Mastering Lighting in Blender

get everyone this is Andrew price here from blender guru calm and in this video I'm going to be giving you a hands-on look on how to do lighting properly so if you ask me lighting is one of the most important things that any 3d artist can learn but it's also one of the one of the the most poorly done aspects of 3d rendering it's it's kind of if you don't know the theory behind it it's very easy to get lost and to to make many mistakes I've made plenty of mistakes throughout my time so I'm not alone in that I'm not unique but I thought recently I've been getting into some into camera photography as opposed to normal photography I guess um and and I've been learning all about the different lighting and the tonal ranges and things like that and and it really all started to come together for me and clique so I thought I would create a tutorial here for you guys that you can learn some of the things that I have learned recently I guess so well yeah so in this video it's going to be more of a theory lesson than a practical lesson simply for the fact that I mean lighting is like easy 1 2 3 punch once you know how to do it is it's super easy like a couple of seconds but the hard part is learning the theory behind it and you know figuring out all the rules and things like that so that when you go ahead and you get to your scene you actually know what you're doing as opposed to just guessing and throwing and lighting wherever it suits you so yeah the first thing let's talk about why lighting is important have a look at these two examples here I'm hoping you would say the one on the right is the the better lighting system if you did thumbs up the one on the left looks like a camera flash so that can kind of look photorealistic as well but but lighting is important for the reasons I said at the beginning there if if you if you don't understand lighting you're really shooting yourself in the foot and sort of hindering your progress or how far you can go in your career so it can mean the difference between work looking good or were looking bad it's really really crucial for every artist to have a thorough understanding of it one of the first fundamental rules for artists to understand is that lighting is equally about the light as it is the shadows so most artists I would say don't really Stan white shadows are necessary so let me explain if you don't have shadows it's nearly impossible to tell the geometry of a scene so for example if I if I show you two examples here you'll know what I'm talking about you can see that with this with the example on the Left it's almost impossible to tell what it is that you're looking at because it's bits purely let it's to record it from the front and there aren't any shadows but in the example on the right you have a shadow and it's obviously very clear then that you're looking at a sphere so in this instance the shadow actually helps you it helps your brain to figure out what it is that they're looking at so it seems that a lot of artists seem to be kind of scared of shadows like they think it's it's bad so a lot of artists either over light everything try to make sure there's lighting in every single nook and cranny and then you on the other end visit of the spectrum we've also got some artists that don't light enough or they you know light only the character and nothing else in the scene so both of those examples are bad so a good lighting system is when you have a good balance of that when you have light and you have shadows and they're working together you don't have too much of one you have a Neve about an equal balance so that's an example there of why they look good so now let's have a look at some historical examples so on the left hand side here you have a portrait of a young woman on the right hand side you have a man who is naked I guess that's kind of it anyway um now you can you should be able to tell just from looking at this that the one on the right hand side is a lot easier to see what it is that you're looking at and that is all due to the shadows whereas compare that to the one on the left hand side which is purely light it's it's got almost no shadows on it at all and and it's very hard to tell what it is exactly you're looking at now this is more to do with the the era that the painter was in then sort of their skill level I guess it was only in the Renaissance period that a technique known as Kira Kira Kira Kira is Kira yeah that sounds right Kira's Kiro came about which is essentially what I talked about before having a balance of the shadows with the light previous to that it was all about painting everything as matter-of-factly so you know if it's a portrait this is what you look like this is what you're wearing this is the house that you're in and that was that as I say it was only until that period that people started or the painters started to experiment with light and shadows and things and it became not so much a matter of capturing things you know as accurately as possible it became how can I tell a story you know how can I capture this moment in time and and that's when paintings in my opinion got really really interesting and that's where some of the you know better artworks came about if you go too far back in history the artworks get a little bit boring let me tell you anyway so that's an example there um here's another a couple more examples you can see very flat very just I mean and that's due to the absence of shadows basically and then you've got this one here which if you ask me is one of the one of the creepiest paintings I've seen there's another one I've seen which is creepier but anyway you can see the absence of shadows there is evident and it's very flat it's very boring I mean for a number of reasons it doesn't really appeal to me mainly the the creepiness