LuxCore for Blender | Basic Lighting | Environment, IES Textures and Primitives

hey everybody dj here this is going to be a tutorial on lighting in lux core and we're going to be covering basically environment lights and the basic lighting setup that's inside of lux core and just go over some of the basics there if you haven't yet please take a moment to like and subscribe to the channel it really helps me out we also have a discord server you can join and there's also a patreon for anybody who is looking to donate to help out the channel so let's go ahead and jump into blender here and those of you who are new i have some screencast keys that are right here and if that fails at the bottom left you should see a keyboard and a mouse as well to show you the keyboard commands since this is lighting it shouldn't be that tricky as far as the key commands and anything like that but just in case you get lost those are there to help you out so for the setup for this basically i'm using the orc character i designed uh in a recent render engine comparison test and we're just going to be putting some basic materials on these so if you're if you want to follow along with me you won't really have access to this if you become a patron you might be able to download this i haven't decided if i'm going to let people download this character yet but you can do this with just basic geometric shapes or you could use suzanne or anything like that but since this is a character it really allows you to see the lighting setups a little bit easier with something like this because it's a real world sort of thing that you might want to render and just to show you what the rendered view looks like right now actually before we do that i just want to tell you some basic settings here so um before we begin go into your render properties here and what i want you to do is just make sure that under the viewport render here if you have a if you want to set this to gpu you can um to make it faster you could use cpu if you'd like and turn off the denoiser because that actually helps speed things up here and it will allow us to see some of the details and shadows and things like that when we start really sort of zooming around here so make sure you set those and what we're going to be doing make sure that you set this to the lux core engine as well and what we're going to be doing is just looking at a lot of the basic stuff in here for lighting and i'll explain how things work and some general setup properties and stuff like that so the first thing that you're going to want to do here is a lot of times people just go right to the world settings and start adding some world lights and we'll just set this to a rendered view here and i'll just kind of show you what's going on just sort of naturally and i i deleted everything and set up my own camera here over here on the left so but if you just turn on the uh sort of like rendered view in the viewport here i'm going to turn off the overlays you can see that there's this uh sort of like already a sky background in here and that's kind of like the default and you can feel free to use this if you'd like there's better ways to do environment lighting than using the sky but i'll just run over the basics here on how this works so basically you can tint the sky by taking this and changing this to a particular color if you'd like i'm just going to set that back to a white color you can increase the brightness by increasing the gain here so in instead of this if you multiply this by two for example you can make it a lot brighter i'm just going to set that back to the default there and under the sky settings here you can actually set a sun object that kind of changes how everything works here so i'll just kind of show you that really briefly if i go into the solid view here and i'll hit shift a and i'm going to add a light sun lamp here oops light sun and turn on the overlays right here and i'll just grab it and move it up over here okay you see there's the sun lamp and if you left click and drag on this little yellow icon you can actually direct it at something and if we look over here in the viewport render or over here in this rendered view here and we'll keep this just set to this render this render mode here so you can see there's the character with the uh sun lamp set to it and if i move this around you can see that it's changing the direction of the shadows you can see the shadows coming over there if i go to the top view here and i take this and i oops i take this and i start to left click and drag this around you can hopefully see on the left there it's changing how the shadows the lighting and the shadows are done but if you go here to the sky settings and you change this to the sun lamp by left clicking and selecting it here or you can actually take this little pipette and select the sun it will actually change the color of that background according to where the sun is located as far as this rotation here but also if i go to a side view if i take this and i move it up you can see it's now starting to be like a sunset color and if you make it go straight up and down it's more of like a midday sort of like lighting okay and the background color is sort of set to that so it based on how the rotation of your sun lamp is here it can change the overall coloring of your scene and depending on what you're doing if you're trying to like make something really quick just to get some you know really quick lighting and and rendering and you just want some you know relatively natural lighting this could be something that you're looking at doing um or if you have a sort of environment uh like a city scene that you already have in 3d and you just set a sun lamp in there or if it's an interior that you have and you want to set up a sun lamp with this environment that could be a use for this but overall a lot of people wouldn't really want to take this approach and it's usually not recommended because you don't really get realistic reflections and things like that in your scene you can see i set like a black material for this sort of um stand that he's on and then on here there's a white and that's so that we can see the difference in the reflection down here and the shadow and then also the uh more matte material here