is not real so a lot of beginners will confuse why this lighting thing doesn't really looks photorealistic what's wrong with it well simply because the environment your surrounding is very different compare what we actually have and what most people will do so basically just gonna build a ground and what is happening here they're gonna kind of push one side hit extrusion going up and then to bevel that edge and just do that ctrl v to bevel and just gonna do a seamless backdrop well you might see a lot of these and we can just do shade smooth we you will see a lot of places using this way because this is what a actual photography where a lot of photographer to using this backdrop to photograph on products you may think well this has got to be it because i'm making a scene looks just like a real photography studio settings no no the problem is that the a lot of people don't know do not really pay attention how environment is going to effect on the physical lighting watch what's happening on the susan head this is what we have with this backdrop if i'm close this ground watch the shadow density is going to change this part of the side faces become much darker and it's simply because the light is going to react with the environment and bounce something back and you can see the jaw part it's actually become brighter just because the light is bouncing here and bounces back so a lot of these you need to put into consideration now how to determine the density of shadow is all about your call so for example in here you don't really need to adding a second light on the side the other side in order to see the detail you don't have to you can just simply adding a plane shift a adding a plane it s to scale up and this already come with the default textures we're going to hit r and y on 90 degrees we can just kind of grab this and put it here dragging here as you can see here quickly what you can do here you can control the shadow density easily by just moving this planes accordingly as you can see here how much details i want to see and i wanted to have a more even lighting i can just keep pushing keep pushing it looks about right so this is the one trick that i often use in a real photography studio so you don't really need to purchase a lot of a light you still can using these bounce cards or reflectors to reflecting the light back to filling the shadow really decrease the density of shadow a lot in order to having a nice balanced lighting okay this is the point number three so i just want to let you know this the density of shadow you can control it you don't have to using a light and be aware of the environment around your subject when you're lighting them next let's talk about the position of light well it's still the same thing you know everybody's need to know the position of light and there's a certain way to put in there and i found the best way if you are beginners you just need to test it out right and what you can do here we have a monkey we have a light what we need to do here we're just going to do uh just to change the pivot point so let's go here if we're going to change the pivot point to the 3d cursor apparently the 3d cursors lie with the subject so what i do if we go to top view if i hit r i can just rotate and to see what's going on where's the positions of a light and see what their subjects are going to look like so because this demonstration for the purpose of this lighting of course i'm just using a monkey so you can actually just using a your products models then you can just kind of twist them around and see which angle looks the best however in this videos i really want to point out one thing is that uh people often not notice is it because the we're looking for a kind of a genuine grading lighting across the to the subject i know this subject looks a little bit sharp and everything looks a little bit uh too unrealistic so what i would do i just gonna get ctrl 2 just adding a subsurface modifier and do a quickly do a shake smooth so this might looks like a regular product or anything for a model so but this looks a little bit softer so what i'm trying to to show you another trick this is called feathering the light okay so what that means so right now you can see here the we have a pretty defined highlight side and the shadow side what a photographer usually do photographers sometimes just using the one single light you can just position the way that actually creating a source of gradient using a inverse square law because basically it's not that specific need to be considered how much light and where to put it at but you just need to be aware that the lighting is going to fall off in this a certain way so hit the if i hit the g and the y i'm just going to generally push this one on the front a little bit as you can see here uh for some reason that we have more side being illuminated this light is still pointing to the to do this side i didn't rotate it anyway there's more light it's gonna hit the from this side to the other this is kind of creating like a natural fall off with a gradient this is also called the feathering light so if i'm really pushing here so you can see we can do some changes over here and for me to in order to understanding light is the light doesn't need to be directly just a point to the subject it doesn't really need to be like that so you can just point the other way and the lighting is going to still hit this up certain part of the of subject but it's creating a different effect so that's how i understand feathering the light and that is just the topic number four position of light and we specifically talk about the feathering the light now let's talk about point number five the purpose of light as you can see here we got a product right here and and based on the purpose of light we usually give the lights a certain name as you can see here if i enable this light and you