and also the bland facial expressions but again there's no shadows and it's just painting things as a matter of factly as possible but in this example for you can see that uh that they have used the lighting you know a better light lighting system I guess you could call it it it's a painting but you got you get the picture the diffused light that's coming off their bodies there is painting some really nice diffused shadows on their faces so that looks kind of cool this one here is another cool technique known as implied lighting I really like that that's up we'll get into these different techniques later on but this is when you have an object off scene that is casting light onto the onto the rest of it which makes the scene look bigger than it actually is that's really cool as well okay so that that is the the light and shadow speech this next portion is about tonal range so if you have light and you have shadow that isn't enough you can't just have a light and then a black that's that's not very good tonal range refers to if you look at the dictionary definition I think it's something like the distance between white and black so it's essentially the contrasts now I want you to take a look at these two examples here you've got Center on the left you've got Center on the right now in the left example it looks harsher the contrast is very very harsh so that is a cent I mean if you want to put it in an easy-to-understand term it's the contrast of areas but it's not just that so in the example on the left you can see that you have the the shoulders and the left-hand side of the image is really over lit really overpowering and parts of it are pure white and that means you're not getting any any information there any detail any other texture it's just pure white you've lost all of that information and the same on the on the right hand side of her body you've got some some dark shadows there so in the area of the hair it's completely pitch black and and and so it doesn't work and if you want to have a look at the the highlight there for the left hand one you can see sorry not the highlight the histogram which is a technique that I'm sure photographers are familiar with but that basically tells you that the different levels for brightness and contrast this is a tool in blender by the way which I'll show you how to use later on but you can see in that little window there the the top part is a highlight and then the bottom part is the the dark range you can see that the ranges are all over the place but in the right-hand side it's a lot more even it's you don't have harsh absolute white you can see in the in that little histogram there in the top right hand corner there's no area that's hitting the top or the the complete one that you've got some area there that's hitting the bottom but it's not too bad so you could see that one of the images looks a lot more nicer and easier on the eyes than the other one does so left bad tonal range right good tonal range um so anyway let's go ahead and move on that tonal range covered so we've discussed we've discussed laying shadows we've discussed the ternal range now all I'm going to do is actually get into some of the lighting setup systems that you can use so the one that is most common and most popular and one that I'm sure you've all heard of before I would be surprised if there is anybody that's watching this tutorial that has not heard of 3-point lighting before it's mentioned everywhere as soon as anyway talks about lighting someone's bound to bring up the three-point lighting system and and that's really because it's it's fundamentally it works it's it's brilliant for almost every application it works well so if you're new to lighting and you don't really understand it yet I would recommend just purely sticking to the three-point lighting system so for those people who don't understand or don't know what the three-point lighting system is I'm going to go ahead and just list what it is right here it's three lights duh you've got the key light which is the brightest light source and that is usually placed at a 45 degree angle from the camera that can be the left or the right hand side but it's usually on the left-hand side and then on the other side you have the fill light and that is placed at a 90 degree angle opposite from the key light and that is to adjust those tonal values to get rid of that harsh black shadow that would usually that would be cast from the key light and then the final light is the rim light and that is a that sits in the background of the scene and this is really important if you have a dark background because if you don't use a rim light then you're going to have that character that's sort of it's going to blend into the background because I mean the rim light it casts just a really fine soft light just around the edge of the character just to separate it from the background there so this is what it usually looks like in blender or any 3d software I guess you have a key light again 45-degree angle from the camera if you can imagine the camera sort of like dead-on to where that green line is and then on the right hand side you've got the fill light that's a 90 degrees away from the key light and then in the background that you've got the rim light and that's just casting some light from the back of the character which is going to separate it from the background now all three of those lights are almost as equally as important as each other if you just use the key light which is what a lot of people do that's kind of boring anyway let's say let's have a look at an example of how they will look so this is with the key light only that's what you start with so that is probably I think what a lot of artists just start with and that's all they do they don't although with the rest of it which is a mistake so