Realistic Lighting - Blender Tutorial

hey guys it's Steve here from CG geek and this is a video that I've been wanting to do for a while now and I'm really excited about so here's how it's gonna work I'm actually taking an artwork from someone that were struggling to achieve realism in their scene and I'm going to be showing you guys how to improve the lighting improve some of materials and then do some compositing effects to make this scene look realistic so here's the scene I'm gonna be working with and you can see that the lighting is suffering a bit some of the materials aren't really coming off realistic and there's overall kind of a flat look to it let's kind like a video game and after I'm done with it this is what its gonna look like so you can see the lighting looks a bit better we have some nice environment lighting coming ants and my shadows and overall I think it just looks a lot more realistic so if realistic lighting and materials interest you stick around for the rest of the tutorial man let's get going before we get started though I would like to thank Vikings war of clans for sponsoring this video Vikings war of clans is a refreshing new take on the classic old-school RPG strategy games if you're a fan of those you'll love this game know how to manage people will be a clan leader and reign your Empire or if you have the killer instinct maybe you can annihilate your enemies still and if you're gonna kinda miss my heart use your skills to build a prosperous city the Vikings game recently reached 20 million players don't miss it let's help the Vikings to reign again is still a game right now with the link in the description and get 20 free bonus gold oh hey didn't see you there just playing some Vikings or clans anyways out of the video okay and here's the scene that we'll be working with this scene was actually created by Ian and I'd like to give a huge shout out to Ian for allowing us to use his scene for the purpose of this video if you want to check him out on Instagram he'll be in the description there but as you can see the scene is pretty nicely laid out I mean if it was up to me I don't know if I would change too much I'd probably give a little bit more of a focus point but the composition isn't really the purpose of this tutorial the purpose is to make it look more realistic and as you can see with the scene right here if I was to switch to a rendered view right now and we let this go a little bit so here's the scene here wants to switch to a rendered view and you can see that everything is looking pretty flat which makes it look pretty fake and not exactly realistic like we're going for and the reason for that is because and this is a mistake I see a lot of people make is when they use an HDR in an interior scene like this it doesn't really brighten the scene up very much it's very dark unless you add other lights to the scene so let me explain this right now by first I'm gonna take out all the interior lights that is added to the scene currently so I'm gonna split my window right here real quick and I'm just going to grab a lamp here so we'll grab this lamp and then I'm gonna go select and we'll select all by type lamp we'll just delete all the lamps currently in the scene so I'm gonna hit X and delete and you can see already it's looking a bit darker in our scene and there's a few more lights that still need to be deleted so I'm gonna zoom in here a quick just hit period to get right in the middle of our scene and then you can see we have some fill lights up here that was added to the scene and if we delete this as well you'll see that it gets even darker and the scene okay so I just quickly went through and finished taking out all of the lights currently in the scene so we can kind of start from scratch with the lighting and I also want to mention if you guys wanted to follow along with this same file and do the same realistic lighting you can download this blend in the description thanks to Ian for providing this so you can see right now if I switch to rendered view I also disabled ambient occlusion as that was checked and I don't want that check right now so disable that I turn the environment strength completely to zero so I switch to rendered you should see complete blackness except for a few of the interior lights that are basically just mesh lights inside like a bulb I'm leaving those okay so here's what we have a very dark scene was just a few into your light bulbs and if I turn the strength up on our environment map you would see that it's still very dark in here even if the outside is eliminated it's still very dark in here so let's start by taking a new HDR and kind of controlling that light to see what we can get brightening up our interior so when you're picking an HDR first of all I recommend going to HDR Haven because it's a great site to get great HDR s and just go to the outdoor lighting HDR s and you want to pick an HDR that has the Sun at the angle that you want now because we're in an interior and it's kind of hard to let light in I want the Sun to be near the horizon so we have some longer shadows you can look at the previous here and see how long the shadows will be so want some longer shadows something like this or something like this one is pretty good too but where I went with is actually if I scroll down here just a little bit it's called dry field and this one has a nice low angle Sun so it shoots some nice long shadows into your scene and will just illuminate an interior scene very nicely so let me see if I can't find here real quick right here dry field and you can see this a nice long shadows on it and it's easy to orientate the Sun right in this exact spot that we need to have lighting coming from where we want so I'm gonna go ahead and do that right now I'm going to open up a new HDR so I'm going to delete that one click open now we're just gonna grab the drive filled HDR right here and now if I switch to rendered let me turn off some of these layers so it goes a little bit faster just so we have our roof our interior and not anything behind it so the Rhinos go little bit faster so I'm gonna switch to rendered night now and we'll see what we get alright so here's what we have still very dark but let's kind of orientate this HDR to get to the right angle that we want to have the Sun kind of pouring through the open windows here so I'm gonna switch down here those make this a little bigger I'm going to switch to the environment materials here so here I've just set up a very simple environment texture into our background with a mapping and a text record at node coming from the generators section I'm gonna orientate or HDR so I get the lighting coming in just how I want so I'm gonna do this by rotating along these axes and just paying attention