can see we have a light in front of the subject with a certain degrees about 45 degrees right here pointed it and we calling this light a key light well the key light usually generally is in the scene is the brightest the light in the scene so that's what we call the key light so that's the most important light and other lights will be just kind of working around this key light and the key light is going to be the you can say the setup the key for the entire lighting so what i'm doing here this is just a simple light we're going to hear is actually using 6 000 watts of powers to illuminating this scene and the next next thing we can do here is actually another light is called a fill light basically just the opposite side to kind of filling some some light into the shadow area so making sure the product has enough uh detail to showing after the the second light being added on so right and as you can see here now the lighting power is 2000 watts so basically people can say this is the one to three ratio so you know but this is not really important numbers i just want to let you know usually the fill light is generally is darker than the key light and another light we can we usually use we call it in the photography is called the rim light the rim light usually the the light that shooting from the back side of the product to actually creating a outline or a separation between the background and subject in this scene we don't have background but usually a lot of stuff that we were photographing we have a background and the rim line is between the subject and the background this is what we are often see and referring to three points lighting system so this is something i do not recommend people to directly jump into this three-point lighting system it is for beginners this is absolutely a wrong way to learn lighting simply because think about this if you really don't understand one single light and you're just thinking oh i need to have this i need to have front line and the fill light and the rim light yeah it seems like it's being done properly it looks kind of okay but it's actually taking away the purpose part of the light for a photographer for artists you need to have certain intentions when you doing any kind of art creations because there's a meaning behind that and there's a reason you want to do that if you're going to light your scene or the characters just directly using the three-point lighting well think about that everybody is going to use that type of lighting and all the lighting is going to look about the same you don't actually build anything out of your lighting you see where i'm going so the purpose of lighting is all coming from the photographer or the 3d artist that's you holding the purpose of light okay so that's something that you need to pay attention uh three-point lighting i'm not saying it's absolutely wrong but don't start with there just starting with one single light so if i'm turning off all these light so and i enable one light which is the one that i typically use the detectors a lot of people ask me why you're not using a default lighting for when you're lighting a scene while you're using a plane with the emission shader to edit on so now i'm going to explain why the reason i'm using this is in this scene you can see the size of the light very easily if i hit s to scale up up and down it's very easy to to go with that and it's much easier when you manipulating a scene and also later on when we talk about the other topic which is the the texture of the light source and then we are we'll i will explain more while doing this but by now this is going to be my default light and just very simple playing with the emission shader if you notice that i changed the pivot point to the 3d cursor so if i go to the top view over here and hit r to rotate it you will see the lighting just gonna circle around with the light and i already showed you guys in the previous point that you can quickly utilize this method to do but however a lot of times i want to start thinking this way i want you to start putting the purpose of your lighting when next time i'm illuminating anything in this in the blender okay so in general and as you can see here the light is directly on the side is going to enhance the texture so remember this this is why we a lot of people using the side lighting is because to enhance the texture as you can see here we have some textures for the for the body and if if the light actually turning around to the front and front side the texture is not looks that obvious right now it looks like still pretty detailed so you can see a lot of highlights simply because this item is very reflective but the in general rule is if the frontal line is going to make everything flat the simple reason is just because there's no shadow side of your lighting because if i'm moving if i'm just rotating here and i'm quickly and i'm quickly making sure this object is not being seen by the camera so i can just do this so you can see here this looks very flat right now it's pretty bright so i can just dial down maybe 10 do whatever but this doesn't looks pleasing well some reasons sometimes they are purposely using this type of light simply because uh if we're photographing a human beings or your females usually a lot of lighting setup is put in the frontal because it's going to smooth out the textures of their skins their facial skin is usually sometimes as you can consider as a matte without wearing any makeup that's what i mean so that's actually going to enhance the softness of female characters or female human beings is all really want to have smooth skins in general and that's why a lot of lighting set up and people actually is going to go in this way and then get another bounce light in here this is called clam shell lighting just because of the sake of the lighting pushing down here but for for us