Modern Lighting Techniques in Blender

how's it going guys so a couple days ago i did this very kind of chill commentary style for a tutorial and i'm gonna do it again we're gonna talk about modern lighting techniques so different things that you're seeing a lot in new advertising using 3d a lot of stuff on instagram and pinterest product for sure a lot of product rendering uses these techniques so i'm going to break down a couple examples and i'll show you how to do it here in blender i did want to quickly shout out that i'm doing a 25 sale on real-time materials i dropped real-time materials a year ago so to celebrate i'm doing a 25 sale you can use the code one year right now on blender market and gumroad i'm gonna link all that in the description if you want to grab it i just added carbon fiber hex materials cloth all that stuff is in there it's 250 materials currently and growing with free updates so you can get that now if you'd like um but with that being said let's get into how to do this um so this is the pinterest board i created while kind of studying this and figuring these techniques out so i'm just going to point out a few of these and how i was able to kind of point uh pull off these techniques we're actually going to go after this one here see if i can make it bigger all right so you can see how just soft it is and we're not using area lights i used to use area lights constantly um but in this case we're not using them because an area light is too spread out but less talking let's just figure it out so this is i made this kind of one step at a time artwork but we'll just go ahead and hide that so this is the piece that i made that was very much inspired by that piece in terms of the lighting we can even make it softer this is a lot brighter than they did um and also just as as a fyi your lighting is pretty dependent upon your materials and your objects the reason why it looks softer the reason why xyz is going to be dependent upon your materials so if your materials are very reflective not rough at all your lighting no matter how you set it up is going to look really bad you're going to have to have different lighting xyz so with this very soft lighting you're also going to want you're also going to want materials that kind of catch that light and spread it across the surface that's going to be very rough materials not like not metallic materials these were kind of like cement and stucco and things like that that really take your materials and i think they were just like diffuse them i mean take your lighting and kind of diffuse it but we were using this spotlight right here so maybe we can do it like 2000 and now it's super soft uh but how do we do that so we we have our main light and then we have kind of i'm going to call it the ambient light i can't remember the exact terms maybe it was called ambient light so we have an hdri set at a very low um brightness and we have a point light now i mentioned i used to use area lights i used to use air lights all the time because they were super soft but this is really soft how do we do it so i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to hide him and we're going to create this so what we need to get is of course an area light so we're going to go ahead and grab an area light sorry we're going to get a point light and i'm just going to move him over here and we also need to hit s to scale it down because they're massive by default so i want my light to kind of point this way but i also want it to be slight slight diagonal but not so much of a diagonal that it's going to the light is going to hit here we only want the light to attack this portion of our artwork and i'm going to hit r twice to get a good rotation and then i'm going to move it back all right so now we have our light so we're gonna render it here nothing's happening of course so power we're gonna go to 4000 that's what i had mine set at already looks really cool um how do we make it better this is a very very harsh shadow so you're going to play with your radius so if you bring your radius to a higher value now it's much softer and then what we can also do is play with your spot size so that your spot is going to be playing with that so bring your radius down and then i'm going to kind of play with my spot size i hope my viewport isn't freezing right now typically when i play with lights it freezes my viewport so notice how we have our spot size condensed to this area and then we just go ahead and bring that radius up until it's nice and soft and there we go we've created something of course that's still pretty harsh i'm trying to remember how i handled it in my original artwork which is on my desktop yeah so i kept it relatively harsh and it's fine um and there it is it's still pretty soft so we can do something like this and maybe do five thousand there we go it's great and then what we did was um also for that hdri so if we go to zero no hdr this is how it looks so i picked a hdri that's just like an interior of a house you can use like a studio something that's still soft no harsh lights in that hdri and then if i go back i did .015 very low and what it did was it kind of filled out that very just ridiculous blackness of the scene now it gives you very soft very good lighting for just this kind of still life scene um and that's how you pull that off all right on onward on to the next one um this one's really interesting i've done a tutorial on how to actually get lighting like this animated if you want to check that out i think if you type in like ducky 3d animated lighting this one should come up