that that is the key light and that is the bright light source coming from a 45-degree angle from the top left-hand corner the next light is the fill light and what that's going to be doing is cleaning up those shadows as I said before you can see on the right-hand side of her face in the in the key light image over here on the left you've lost some of the detail so the fill light it fills in that area into the name and then the final one is the rim light and that is again the light from the the back of the the scene which is casting light and just separating the character from the background that's usually important for dark backgrounds if you have a light background not so much but still I try to use it wherever possible now by themselves those three renders don't work the closest one would have to be the key light but as I said before it's it's still not good because you've lost detail on the shadows it's only when you combine all three of them together that it actually comes together and it starts to look good so this is an example I've used the model from Ben Ben Dan Z if you want to grab that you can get it off blend swap but anyway that's uh yeah that that's that's how the three-point lighting system should look when it's used effectively and properly now this is a random factoid that I thought was really interesting in a survey of over 200 paintings taken from the Louvre the Prado and the Norton Simon museums more than 75% were lit from the top left that's really interesting that is fascinating to me that shows that people throughout history understood lighting the three-point lighting system it's I mean it doesn't mention the three-point lighting system there but it's I mean it's evident in all the examples that I gave you just before so it's really interesting that people understood these different rules about lighting they didn't have tutorials they didn't have books to read they just had to figure it out for themselves and in this book the universal principles of design it's a great book by the way I recommend you give it a read if you haven't heard of it it's great um but in the book it talks about how the human mind actually has a bias towards top-down lighting and and it goes on to talk about why that is and it's basically because we live on earth and we have a Sun and the Sun is in the sky which is above us so we're used to seeing things which are lit from above and it's kind of interesting it said that if we if Earth was in a different solar system and we had for example two suns then we would probably have a different bias we might prefer lighting which has you know brightness coming from the sides or something like that so it's really really interesting so that's sort of like the theory as to why we like things that are lit from above and it's also why we find things that are lit from underneath creepy so that's why in horror scenes for example you might have the scary character come out with a flashlight underneath their mouth underneath their face pointing upwards because it looks creepy it just looks weird it's unnatural to us so these are some of the are some of the reasons I guess as to why certain lighting looks better than others okay so the three-point lighting system isn't the only system that you can use obviously but it is the one as I said I recommend a lot of artists start out with but there are a whole number of other different ones which are good for different applications basically so I'm going to discuss a few of them here so a really cool one one of my favorites is the implied lighting technique and the example sets it so beautifully it's basically when you've got an object off camera which is casting a shadow into the scene so that could be a tree that could be a character holding a knife or something like that but it's really really good for for storytelling for one and for all so expanding the scene so if you have like an architectural render and you've got a shadow from a tree that's being cast onto it it makes the scene look bigger than it actually is because when the viewer is looking at that they're actually visualizing and imagining something which is sort of expanding what what they what what they're imagining in their mind basically so it's really really cool lighting technique it's not applicable for all examples obviously but it can be really effective and again if you're trying to tell a story it's great I mean with this example I mean I love it I love it I mean it's not you don't need anything to tell the story it's crystal clear what's going on and that's just from the shadows it's it's absolutely Brad so that's the implied lighting technique another one is backlighting in this example that I showed you earlier and that is when the light source is coming from behind essentially and that works because it's casting basically the light is coming from the back and it's bouncing off objects and then it's then casting a diffused light over everything else so this can create a kind of soft intimate type feel to the image so that's another lighting system that you might want to use in different applications and the other one is a silhouette lighting technique and this is a I guess it's kind of a bad example but usually it's um I mean the name pretty much says it all it's when you've got a something in the background which is so bright that it's a lot of the tonal range is lost really in the in the character or the objects that are in the front and it becomes like a silhouette so that's use in a lot of movies so if you've got I don't know in like a horror movie you've got a character that's standing in a doorway holding a knife you don't need to see their face you don't need to see anything you can just see the figure and that is enough for you to to figure out what's happening and it can be very effective for those