to the shadows and where the sun's coming from and seeing when I get the right lighting for my scene now I've already oriented or before you played around with this a bit and I know that I want something around 620 I guess I could actually do a smaller number because it goes around a few times but that's fine just 621 will work for this and then you can see that we're not really getting much lighting and that is mainly due to the porch so I am gonna have to modify the mesh here a little bit I'm going to take off this extra section of roofing just to allow more light to pour in and leave certain areas of it like this little choice area because that looks cool but I have to delete this section of the roof so to do that I'm just gonna hover over it and hit L to select these portions of the roof and hit X and delete the vertices now you can see we have a few framing boards here that we can take down but overall we get a lot more light pouring into our scene so sometimes you have to you have to go without a porch or something just to let more light into your scene and you can see it's not looking half bad it needs a little bit of a little bit of adjustment still but we're getting the right idea you can also feel free to play around with the rotation if you want to maybe get something that fits your liking a little bit better however you want the shadows kind of falling it's going to be perfectly up to you I'm gonna stick with about a 623 though and we just have some nice shadows gonna come in a car store scene now whereas I'm working on the lighting and let's show you guys how you can actually get it brighter inside without even adding any more lights and that is first going to our scene settings here and changing it to filmic because filmic is the most important so I'm gonna go filmic log and then under view I'm going to change this to filmic this too as well I should say and you can see that it doesn't do too much but it gives us way more dynamic range in our scene so now I can take the exposure and just crank this up something high like a three point seven and you can see the suddenly our scene isn't so dark anymore and we still are retaining detail outside but everything is still bright and you have some nice sunlight pouring over areas like the bed over here and hitting other parts and stuff and it's looking it's looking pretty good not perfect but it's definitely adding a lot to our scene so what else can we do well what we can do now is kind of open up other areas of our of our house here to add a few more windows and let a little bit more lighting pour in so for example I think the chairs are a little dark over here so on our house building he let me just make this a little bit bigger we can make this a little bit smaller and on our house building over here we could open up a window in the back here just to make it a little bit more easy to see through here so I'm just going to delete a few the faces back here I'm gonna switch to face select mode here and it's like these two faces and X delete those faces and then we have another face here I'm just going to go control our add in a cut here a cut here cut here and I cut here I'm just gonna make a nice big window here it's not gonna doesn't matter if it's perfect or not because and our scene here it's not even visible so I'm just gonna delete that and you can see we already get a little bit more lighting coming through but I'm gonna have to also delete this object here so I'm just going to delete that as it's not visible on our scene and now you can see we have some light pouring over the back of our couch here and it looks quite nice a few of the things is you could add some windows up on top here as well if you wanted to so just a few cuts to make room for a window and these go a long way in adding some more lighting falling across your scene um you can even do things on the other side where you'll get a little bit of ambient light coming through if you delete a few faces for more windows on all science if you're building just to let some more natural light in like that for example and that's looking looking a lot better our scene is looking quite bright now and I think it looks quite a bit better so that's gonna do it for the main lighting aspect but now there's a few other scenes that are kind of lacking our areas of the scene that's lacking a little bit of realism I think some of the materials could use a little bit of work like this wood materials just kind of playing and you also kind of want to go for a color scheme right now the colors are a little bit all over the place I would say not I mean not too much we're just a little bit not consistent so I'm going to tweak a few the colors of these materials and also I think it looks better if the TV is off because it just looks unnatural to have a screen showing like up like that in an image usually TV doesn't render that well in a in a scene so I'll just grab the TV here go into the materials let's go to our material settings here grab a screen and basically just turn it off by what does disconnect this node right there and just add in a new node this is gonna be a shader principle shader connect that up right there we darken the screen a bit and then you can give it a little bit of clear coat to give us some shine so let's focus on this wood material little bit and I forgot to mention if you want to do just an area render like that it's just shift B and then dragging with your mouse to render just a section it goes a lot quicker so it's better for working on materials to just pop a section like that and then work in that material so I have that selected right here and here we see we have a wood material I already set up by Ian but I'm just going to create a new even simpler word material that should look very nice so let me show you how to do this real quick I'm just gonna make this a little bit bigger so you guys can see what's going on and pull our material out put over here all right just crank that's and you can see it's this black because we have nothing connected I'm gonna add a shader I'm gonna go principal shader right there connect the output to the surface a blank white board right now I'm gonna go at inputs image or texture image image texture and I'm just gonna open up a wood texture I'll include these textures in the description but this one's called twelve seamless would find twelve seamless actually sixty one now you can just follow the link in the description to get exactly what I'm using what if I connect that up here a wood texture not looking the greatest yet because it needs a little bit of TLC so I'm just gonna grab the mapping and texture coordinate here shift D it so we have our vector controls connect that up right there and let's gonna change the scale to two so this wood