but i'm going to show it to you guys anyway because this i'm going to show this a different technique than that one that one was done with built-in textures we're actually going to get different textures for that so i'm going to go ahead and go and grab that so this is the scene that i created so if i just go ahead and render this hopefully i'm not frozen um see how it looks very relaxing we have some type of greenery or plant or whatever in front of a light in this case i did use an area light so here's how we here's how i built that out so i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to hit the render button here so there's a lot of things going on here but essentially what we have is a plane right here and i took a png image of or it was just like a black and white image of a plant from textures.com and we put an area light right behind it so the area light is shining through it and one thing that's very specific that we did with the area light and so we made the spread at one degree i think that that's what that means degree so if you notice this see how the lighting looks if i bring that spread to say 10 that entire thing is gone the whole plant is gone is because the area light are by default very very very soft you can probably hear my cat eating in the background so if you bring that to one it's as solid as it gets that light is not soft at all and it's going straight through that um and so in this case this is a very general video not a tutorial on specifically how to do this but basically you could take an object and then put an area light right behind it shine through it and you can really have some fun i'm specifically using it like shrubbery greenery or something that creates a very calming effect so this looks like leaves from a tree it just looks very calming and very natural at the same time i also used blender's default sky texture using uh nashata and then i made my sun intensity at zero what's really cool about that is if you put your sun intensity at zero that sun is like not on and you're just using like very soft lighting and then we have the strength at 0.24 so very low like hdri lighting and that's really the key have a very bright light on something if the dinging is my cat eating but i'm not going to tell her to stop very bright light and then have it reinforced with a very low light hdri to fill in your shadows that's really going to help you when you're filling in those shadows to make it look even make it look nice and in this case just kind of make it look good and so that's how you're able to get soft lighting back here bright lighting here being reinforced all right this one's cool um this is actually by one of my favorite artists 3d artists ever peter tarka um and so i did my best to kind of relatively recreate this so i could show you how to get soft lighting in this case it's very similar to the last one but we're going to we're going to do it anyway um no it's not similar to the last one sorry it's similar to the first one we attacked um but we still had some fun because i wanted to point out something we did here there are three lights happening in the scene there's an area light so there's a point light hitting it here there's an area light right back here doing that and there's also um a gray hdri so if we just bring that to zero it is reinforcing a little bit right here using that just default gray sometimes it's okay to leave it on but what i noticed about peter's render is there seems to be some lighting happening not only lighting hitting here but there's some lighting happening here and i don't think it's caused by the one light hitting it i think there's another light i even think there's some lighting hitting it here i think but there's only so much i can get from this image so what did i do so from the first um from the first example i showed you same exact thing just had a very soft area light hitting it so if i go ahead and kill it hitting h now we just have that backlight boom and then what i did was i took a point light which just spews light everywhere in 360 just all over the world right right here so it's hitting here it's hitting everything but the point is it does that see how it's really dark so we'd have to kind of figure out maybe like oh maybe we should do hdri lighting i still wanted to be kind of dramatic in a sense so we popped a light back there to goof with your background and goof with your focal point so we have a bright focal point here bright focal point here and it kind of works together and meshes everything together and in this case instead of using an hdri we just kept it out of gray so you feel like you did that it would do that um but that's how this is pulled off soft lighting but kind of dramatic in the sense that this is still like you have a harsh shadow that's kind of the difficult thing like i want to be soft lighting but i don't want it to be so soft that you can barely see shadow in this case you can because you can do it here and if you want to see the render the render is actually very clean and very easy to look at so this is the final piece it's very nice it looks great where you have harsh enough shadow still easy to look at harsh enough shadow here but it's a very clean very pretty lit scene that's just nice it's nice to look at also shout out to peter tarkov whole scene here he's amazing study his lighting um his instagram is amazing for studying lighting so another one i wanted to show so another piece i wanted to show was this right here um zoom out a little bit notice how you have these streaks maybe there's an object from the light but