different things strong storytelling and again for different types of moods you want to portray you can use those another one is the non key lighting system and this is essentially when you've got lighting which is anything that isn't the key light so usually using bounce lighting so for in this example you can see right here the main light source is really off the camera or in the background there but it's Castley nice bounce and sort of translucent lighting from the leaves and whatever else this is kind of also using the implied lighting technique as well because you're sort of imagining where the setting is even though you can't really see it but you can see it's creating a nice soft light over this lady that's lying down in the grass there even though it looks like she could also be dead I'm singers it's like a hatchet next to her which is kind of freaky but I guess the name being siesta I guess she's having a nap I'm very like that's a that can create a nice cool effect if that's what you're going for so again you have to think about these things and figure out if the if this lighting system is applicable for your scene then you can use that but again you have to know what you're doing otherwise you can just mess it up anyway moving on now this is a great quote it's really long but it's by Jeremy Vicker who is who works at Pixar and he said on making realistic lighting I'm aiming for fantastic believability you get enough of realism you can 3d model a house and it looks totally realistic but it's just not interesting so add something with character with style make something that's better than reality make a world that people desire to go to I think that is gray that really really does sort of give a different perspective on the whole realism versus fantasy you know how some people say like photo realism it's not good like don't bother with photo realism because you can get that just by taking a camera kind of thing and I think it's true but I think photo realism still has its place but essentially what Jeremy here is trying to say is that just photo realism isn't enough to make to make an image look good I mean you can see for yourself I mean if you have a look at like your grandma's photos on facebook from when she went on a holiday to Bali I mean photo realism I mean having something looks like a photo doesn't guarantee that it's going to look good so you have to be thinking about all of those things I just mentioned all the different rules and things that go into it because there are some horrible photorealistic images out there I mean it's photorealistic but I mean so what you didn't give any thought into how it is going to be looking good how is it going to be desirable to the person that's looking at it so I mean if you want to make a technical demo sure focus on photo realism but you also mean for everybody else really you should be aiming for that fantastic believability not just for lighting but for pretty much everything you're making so that's a great quote I thought I would include there all right so these are a few more examples of different lighting techniques out there this one is I mean I guess they're all kind of a mix of different lighting techniques I've already mentioned but this is I guess the back lighting so it's using a lot of Bounce lighting and it's creating some nice soft to diffuse lighting on all the faces in there this one is I think kind of a mix of the three-point lighting system along with a silhouette lighting so you can see that the Sun is I guess on the left-hand side of where the camera is so it's casting a nice orange sort of sunset onto the tree but it's also against a very bright sky so that in turn is making a silhouette of the trees as well and then this one here is backlighting as well you've got some I think the colors on this one are really nice and that's it's creating some nice soft dish shadows there aren't too many shadows there but the colors really make it look quite nice I love the title of this image I don't think I could get any more British it and the Sun peeped over yon staff land Hills I didn't make that up that is the actual title I think it's great and you've got this one here called Stone Hill cam a Stone Hill common the name isn't important but the I showed it to I guess show the the backlighting of the silhouette style as well it's got a very very bright sky and it's got some trees and some houses there which are not casting a nice silhouette it's also making use of reflections which is another way that you can get lighting and different tones and stuff like that in an image that would otherwise be fairly flat so if you can imagine this scene without those reflections there that would look kind of flat and kind of boring but by having them a kind of a brings it out of it so the fact that's really good for nighttime scenes as well because in nighttime scenes you don't have many light sources so it can be hard to kind of get enough lighting into the scene so if you have reflections that can reflect other light then you can bring out the scene make it look a lot nicer that's another clever technique you can use as well okay so if you're wanting to explore and create different lighting systems and venture out or whatever this is a basic lighting checklist that you can apply so if you wanting to whoops if you wanted to sort of venture out and break some rules of the 3-point lighting or whatever just make sure that you know what you're doing or you know why you're breaking the rules so here's a basic lighting checklist does this match the story I want to tell so pretty basic there think about the mood what it is you're actually trying to tell with this image and you should have a story you should have a point to an image by the way don't just you know this is an image of a couch well so what I mean