i just want to remember start recognize these when you putting the light directly in front of a front subject you're going to make the shape looks a little bit flat when i saying a flat it means two dimensional it does not mean three dimensional look okay so that's kind of how it goes so if i'm rotating here on the side view so you are clearly see a highlight side and shadow side this is looks more three-dimensional which means this is less flat okay so i want you guys to understanding why these professional terms or the photographers or artists describing lighting results using these terms that can help you quite a bit when when you're watching other tutorials and then when you're watching other lighting tutorials to understand this better okay so we're going to continue rotating this light as you can see here when the light one single light is pushing to the side edge in the back side of the subject you will see there's a light illuminating on the curves on this subject you don't see any details in the front simply because there's nothing there's no light source from from there to building that well just think about this silhouette is that type of lighting that you will only see the outline of curve and is is nice because it actually gives you a lot rooms to having this highly contrast images to build and also rooms to for the imagination so you don't really need to light everything in your scene to to show what you want to do but sometimes when when the product have pretty cool design layout whatever maybe a good rim light to start with will be good because it will enhance the feature of the product you're really illuminating your your scene to have a focus to enhance the product design right so that's what i use so if i continue rotating if i rotating in the directly in the back so basically this light is focusing facing directly behind the subject and it actually is illuminating the entire outline and just using one single light and you can do that and to do these or you may say well wimbo that we are still trying to to prep promote the brand we want to show the logos every details and the one single line is just going to not going to help us well i will show you how okay so and if we're continuing rotating you'll see that we're just gonna get more stuff coming out that's just the way how you how the the light is is works and it's not that complicated at all when you're learning lighting inside the blender in the past if you're really learning lighting in the studio man you gotta holding a light whatever it's gonna continue to take pictures and really truly understand these to how the light and subjects gonna and the react compared to the positions and the purpose so now uh after watching this tutorial i am hoping you will have better understanding why you position the light in a certain angle and why what kind of effect that you want to achieve visually through lighting okay so this is the number five the purpose of light let's talk about the point number six the texture of the light source well as you can see here we got a two different subject one is the matte surface one is kind of like very smooth plastic smooth surface as you can see here in the scene we're using a blender light it's just an area light if you can go in here you can see how much power is it the size everything you can put in here this is the default blender size you can illuminating the different subject using one single light you can see they have a different type of result when you see on visually on here and it does simply reflecting there are two different textures about why we need to improving this or pay attention on the texture of light it's just simply because a lot of products have like this sunscreen has plastic super smooth and super reflective surface the mass surface subjects are really easy to light it actually gives you a lot of rooms to to placing the light it doesn't really need to be super precise because the the shape of a light it doesn't really reflecting on their surface for a lot of beginners when they are trying to start doing product photography they're going to photograph some super reflective items and cosmetic products and they are just going to be a big stone of challenges when they're illuminating because they're reflecting the light pretty ugly highlight everywhere is just annoying and that's why you are going to start learning the texture of light source and now we have this light source if we are simply just change to the the lighting source that i usually use it's just a plane with the emission shader you can see that the lighting is still relatively about the same and having kind of pretty strong highlight in that way and that's why we're still not really solving the problems making this product looks a little pleasing although it's a representing the pretty reflective service of the nature of this this product but that's not enough for a a professional photographer and what we do in here we can just change into a gradient light watch here this is what the plane light looks like if i'm enabled that gradient light and you can see here we have one side as being black and has some gray areas and then slowly transferring to the the white part and what's happening on here you can see that it's much better of transitioning smoothing here so having this kind of gradient light a lot of times it is really nice to illuminating some product with very relaxed surface this is why we need to pay attention because what's going wrong in the environment is easily to be catched by the reflective subject okay so that's what we do and you might wonder well do we actually seeing this in the real product photography practice because this is pretty easy to accomplish in a 3d world because you're what i'm doing now i'm just actually adding a a gradient textures that i made in the photoshop and plug this in now i do have