for the white shadows uh or on a map material here for the shadows and how that sort of reacts to the environment and our lighting so basically that's kind of how the sky works now you can change some of the stuff here and what i mean is the sky environment lighting here and what you can do here also is you can change the turbidity which um it's kind of like how hazy or clear this sort of sky texture is in the background so for example if i set this to a one actually i think that overall that's kind of as clear as that might get but if i change this to a five or something you can see that the um it starts to change the sort of coloring in the background to some different stuff so it's a lot more like smoky or hazy in the background and you can also change the uh the ground color so if you click the use ground color here you can actually select a color and again it's not super realistic but you may come up with some sort of reason for using this not really sure what that might be like i said it might be something like um a cityscape that you're creating or something like that but there's better ways to sort of make a more realistic lighting situation now what you could do is you could actually go to your sun here and go to the uh object data properties that looks like a little light bulb when it's a lamp texture or a lamp object and you can change the color here so rgb color you can change this to a different color and that will change how your scene is being lit doesn't look great uh but better than that is this temperature setting here so basically what's called black body temperatures are what things look like when they are heated up so a light bulb um depending on what it's made out of there will be a different sort of temperature color that's associated to it so for example 3500 is more of a red color and then if you go to 7700 it's more of a blue color like you would see with natural light so that's a more realistic way to sort of um color your scene and you could you know make this go way up if you want and change this to a more bright light or whatever it is so i'm going to set this back to like 5500 or something like that and what we're really going to do we're going to set this back to rgb color and the sun lamp um you could use it's it's uh i would say for interiors and stuff it works pretty well because it will cast shadows more realistically than some other lighting setups or hdris but really for certain objects like this you want often you'll want a more dynamic sort of setup for your lighting so i'll show you how to do that in a moment so we're going to do here is i'm just going to set this to the regular viewport shading and i'm going to save my session and i'm just going to delete this for now and what we're going to do is we're going to focus on some of the different ways that you can do environment lighting now you could do a flat color so if i go back to the rendered view here and you set this to a flat color you can change this to just a complete white like it is here which could be for certain people scenes that might work you could change it to different colors if you're doing motion graphics or you are doing some kind of um stylized animation having your the lighting of the background a specific color like this may work i've seen people use this for that you can also use the temperature here which works out well as well and the gain will just basically increase the brightness and the exposure you know you can kind of like play with these to show exactly how that's working so left clicking and dragging or you can type in the information but really again this is not the best way to light a character like this so if we go to none we can actually set no lighting in here and that could help if you're or that could be useful if you're trying to do just um lighting with very specific lamps and stuff like that so that's how you basically make no environment lighting now what's usually used in a lot of realistic lighting and realistic rendering is an hdri light so if we go to the rendered view here and if we have nothing here we actually have the temperature set to this number here but it doesn't matter um what you'll want to do and i'll just uh remove that there you'll yours probably looks like this and if you have set this to a color or something like that it should look something like this and i'll set the gain back to a 1 and the exposure back to a zero so this is kind of what you get because you don't really have anything open yet so what we're going to do here is we're actually going to take where it says hdri you're going to open this and you can go to hdrihaven.com to get these if you go to hdri you can basically choose any of these 360 degree mapped images to go around your environment so if we uh let's just choose a very simple one here we're going to use this studio small and again you can get these at hdrihaven.com and that's going to set up a relatively realistic lighting setup because it is taking an environment and all of the um sort of like the color and the brightness and lights that are inside of the room it's taking that into account a lot of times when you are lighting an object it may seem unrealistic because uh you are just using point lights or something like that and it's your object is not able to actually reflect the things that are inside of the room in order to make it look more realistic so even when you're doing a basic studio um lighting setup or something like that i often will recommend people to use this approach to begin with because you automatically get a more realistic looking uh render and if we just take a look at this it kind of already is starting to look really really nice with just this now the cool thing about using these is you can even spin the background by taking this z-axis rotation right here you can change this to like 90 degrees or something if you don't like how the background was set up before you can rotate it around and get it to be kind of where you want it to be so i can left click and drag this here and move it around in the background to get it where i want it to be i'm just going to set this back to zero just like that okay now the cool thing is uh when you're using this hdri the gain and the gamma they all do different things so the gamma