you know how is the viewer supposed to feel when they're looking at it then from that you can start thinking about what different lighting systems would work well for that image another one can I easily see the geometry of all the objects so is it very easy to tell what it is or do you have a sphere that looks like a circle I mean you have to be able to see some shadow in the object so you can tell what it is that you're looking at basically and then the third step for that straight after the last one is does it have a good tonal range so if you've got some areas in it that are that have too much shadow so it's completely black or if the the main key light is so bright that you've got some highlights there that are pure white they need to fix that so you need to make sure you've got a nice tonal range and you don't have to add too much extremes and then the fourth one are the objects and background easily separated from each other so this is very important I think it I think it's probably one of the like I didn't understand it for a really long time like what the importance of a rim light is but now I do if you don't have a rim light you just have the object that blends into the background and it can just instantly kill a render so if you have a dark background or even like a mid-tone background you have to make sure the the object the subject the focus of the image has some rim light on it so that it's easy to tell the subject from the background so I can't stress that enough make sure that you pay attention to that because I didn't for a very very long time and now I can see the mistake okay demo time yay finally we can go ahead and get into blender so we're going to be creating a three point lighting system and we are going to be using this example this still-life bowl of fruit here so the first step in the three-point lighting system is of course the key light so for those of you who were listening and can member sorry that's starting to sound a little bit like a teacher um but the other key light is a light which sits at a 45-degree angle from the camera so this is our camera right here sitting directly in front of our fruit bowl so 45 degrees is in the left hand side direction and we also want it to be at the top here so you can use a number of different objects to cast light when you're using the cycles renderer here so traditionally in in the normal if you're using the blender render engine if you wanted to add a light you would have to use one of these lamps here now you can still use these lights in cycles there's nothing wrong with that now the difference between what using one of these lights and and using one of these these meshes right here is that the lamp is going to produce a sort of a single point light which is going to give you a lot less control over the shadows and the appearance of that light in the reflection of things so in regards to the shadows if you can sort of picture like if you had a light bulb and then there's the shadows that that light bulb would produce if you hold your hand in front of it and then if you put that light bulb behind a sort of a frosted shower curtain and then how to look at the shadow of your hand then you can imagine the the softer looking shadows that you would have and the simple the reason for that is that there is a greater surface area now that the light is now passing through and now that surface area is essentially becoming the light source and is creating the softer shadows so that is essentially what using one of these measures here will allow you to do in particular the plane so whenever I'm doing a lighting system in cycles I'm normally using planes and that's really its closest also to a studio lighting setups photographers use lights inside basically a frosted umbrella type coating and then that again sort of casts softer looking lights softer looking shadows across the scene okay so I've added in my plane and it's now positioned at my bowl there so I want to now position this to be behind the camera obviously like out of the out of the way and I want it to be at a 45 degree angle to my bowl there so a cool way that I've realized or I now use to to make sure that the object is at a 45 degree angle from a camera is I select the object that is the subject of the scene so in this case it's the fruit bowl so I hit shift s and I'm going to select cursor to selected and that's going to make sure that my cursor there is on the object and then if I select my lamp here and then I go down here to the pivot point if I select 3d cursor I can now rotate that lamp there according to that 3d cursor and now if I hold down control I can move it in five degree increments and if you look in the bottom left-hand corner of my screen there you can see it says rotation 45 so that means that it is now at a 45 degree angle to my fruit bowl so now I need to raise it up from where it is and I'm going to move this back to be the bounding box center that's all right and I'm going to rotate that so it's facing the bowl and in top view I'm going to do the same but see it's kind of like at an angle there but let's just sort of straighten that out it doesn't matter all too much about this sort of thing if you can imagine like you're sitting in the fruit bowl and you're looking up at the lamp it's sort of like how much lamp you can see that's going to depend on sort of how much light is hitting it so yeah now the other important thing to keep a note of if you're using a plane or any mesh for a light source is the size of the object because if it's this size and then you've got the the lamp I don't know setting it a hundred or whatever it's going to look completely different if the lamp was that size and then you use the same the the lamp powering so you need to make just keep a note of the size of the lamp according to its