a tutorial going depth in the texture of of this lighting i will make sure you watch that the links are going to be on the right corner right here so we're going to continue to move on so what is going on in the real product photography practice it looks like so basically what's happening here i might just enable this you will see there are similar effect right so in in the photography world so usually we are just going to using a a strip of light it's just typically light box or soft box you can call that as strip box and then what you're going to do here you're going to put a diffusion materials it sometimes can be semi semi-translucent that's why i built it's just single plane and with a translucent materials and the color i just push all the way to the to the white part so now what you can do here the light is still going to trans can shooting through this translucent this is not transparent okay translucent so it actually diffuser light is creating some sort of like the gradients in here and usually photographers were just kind of positioning the light and you can changing the the gradients accordingly to getting the the good result out of it so this is how real photographers is going to set up lighting when they're photographing plastic or super reflective surfaces items okay so this is how it works so basically in the blender it's just much easier you can just creating a light that you want you like to use and you can just save this light and keep using it forever all right so that's the point number six the texture of the light source and this is primarily focusing on the very reflective surface subject point number seven the shape of a light source as you can see here we got a scene in here we have two uv sphere and there the materials on there is is called the smooth surface the super reflective basically what i have done just to to crank the metallic all the way to one and the specular to one and the roughness to zero this is the ultra smooth products or product surface that you would not see in the real life because in the real world they will have some any fingerprints any dust everything and then you will see the surface with a little bit texture and then also the same times when you're lighting a scene or lighting this type of surface product that you need to pay attention on the the shape of your light as you can see here this is a circle light in here if on the reflective the shapes looks a little bit oval right right here and if you're using a a regular square that actually seems like it's not a really reflecting a square shape but because the surface uh shapes they're actually having this type of like uh shapes going on here that's what you're actually going to get and you can even actually just changing to anything to a light source so this is a uv sphere of course it's a three dimension shape right here and what i did is just adding a mission shader and then it can turn into a light source and then if i'm actually just using this uv sphere light this is not typical a real lighting source because we don't use this type of light source in the photography if i'm moving things around you can see here this can be used as a light source as well but this one doesn't have really a one single direction so a lot of times it just having losing a sense of control over the lighting i just wanna let you guys to be aware the shape of your lighting source actually playing important roles when you're photographing some products surface that very reflective and smooth okay this is the point number seven point number eight the texture of reflectors so as you can see here in this scene we have a light we have a susan we also have a ground and basically the light is going to effect on the environment and the subjects the illumination of the subject usually is according to the light source and also the environment around it so a lot of times people understand that it's adding a reflector it's like this it's just a simple plane and i'm actually dragging the roughness all the way to the one for the material and also change the color to that as you can see here the shadow side of this monkey head quickly getting some light bounce it back and cut easily to change the position of the reflectors to control the brightness of the fill this is very easy to do and people understand that a lot of times the common mistake for beginners is they're over lit a subject i know they are very into lighting they're they want to showing every details of the subject and that's why the problems come in to overlit and if you really can stream off all these thinking for three points lighting everything just focusing on one light you can do a lot of things with just one light and a reflector and that's how photography world works like that way as well because a lot of times you wouldn't be able to just simply purchase a pretty high power strobes and light a speed light and a lot of time you're just going to work with one light when you start it and then you're going to using some white board and to do the fill to really getting the the result you want uh luckily in blender in cg we can just build as much as light we want we can just illuminating that way which actually causing a lot of issues because people don't know how to use it and they just overlit everything another thing i want to point out is the the reflector doesn't always need to to bounce some light back and we're adding the brightness on one side it can also to take away some light accordingly in the scene so that's also referring to uh that's also people that's that's people also referring to a name is called negative feel negative fill is just going to darken one side using a a reflector okay so what i'm building here the nectar fill is basically just a black color a plane with roughness one and basically just positioning here if we zoom in very close to the ear part if i'm