Master Bright Lighting in Blender! (Blender lighting tutorial)

my lighting sucks that's something I used to say to myself all the time when I was starting out in blender but since then I've come up with tricks and systems that I use in all of my renders to give them the character that I've always wanted them to have so in today's video I'm going to show you from scratch how I get my renders to look bright and Airy but not Overexposed or dark and drab just that perfect medium to really make them look professional all right so this is the first scene that I'm going to break down and I'm going to show you my entire process from scratch so there's no confusion and you really understand everything that I do now today's video is brought to you by grayscale Gorilla plus they've been a household name in the Cinema 4D Community forever and they just released their massive library for everybody including us blender users and a really nice add-on to import these materials so I'm going to be using their library to build these scenes and show you what I do let's start out with the first problem which is a lot of beginners use a lot of small lights to try to fill in those dark spaces which just gives you no direction for what you're doing instead use one really big light to really establish what you're planning to do in the scene so make sure you really have an idea where the direction of the light is going and just kind of be clear about your direction here so I'm just going to navigate through their lighting Library tons of hdis here I'm just going to try to figure out what exactly I want here I'm going to go ahead and pick an hdri that has a really big establishing light in it now they do have a lot of Studio Lighting in this case I want to go ahead and use an indoor one I'm going to go ahead and pick this one so as you can see this HD has a large light source right here now I'm just going to go ahead apply this to the scene here's how it looks and we have that huge establishing light right there now a really cool trick I learned in photography is using a big bounce board to reflect the light back so here's how it looks without notice the light right here and then I put it back in and it's just going to fill in we're going have big highlights here and just getting those Shadows to look nice so now the next thing that's going to make it really hard to get your SC to look bright and Airy is having dark material so don't pick dark wood colors or dark stucco or anything that you're using make sure you're on the brighter end of the materials so it helps that light bounce around and reflect and just look really nice so for the cushions on the chair I'm going to go ahead and pick this suede Light Beige material it's really nice now since the suede has kind of a little bit of a yellow in it I do want to pick a wood material that has some yellow in it and again has to be a bright color um I think the caramel Oak number two is going to be a really good choice for this one we're going to go ahead and get a bright colored cloth material for the blanket now this rug right here is going to be really important because it is so bright we are going to get light that bounces down and up we're going to grab this concrete material for the floor so for the cup which that cup model is from grayscale gorilla plus they have some really cool models there I'm going to use this really nice ceramic material now this material I know is going to be really bright and bounce that light around so we're going to use this uh drywall material for the wall behind the chair now great scale gorilla plus comes with an add-on for blender that's going to import and plug in all of your image textures for you so you don't have to do that and what's nice is once you're done you can make those materials Assets in the asset browser so you never really have to import them again so it really makes your life super easy now the next thing that is going to really sell the fact that this is a bright Airy render is having these spots of highlights all around your scene which is something that Goos are really really nice for so I'm going to look at the animated goo section and because this is kind of an indoor scene I'm going to go ahead and use this window Gobo all right so I'm going to have one kind of Hit the chair right here and then I want have one more back here just to kind of have some highlights back there but look how nice this looks now when it comes to how bright you should make these Goos I try to make them almost Overexposed which like that's Overexposed we try to just get pretty close to Overexposed that we still have some data for postprocessing but still is brighter than the establishing light all right the scene is all finished so let me recap everything that we did so you can apply this to your scenes so the biggest thing have a big establishing light this hdri that we picked had a big window that's the light uh we also used bright colored materials that is really going to help bounce that light around and make it feel bright and Airy uh we used Goos to get those highlights and we also used like this big bounce board to bounce the light around to make it nice and soft uh all of that combined is why the render looks so nice um so there you go let's go ahead and hop on to the next scene all right so for this next one I kind of want to have a little bit of fun and create a mograph looking scene I'm just going to take this uh ball here and just cut it up into four pieces so that'll give me some opportunities to add some materials I'm just going to pull up on these edges and then bevel it and this is where the ball is going to be able to roll now style-wise I'm going to cut it in half the same way that I did to the sphere and that'll kind of keep it a really cool looking style all right the scene is now ready for materials and part of my process is I like to add the materials before I add the lighting depending on what I'm doing so for this example I'm going to add the materials first cuz that largely affects the decisions I have to make for lighting later cuz the way things are going to be bouncing around again sticking to the idea of having bright colored materials I'm going to start with this marble material I'm going to go ahead and grab a nice just simple plastic material this blue looks really good let's take it a different direction I'm going to grab this composite wood I like this one we're going to get this brass hammered uh material now I want to give myself a challenge on this scene and just use one light to light the entire scene um I'm looking at the AAL light map hdris here and honestly this one is probably going to be really good cuz it's going to be pretty dramatic add some detail uh and also present that challenge that I'll show you how I like to go around it all right so I applied it to the uh the world um typically I'm not going to be using them like this but I want it to be as big as possible otherwise you would apply them to area lights and use them as more controlled really cool things like that uh but here it is and I'm just going to go ahead and I want you know rotating it I'm just kind of put it back where I had it and giving it a really nice highlight right there now like I showed in the other scene I'm going to use another reflective uh white wall to bounce that light around but it's still too dark so here's a fun hack you just apply a white material to the board and then here on the value I'm just going to pump the value up to a value of two and that is going to reflect even more light onto the scene I mean you can go insane with it maybe like 20 and overblow everything so it's really going to bounce that light even better so you can kind of hack it and get a really nice scene with just one light now when it comes to lighting and trying to get the most out of your scene uh never ignore post-processing so I'm going to head over to photoshop and use one of their tools and I'm going to show you how I get the most out of my lighting for my scenes so we're here in Photoshop and I love to use uh curves uh for this and just to boost it a little bit because we have a pretty good highlight here uh and it's you know like I said almost Overexposed so we want to be careful and you know make sure we don't blow that out so what what I'm going to do is just get a DOT here and get a DOT here and you can see how quickly it really makes that scene nice and bright and you can really play with all of this here um but what I don't like to do is this you know start making those dark portions darker we definitely want to have um healthy amount of contrast but we want this to look nice and you can go in here and say add a little bit of texture possibly Clarity but I'm going to leave that b maybe boost that up uh contrast can be brought up a little bit uh but here it is all finished and beautiful and bright so there you go this is the finished piece and that is my whole lighting tutorial uh I've done a couple but really I haven't done one step by step kind of getting into the nitty-gritty of my whole lighting process so that is that's that um I want to give the biggest thank you to grayscale gorilla Plus for sponsoring the channel they're actually the people that I found out about blender from to begin with I was using Cinema 4D before I was using blender uh so it's so cool to be sponsored by these guys I actually believe in what they're doing and I believe in their product so if you want to check out grayscale gorilla plus that's going to be linked in the description again I love these guys I love what they're doing and they're really putting out quality uh so with that being said thank you guys for watching and I will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 54,707

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Id: KgqyWeF09wE

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2023