the best way i can kind of explain this is that the gamma kind of increases or decreases the contrast of the image in the background so if i set this to a 0.2 or something like that the back you can see how everything kind of gets washed out in the background okay and if i set the gamma to a 2.2 or something like that it's going to be really really contrasted okay so if we set it to a 1.2 then it's going to be a little bit more contrast than normal and if i set it back to a 1.0 it's back to the original so if you find that you want a lot more contrast you want it to be harsher shadows and you want a lot more brightness in the very specific bright areas you might want to increase the gamma and if you find that it's a little bit too harsh you might want to drop this because it's a little bit too harsh for what you're trying to go for another thing you can do is what's called the gain here and the gain is basically the amount that's actually being applied to the overall sort of like brightness of the image so you can see right here um where if you just kind of like hover over it says gain brightness multiplier so if you set this to a 10 or something you get a lot more brightness happening okay um and then if you set this to a 0.2 you can basically start to turn off your light so a lot of times what i'll end up doing is if i want something to feel a little bit more studio without so much of the background um hdri sort of like manipulating the lighting too much or the you know the overall contrast of shadows and the lighting and everything i'll often set this to like a point one or a point two and then set some other point lights and stuff in the scene because that way it um will give me the more realistic background reflections like you can see sort of in the bottom here and especially for metallics and stuff like that you really kind of need a lot more of that reflection uh reflected light and everything in the background so often i will set this to like a 0.1 or a point two or something like that and then set up my other lights in the scene so again this is kind of a crucial step in creating sort of like realistic lighting in your scene but it's not always necessary you don't always need to have this and like everything it just really depends on what you're trying to do hdris do tend to speed up the render quite a bit instead of using specific lights inside of your scene but again it's really up to you on what you need your lighting to do so for me to show you what the other sort of like point lights and stuff we're going to do i'm going to kind of move away from these environment lights right now we're just going to go to the regular 3d view here i'm going to save my project and over here i'm just going to reset this back to the default one and then go to none here and what we're going to do is we're going to hit shift c over here in this part of the viewport so i can set the 3d cursor back to zero and i'm going to add a light and this time i'm actually going to add a uh let's do a point light let's start from here so let's hit g and we're just going to grab it and move it up here somewhere so we'll just move it kind of near the face of the character and i'm going to skip some of this stuff here as far as the rgb color and the temperature because we already went over that and it's basically the same temperature is going to give you more realistic coloring to your light and rgb color allows you to color it so we're understood in that now the next thing here is uh basically how bright we're gonna make this thing and what i like to tell people when they're moving over to lux core is if you change this to power this is what most people are used to because this is more the um more of an equivalent to what cycles does okay so if you take the power here and you increase this it's going to be more sort of like the same of what you would expect to see when you're using something like cycles um and the efficacy down here basically means for every unit that you have of power how much more uh sort of like brightness is there so the increased number down here will mean that every time you pump up the power it's going to be more bright the best way to kind of show this is to or to explain this is kind of to show you so let's go over here to the rendered view and again we set the background to a none so we shouldn't see any lighting in the background and all we have now is this point light and if we move it around you can kind of see how the lighting is affecting our object here and before we get into kind of the um the details of you know some of the power settings and all this one of the most important things that i try to convey um to people sort of like beginning with this with lighting and everything is you know kind of like you have to know sort of the mood and uh get some reference material of what kind of scene you want okay so if you wanted something incredibly dramatic something like this might be helpful because you have this very stark contrast between your your lit and your unlit areas okay so maybe a single point lighting with a little tiny bit of your environment lighting might be something you're going for but you know that's kind of beside this uh uh tutorial but i just wanted to kind of point that out like before you really start setting up your lighting in your scene think about or do some research on different lighting setups that really appeal to you and what you want to see in your scene but one of the things that you need to think about is how harsh do you want this lighting to be and one of the things that really determines that is this right here the radius of the light and if you set this to a low number like a .01 the shadows become very very stark you can see that the uh the sort of like edges here and down here and along the floor it's very like clear it's like there's a very sharp line between the shadow and the lit area here and if i take this radius and i set it to a one for example you can see that the uh it's much more soft kind of like something that you would see if you were lighting for like a portrait or something like that a lot of times they'll use a soft box or something like that to soften a lot of the shadows so that you get a little bit more visibility in the contours and it doesn't