enable the neck to fill you can see the ear details has a little bit more details if i'm enable this negative fill and it's become darker a little bit i i'm hoping you will be able to see this from the youtube uh videos but this is what's happening and if you really wanted to to having better results in the side blender because this is not really a real world reactions it's supposed to getting the darker but it's very minor changes and that's where professionals have a pretty precise control on the lighting so what you can do here you can just adding a ambient occlusion note on your materials and to hook in here all the areas that have a kind of crease and that will be darken it up with the shadow so that's what this note uh used for so to demonstrating this negative feel a little better is i can just basically uh to zoom in in here this is with the negative fill and this is without negative feel you will now you will see a big difference now okay so you don't have to do this as really using a negative fill whatever i just want to let you know in photography or in the lighting you don't always keep adding light into your scene a lot of times you need to do the the do the minus you need to cut off center line and then you can even use the negative fill and the positioning in certain areas trying to kill some light you can see here if i'm doing really don't want the the the mouse area has been lit i can just using a negative fill to block in certain way certain areas you can just do that okay accordingly so this is also called flag so that's that's a lot of terminologies referring to the to the lighting so you can just pay attention on that but in the in the ce world i know you can quickly change the size of your shapes of your lighting and that's easy to do but in the real world in the photography world that's not really easy to to quickly change that because if you buy a certain size of a softer box or or a lighting tent whatever and then you just cannot change the size of it that quickly in the cg so we have a lot of advantage to doing lighting scenes but i believe the most important thing is the knowledge of understanding lighting and my recommendation for all beginners is just focusing on one single light and the please master the one single light and then you will open it up a lot possibly for complex lighting scenes and you have more much better control that so start investing yourself on the knowledge of of understanding light okay in the next part we are going to break it down some lighting setup that i use for light lighting a product and i'm pretty sure that you'll be amazed by just using one single light and to producing some pretty good result out of it inside blender let's get started all right let's see the setup number one as you can see here i have a product right here and then this is i believe this is a sunscreen and i just have a pretty big light and which is going to cover the entire space you can see that it's going to creating some pretty soft light and the same times as you can see this is just a silhouette there's nothing going on there's no too much details only using one light is not going to be really doing too much so how can we actually achieve that this is not just only working in the cg it's also working in photography so if you're only just like one single big light and how can you illuminate this thing so i just enabled this reflector at the very bottom this is just a reflectors with the default materials if i can drag in here just go to the shader editors and this is the material looks like it's just a default setting and nothing special important here however with this reflector going on here you will see more details from bottom part just because it's going to bounce some light from the main light you see here we got some more details going on here so that's not really majority of important because it's getting some details coming out just because the light is reflecting to these i'm adding another reflector which is the still same amount same kind of materials however the differences in here is you can see here this is our camera and the reflector is blocking our camera view why we still can look through it over there is simply because we disable the visibility on the camera on that if i'm just kind of check this thing off and just work at regular playing and and then you wouldn't see anything if you really try to having this setup in the actual photography studio you will going to cut a hole over here for the camera lens too in order to see the subject so the big advantage of cg we don't need to worry about that we can just utilize this and disable the ray visibility under the camera so it's still working this way but you will not be detected by the camera so this is very nice and another magical things we can do here this is a light you know we were using you can that's why you see this is a pure white uh we can do the same thing i can just select this light and the check to uncheck this camera boom you are going to have a beautiful rim lighter in here and without seeing anything in the background so basically this has become a pretty dark mood scene and then with a beautiful highlight on the product and the utilizing the front materials the reflectors you can really changing the the reflections so it's a really minor but you can just manipulating the shape and the positions that to the exact position you want and to really achieving a really good result and the pro the thing is we are only using one single light but with all the knowledge we're packing so we are understanding oh the reason we we have using this light we're trying to creating a rim light to highlight the shape first and also because we are dealing with very reflective surface we're purposely using a big reflectors and with a with a matte or pretty roughness to one a surface to kind of getting them to