it reminded me of a type of light but it reminded me of a really cool type of light that maybe you haven't heard of it's called an ies light and so the way you can kind of tackle these really cool looking lights is let's see i guess right here so i'm going to go ahead and show this so notice how i'm going to go ahead and show this so notice how there's some detail in this light it's not just one flat like shoot out of light it actually has something interesting going on and that's called an ies light i'll show you how to use those but i'll show you what they are and there's a website called ies library.com it's just full of just free ies lights here's ies lights um and it gives you data from i think like real actual lights if you're doing a lot of architectural rendering like i needed this exact type of light you can get them with a ies lights rather than like putting objects in front of lights and trying to make it look like that so the way it would work is you would just go here and go here download ies then what you do is you would go ahead and get in a point light so you shift a right here point light boom all right and what happens now is you have to go into the nodes so you'll click on shading and then you'll you'll have your object and so what's going to happen is you would just go ahead shift a search ies ies texture and then plug that into your strength and then you just go ahead and put in your file and then you can play with your color within the ies light and what that's going to do is it's going to allow you to have some more detail in your light and then i also looks like i took the same light and i pointed it so if we have this light here i'm gonna hit r i'm gonna hit r see how it has some detail there and then i pointed it there onto my model this is very quickly made not a very pretty scene but it talks to you about ies lighting which is really really fun and very very cool and i think very useful if you are trying to get something realistic and something interesting an ies light is really going to be a good use case you know depending on the scene now the last one is something i'm seeing a lot and something that i really really like seeing and doing in lighting and that's these pieces where it has these streaks and um on my patreon i did a product rendering two product render tutorials and i did one of these with that um you're seeing that a lot so i think i highlighted a few like this one right here implores the kind of the same idea of just this beam this beam coming down and and you can also see on both of these like i've said a couple times really bright light accompanied by an ambient light to fill in your shadow and still give you some detail so the way that that's pulled off is we're just going to go here to the render you can see i kind of i did it here very quickly and what what we did was actually using area lights instead of using a point light so instead of using spotlights which are circular um i wanted to be able to use a light that was square or even rectangular that's going to give me control over the actual beam rather than being a curve at the end of it and again with these lights the area lights remember i mentioned spread so let's see which one is this so if i did a spread of one see how just bam super super hard shadow but in that case i did five so it's still soft on the edges hard enough and then i accompanied it with another area light that's hitting it so if we look at our scene here rectangular light going down this direction and then another long skinny light hitting our object so you're getting these two point lights and then of course accompanied by a very low we're still using the sky texture with a sun intensity of zero and this one looks like the strength of 0.3 that creating this really dramatic scene for our product and this really keeps those lighting and brings your eye to the product the focal point and it looks really really cool and really effective for creating lighting just to give you an example here if we didn't do our sky texture this is how it would look actually kind of cool um but too much contrast for me so we added the sky texture filling it out giving some more detail and just making it look pretty um and that's it those are the examples i created so if we kind of look back on this pinterest board um you can see there's a bunch of these that i just say like this one is like a very obvious use of using an object in front of a light for these watches giving you this really cool effect so sometimes it's very obvious use cases but this one same thing area light hitting it here with a soft edge and then probably a spotlight hitting this with a soft edge too giving you a really cool effect and of course maybe they didn't use a ambient lighting for this one or like even this piece here um you can if you look at the tutorial i mentioned where we were animating it you can just kind of put these lines in front of your and then do that and then of course this one definitely has like an hdri around it so there's all these really really cool ways to create these modern lighting techniques that are very just good to look at kind of put you in the cutting edge of design and probably get you some jobs if you're freelancing but with that being said that's it um so yeah that's how that works this is the modern lighting techniques thank you guys for watching i hope you learned some stuff and i'll see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 87,506

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Id: y6WKm62mhIo

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2022