use so anyway let's just keep it at that for now and I'm going to use our in this in the materials here so we need to change the surface type to be emission like that and let's have a look at the fruit bowl from our cameras perspective here and I just want to have a look at the fruit also let's have a look at the yeah there we go the fruit and the bowl and let me just see wherever I placed the okay alright so I'm going to move my key light here to be on the layer so like the second layer down lair number one and I'm going to look at just the fruit bowls let's just grab that from 3d view mode and I'm going to go I'm going to save this to start with and I'm going to go into rendered viewport shading which is going to give me a preview of it okay so you can see having a look here you can almost see no light that's because the lamp is far too dull so you can do two things to increase the light source and that is as I said before increase the size of that plane you can see there's now casting a lot more light into the scene but you don't want it to be too bright or else you sort of lose the sort of the position of the land because if it's so bright it's covering half the scene then it looks like you know it does not any angle on it at all so you wanna make sure that it's at a reasonable size to the scene so something around about that I think should look good and then let's use an emission value something with a bit of kick so I've gone for 35 you can adjust that depending on sort of how big the lamp are size you want to use is and remember let's go 25 let's take a look at that let's have a look there alright so that's not too bad I think that's so that's okay now if you are as I spoke before in the in the presentation total range is very important so how can you tell that this is an appropriate tonal range well let's go ahead and have a look at that histogram that little fancy little chart that I showed you before so this is how you do it in blender so to have that little histogram you need to not like that you need to actually do a render so let's go ahead do an official render right now let's have this all fired up that did it today let get rid of some of that noise one two three all right there we go okay now if I hit n know if I hit T now we get this information that's here in this little toolbar here and so you can see at the top that you've got histogram and I think it's actually a bug in blender as to why it doesn't work at the moment but you should normally see the little chart there but for the meantime and this is what I used um in my presentation as well anyway I used the sample line and what that does is it gives you changes your cursor to be that little cross here and then I can just draw a line from the top or from any area to another area and that will now give me a little readout of the brightness values of what I've just done so you can see that on the left and the right hand side where the line is hitting the black value it's now getting an absolute zero reading and that's fine because the background is going to be different in the final render but you can see in the day around this part here in the middle I've got an area which is hitting the top bar like you don't really want too much white area hitting the top if you've got a little bit that's okay and in some instances having a lot of white there would be suitable like if you had a white background for example or another type of scene like that but generally as a sort of a rule of thumb you can use this chart here to tell if an area is too bright so let's take a look at this Apple over here okay that's not too bad and if you just sort of move this around you can also just have a look at it in real time it's one of the cool things about blender is you can adjust things and see all the different settings in real time which is kind of cool but anyway that's sort of giving me a nice readout there so I think that tonal range isn't too bad I think I might turn it down just slightly this lamp here I might just scale down the lamp size actually just a little bit okay so we've got the key light now so what I'm going to do is I'm going to position my cursor on the bowl there again and I'm going to grab my plane I'm going to hit shift D and then I'm going to rotate this oops change the pivot point to be 3d cursor I'm going to rotate that to be 90 degrees opposite where my key light is and I'm now going to scale this down just move this bounding box scale that down about there and by the way if you're curious as to the distance some of how close you should have to light to the object you just need to remember that the closer the light source is to your subject then the less I guess what's what can you say the more harsh a tonal range you'll get as in the the object that is closest to the lamp if you know I'll just I'll just demonstrate it okay let's just move this fill light to be on the second layer there and I'm going to position this yeah about there I'm going to hit renderer so choosing the exact same light lamp settings as the the key light but anyway you can see from the the view of the camera you've got a sort of a nice even light source here and then another even one over there but if I move this lamp to be closer to the scene and then look at that you can see the objects on the right hand side have a lot more brightness value than the ones that are on the left hand side so if you want an even brightness value over everything from left to right in your scene then you want to make sure that you position that that lamp far enough away that it is that it's casting even light sources so let's just move that back to where it was okay all right cool all right so this fill light as we spoke about in the presentation it's essentially it's going to be clearing up that dark shadow area that the the key