reflection out of it rather than a a strong light with a pretty crispy highlight this is very subtle but it actually bring in a lot of details into the product and the third thing the reflectors on the bottom really actually bumping up some some fills into the bottom part and instead of a black silhouette okay so that's what we're achieving in the setup number one okay let's go to the setup number two for the setup number two as you can see here is another very simple setup i have a light and i have a subject in here and the reflector from bottom and also a reflector from the side it's nothing special but why what i want to point out is you're noticing the relative size with the subject this light is super big as you can see here if i move the light you will see the highlight on this subject because it's also working around with your light but one thing i really want to point out is this looks pretty simple to set up the reason i put it in this way is because i want to have an illumination that looks very even across this body so what i have done here if you go to the camera icon go to the camera management if i quickly switch this one to false color this is what actually seeing in here the red part means the the brightest of the part of this subject if i'm i'm trying to move into a position that the the red part is really kind of a small part of it and the rest of the body is being in the range of blue and green which is means a little bit evenly lit if i'm really get too close to here and that's too harsh on here and and all the reflections kind of here is going to representing i blown out so if i switch to the filmic again this looks way overexposed so i'm just looking for a really good a position that the highlights is a very thin line but the still the main subject has been illuminating uh properly and again using the feathering light techniques we can just getting some a pretty good gradient light across the entire place and then you can continue kind of working around the highlights if you think this is highlight you won't like that you can actually just kind of bump up the the brightness to getting a good result out of it and for the reflectors basically where you can just change the reflector position and trying to see which part you want to be having some minor highlight and getting some fill light back to the position you can just do that okay so that's easy way to do and again this is only using one single light and you can certainly do something about it okay let's go to the setup number three this is something that you will see very often because this is kind of more like a standard look of a e-commerce type of look it's a pure white background with some reflections and you can see the details of your product and very nicely lit and this is very easy to accomplish in the cg world i do have a video that produced specifically talking about the perfect pure white background lighting and basically i just want to quickly give you an overlook of how this get done so as you can see here the surface here is almost a mirror so what i've done here i selected the ground i'm making sure it's in the black color and to remove the roughness to making sure it's specular all the way to one this zoom pole is going to be the super reflective surface so what's happening here is is the light is going to come in from the background it's going to directly point bounce down the surface and then and then bounce back to the camera so that's actually the surface is reflecting the background big light into white so there's a seamless line between these because i'm trying to just creating this look with using only one light so i make the background light really big and and then i just use a wide reflectors in the front and make it big enough to really uncover to bounce some light back from the background to here to the subject so that's how everything works it's very simple and effective if i grab the reflectors and go to the top view i can just kind of move the positions to kind of change how much reflecting white highlights on the subject and how much details i want to pull it out from there so you can do it quite a bit and then you can even rotate it accordingly and that's just running out pretty good result and keeping everything nice and simple and this is something that easily to make using a one single light is in the cg world a lot of time the the light reactions can be working very perfectly but in the real life there's some light losses and certain size ratios kind of challenging to replicate but once you understanding the lighting concept you will be able to do a lot of amazing stuff in the cg yeah that's pretty much all i want to share in this video you can get this blender file and either on my patreon or on my gumroad for free and this is something that i want you guys to start play with it and to really see what's going on on your own side and really takes our time to digest and consume this level of lighting knowledge on your own if you like this type of content please consider subscribing my channel hit likes and share this video to your friends and to someone you may think is useful for them and also leave comments and please let me know what the topic that you want me to cover in a future video and thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Wenbo Zhao

Views: 111,961

Keywords: Master One Light in Blender, lighting in blender, Blender lighting, blender lighting tutorial, blender lighting tips, blender lighting setup, blender lighting basics, one light in blender, blender how to do lighting, blender how to light, using light in blender, master one light, lighting 101, product lighting, product lighting setup, product lighting blender, product lighting photography, product lighting 3d, blender tutorial

Id: Mj22FhZecj0

Length: 55min 57sec (3357 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022