feel so harsh so again it kind of depends on what you're trying to do for you know your character and i would think about that before you really start setting up your lighting in your scene now if like let's say this is the radius that you wanted for this particular uh character you wanted it to be you know soft shadows like this but it was a little bit too bright you just go over to the power here and you set this to maybe a 10 or something like that and you can control how the lighting is done as far as the um the luminance values and all that using this power setting here and again the efficacy here if we take this and we multiply this by two if you look over here you can see that basically it's getting more and more bright if we hit that to you know multiply by two again you can see that it's kind of like brightening that up so it's sort of a mixture between the efficacy and the power will allow you to have different types of lighting as far as the strength of that lighting and then again the radius here will change how the shadows how soft those shadows are or how sharp they are depending on what you're trying to do now we're going to talk about ies lights not right now we're going to talk about that in a little bit but let's go ahead and move over to spot and i want you to really pay attention to how this soft lighting looks right now because it is kind of nice okay now if we go over to the spotlight right here and if i take this little yellow ball and i sort of move it over to the character it looks really sort of like drastic you know it's like very dramatic okay and part of it is that it's like set right here right next to our character but the other thing is that the uh unfortunately in my opinion unfortunately these uh spot lamps do not support soft shadows so if you look here at the arm and the leg right here you can see it's very very sharp contrast between the lit section and the unlit section and again if you look at the bottom here you can see that there's a very sharp contrast between this and this right here so let's just kind of pull this away a bit and i'll show you kind of like the sort of unfortunate thing about this so you know say let's actually pull this down a little bit say you like this sort of you know lighting as far as the amount of contrast but you want the shadows to be softer that's not really going to happen you can't really control the softness of the shadows with these spot lamps so unfortunately that's just what it is but you know just like cycles you can change the blend shape here so if you take this and you left click and drag to move it up you can change the the way that the cone is sort of making the softness in the uh projection of that lighting down here in the bottom but the contrast between the shadow like the softness is not there okay um the size kind of doesn't really do much except for change the size of the actual shape of your cone so that's all that does it doesn't actually change the size of the light here which is again unfortunate and you know sometimes this is helpful and usable to use in your scene because you want to see this other times it it doesn't and in my opinion it's just uh something that i tend not to use because i really like to have control of those soft shadows now the way around that is to use an ies texture but we'll get into that after we do area lights so let's go on over to the area light here and the same sort of thing here as we've been talking about as far as the power here if we change this to like let's say 150 you can see that now it's a lot more bright and we can actually change the way that the shadows are being projected here so if i take this and i scale this up you can see that it's really soft it's more of like what you would expect to see a soft box or something like that so the lighting is very soft on the face and overall on the character and if we take this and we scale it way way way way down over here in the viewport we just hit s and scale that way down you can see that the shadows are getting a lot sharper okay you can control that here as well and one of the cool things about uh the lux core engine if i scale this back up a little bit is you can actually change the angle of the spread so if i take this and i reduce this down you can see that it's actually changing how much of it's kind of like controlling if you've ever seen barn doors on a um a lighting setup inside of a studio which are these little things that are on the edges that sort of control where the uh the light is directed it directs that more into the area that you kind of want it so if you needed to have that sort of spot shape to it and you didn't want to use an ies texture or something like that you could use the area light and just take take the spread angle here and move it down a bit and you can see there it's sort of directing it to that area but you also have control over the softness of the shadows and we can just take the power here and change that to make it a little bit more what we would want it to look like now we're going to skip this laser one here because the laser really doesn't help that much um you can see that here it sort of makes this sort of effect here so if you wanted to sort of have like a really bright light coming into your scene you could do that um you know maybe you're making some sort of dramatic environment where you want some volumetrics and this sort of thing is what you want to do it's really up to you on if you want to do that it's not really something that i tend to do unless i have a lot of caustics in my scene where i'm trying to make the refractive caustics shoot out from glass or something like this but if you wanted to make some dramatic lighting in your scene with some um you know background lit uh volume metrics this might be something that you could do or if it's an underwater scene and you want some light rays sort of like bringing brought through in the back in a very very sharp way this is something that you could do um but it's not something that i would say is very useful for rendering a character or something like that so let's go and look at the last sort of way of lighting your scene i would i would argue which is using the ies light textures so if you go here click the ies light here and instead