light is causing so I'm going to move this down to be let's just move this 3d cursor I'm going to move that to be bad there so it doesn't have to be exactly where the key light is because you want to be picking up some of the shadows that are casting underneath the object as well so moving it down slightly can work a little bit so that's what I'm doing right now so right there is fine and I'm also going to just turn the the amount of this down to let's go to twelve let's have a look at that so it's you can see that I've put my key light on my fill light on different layers and that's just so that I can see how each one looks without the other one interfering so this is just the fill light and then if I hold down shift I can now bring it in with my fill lamp there as well and you can see that that shadow that's on the right hand side there isn't as harsh so there it is again with just the fill light like that and I think I might actually just turn it down slightly because I think it's taking out a little bit too much of the shadow so you do want some shadow but you don't want too much so again it's finding that balance between the two okay so that's cool now I want to get a little bit of rim light just on the edge of that Apple there just to kind of separate it so that it's not too too in the dark there so the way I'm going to do that is by adding in a spot lamp so I've got the two planes here and they of course match lit objects but I'm now also going to use a lamp now the good thing about using one of these are these lamps here is that you can place it behind an object and the lamp source isn't actually visible so it's one of the reasons you would use one of these traditional lamp sources here than one of the mesh lights so I'm positioning it in the background there and I'm going to move it to be about there so you've got a little bit of rim light coming off that Apple there let's kind of cool move that there and let's take a look if I move that to be this layer just over here take a look at just that with the fruit bowl and we'll give that a render let's take a look okay so you can see you've got just some nice fine lighting on that edge there now obviously it's not enough so I'm going to go ahead and turn this up to be let's go 500 see how that looks I think actually there might not be might not be far enough away and I might pull this in a little bit closer what am i sure that the bat it's not hitting the background as well okay so I can see that it is alright so I'm going to move that in and let's take a look at that now okay so it's trying to do a render there we go okay so it's picking up some of the tablecloth there as well which I tried to avoid in my final render so I'll just I'll try and move that now this is one of the good things about using a spot lamp you can use a point lamp but in this instance it was casting a light all the way over here on this on this silk cloth so I used a spot lamp so that I could separate so I could cast it sort of pointed in the direction that I wanted to so that's one of the good uses for that let's just turn that off let's have a look at it from the rendered view okay so it's 500 which is I mean it's quite a lot it's quite a powerful lamp I guess but it's not too bad I'm the size of this by the way that size value there wasn't normally in the normal version of blender but this size value will create either it will allow you to adjust the size of the shadow like a diffused shadow or a harsh shadow so having it there set to zero you can see that that shadow line is a lot harsher than if I set that to be one you can see that the shadow line is a lot softer so you do still have some control over how much diffuse you get from a lamp but obviously I think you do get a lot more control from a mesh because you can then also you know change how it's reflected how it looks in reflections and things like that but that's sort of an idea of how you can use a rim light there so that pretty much does it so if I now go ahead throw in all of my objects here I'm going to give that a render and let's have a look at how it looks okay and there we go so as you can see from the finished render you've got a nice blend of the highlights with the shadows there that are helping you to see the geometry of things you might want to do some tweaking with this you know make me fixing up some of this dark area over here maybe moving that lamp further away so there's a slight amount of tweaking that you can do to sort of improve that even further but the basics of it are covered and and that's basically that and if you want to have a look at the the the tonal range if you use that sample line there we just drag that through our scene and you can see that you've now got a nice mix of you almost almost get the black there in that silk there on the left-hand side but it's not quite so that's fine and you almost get some highlights that reach the top and make quite as well so in my opinion I think that's a fairly good tonal range and and and that's it that is the three point lighting system in a nutshell so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and theory lesson I guess on lighting so I tried to cover as many different lighting systems and styles as there is I included a lot of rules and things like that now rules are meant to be broken but only do it if you actually know why you're breaking it because I think you can get into a little bit of trouble if you don't know what you're doing that's just in my personal from past experience I guess um but yeah that's it guys I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you next time

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 244,934

Keywords: blender lighting tutorial, blender

Id: m-N149FMlWk

Length: 39min 21sec (2361 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2012