of text we're actually going to use file and you can go online and look for these um if you just do a quick search for like free ies textures you can find them i'll put a link to the ies textures that i downloaded for free in the video description below but if you go in here click ies file and i'm going to i'm going to navigate to where i have saved my ies lights and i'm going to organize this by name here and i have a png that's also associated with an ies texture file and this kind of shows like the shaping of what that light is going to look like when it's projected in your scene and ies lights are basically um a realistic interpretation of what a light would look like if there was a particular type of bulb that was in it so a led led light or certain types of lights that are used for studio lighting and stuff like that you can see are all in here so one of the ones that i really really like is the three lobe umbrella here because it kind of is a very highly contrasted sort of look to a scene so if i double click on this texture here and then i'm going to click this right here that says flip ies z axes it's now projected into my scene and what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to go out of the rendered view there and i'm going to try and um sort of hover above the scene so that i can show you more of what this does now how it works and this is a little bit tricky for most people is that wherever your light is directed to where it's been rotated to it's going to project that light in that direction so if i for example if i go to the area light here you can see that it's projected down towards my character so the point light even though you can't see where it's being oriented the uh point light has to be directed into that area and an easy way to do that is if over here i hit shift a and i add an empty and i grab that on the z for example i'll pull it up here and i'm just going to show you what happens if i take this and i go over here to the object constraint properties and i go to track two right here and then i'll take this little pipette here and i'll choose this as my target now the light is being directed at that empty and if i take that empty and i grab it and i move it down you can see on the left here that it's it's controlling the orientation of where the light is being projected and you can easily just move this around and you if you have three or four lights you can easily target that using this empty and the same thing the same things apply here as far as the way that the light is being projected and the shadows that are being cast so if i take this and i go to the object properties here and i take the radius and i put this to a point zero one you can see that the uh the difference between those sections of the lobed uh v or whatever it's called you can see those very clear distinctions between the areas that have more lighting to it and has the less lighting to it right here you can see that difference and then you can also see the very very sharp contrast between the shadow and or the unlit area with the shadow and then the lit area here and on our character if we zoom in a little bit you can see the same thing there there's this very very sharp section here and that's basically how that works and you can change this here to a instead of a 0.01 for the radius to 8.25 and it will soften that up a bit so you can see that now the shadow's a lot softer the other thing down here you'll see that it says right here for rendering the ies profile is baked into a texture use a higher resolution if there's finer detail so basically if you want to get more detail you can hit times 2 here and let's do a times 4 here and it will depending on the ies texture you have the more detailed the information that's in it the more that it's going to present here now i've noticed that some of the things or some of the textures i'm just going to save my file real quick some of the textures that i use for ies they don't actually for some reason they're not supported with this engine so if i go in here and let's choose a different one i think this one doesn't work so let's grab that oh that one actually does and you can see that the the way that it's lit you see all that stuff right there really really neat effect uh if you want some sort of more ambiance uh to your scene you might want to add something like that um for some reason some of them don't work and it'll just be black in here and you'll sometimes end up with a error so you'll just have to choose a different ies texture and you know find one that works with cycles i know that all of the ones i have work but for some reason in lux core some of them don't one thing that you really should keep in mind is that if you go to the point light here and you change back to the area light and you have an ies texture here you'll have to click this off otherwise it's going to try and map the ies light to that plane so make sure that you click that off see there it doesn't quite work right so just make sure that you click that off there so that's going to pretty much be it for this tutorial hopefully you learned how to change the lights in your scene and utilize them according to what you need it to look like the best recommendation i can give to you is that you do some research and really make sure that you know what kind of mood that you're trying to set with your scene before starting uh to add lights into your scene because that will save you a lot of time and uh again please if you liked the video go ahead and like and subscribe to the channel or consider becoming a patron and i will see you next time on dj tutorials

Channel: djtutorials

Views: 1,230

Keywords: luxcore, blender, crash course, beginner, installation, tutorial, render engine, alternative render engine, blender render, light tracing, how to, lux renderer, luxcore render engine, blender rendering, blender raytracing engines, materials, luxcore materials, luxcore render, luxrender, 2.9, 2.8, laser, environment lighting, ies, lighting, light texture, point, area, lamps, lamp, hdri, spot, spotlight, spotlamp, shadows, harsh shadows, flat color, lighting a character, character, sky, lights, light

Id: SkzzYm_DfeA

Length: 31min 9sec (1869 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021