texture repeats a few times okay now you can see this textures very bright so I'm gonna modify the color a little bit by first putting in a brightness and contrast note it's a color bright in contrast right there and we're going to give it a little bit of contrast so I'm gonna go to in the contrast I'm real shift D add in a hue saturation and already you can see the grain kind of coming out of that wood texture a little bit more after giving a little bit of contrast I'm gonna drop the hue/saturation in here and I'm gonna take the value down to about a point four to give it a darker wood material I'm going to tweak the hue a little bit to give a little bit more of a reddish color wood so I'm gonna go to point four eight and you can see that kind of works to tweak a little bit and then you can give a little bit more saturation with maybe a point zero eight and just kind of makes that stand out a little bit more alright so now we need to give it a little bit of a bump map so to add a bump map the proper way to do it if you don't have a normal map is to do it with a vector bump node and then you can just take an image output like this one for example and use it as the height and then connect the normal to the normal and you can see right now it looks very strong way too strong and we're just gonna take the strength down to 0.1 and then we'll just add some nice subtle bump mapping to our wood and make it look quite a bit nicer now I'm going to take the texture out and connected to the roughness so it connects our controls these specular values of the image as well and if you need to tweak this you could do it with a color ramp node but in this case I don't really need to do any tweaking on it I will also give it just a little bit of clear coat so it looks like maybe this wood is finished with something and you get a little bit more for glossy look in it and that's gonna do it you could also give it a little bit more contrast if you wanted those green to really kind of pop there as you can see that looks nice and there you have it the wood texture is now changed and I believe this also changes the wood texture for a few the other areas like the wood over here I think this is just a better looking wood material and gives us a little better looking results alright and the next thing I'm gonna change is the glass material so currently there's just a very simple glass material that is set up on the scene and we're gonna do a little bit of work to make that look a little bit better so I'm going to set up a little bit more of a complex glass material but I think it works a lot better and gives you a lot more control over the scene well not adding any noise or anything so to do this it's going to be using a light path node so I'm gonna go input light path and we're just gonna use two math nodes to multiply so I'm gonna go math and then I'm sorry not multiply but add we're gonna add the shadow and the diffuse rate together so we basically want to work with the shadow and the diffuse here and then one more add node to add in the colossi rate at the bottom and then this one goes in the top so a simple glass shader I mean a little bit more than the simple glass hood a little bit more of an advanced class shader but something that will give you way more control and better results so now it's gonna be if from our fernell shader I'm not I'm sorry not a shader but an input for now and then we're gonna set this to what glass is generally eight it kind of changes depending on the thickness of the class so you can kind of play around with this to get the results you want but leaving it around a point one four one four five is close to glass and then you can change it depending on the thickness of glass to get the right look all right now I'm gonna add a transparent shader so shift a transparent and then shift a glossy the glossy is going to be changed from a GG X to sharp and this is going to be better for our reflections so we can leave the roughness at point two doesn't matter and we're going to use a shader shader' to connect the transparent and the glossy with the factor of the four now so the transparent the top glossy in the bottom now I'm gonna use on one more mix shader' and we're going to mix it one more time with a transparent node except this time the transparency in the bottom this mix shader' is in the top and then the glossy and camera rays are controlling the factor so we can drop that in there drop this into the surface and now I find just grab a section of our class here shift B to switch the camera view here shift B to see what this looks like rendered so here's what our glass noodle looks like you can see we have some nice reflections a little bit of that glossy shader coming through and everything looks pretty good if we check it over on this side as well by going shift B and grabbing some of that class you can see that we're getting some reflections as well of the other areas in the class just looking looking pretty nice so the next thing I want to work on is our curtains here so the curtains are currently set up with a pretty complex shader and basically I want to make these a little bit more oops I'm sorry I didn't have the curtains selected before these are the curtains and I want to set these up to be a little bit more translucent so the way they're working right now is they're using a transmissive and I'm just gonna kind of simplify this and add in my own shader for the curtains or the silk I should say all right now you can see a silk material with the lights hitting it is way too bright extraordinarily bright and I don't want that quite so much so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the value down right here to about a 1 so it's not nearly as bright of a silk and then I'm gonna use this also as the color of our translucent shader so I drop that in there and then that takes the value down even more so it's not quite the value of white but it's the color of this if I enable our node regular here this definitely helps with previewing materials I'm just typing note of angular you have it right there and if I go ctrl shift you can see that this color isn't completely white so it works better in the translucence later here to give ourselves a better looking results if I check another area of it right here you can see that we have some light passing through and it's not completely blown out anymore you still have some shadows and stuff come across and that's looking quite nicely so next up I'm gonna do a little bit of work on the carpet material here it already looks pretty good as you can see but the way it's set up here it's actually using a normal map with just a noise texture and that's not normally how I see it pun intended I don't know if you can be used this way or not to be honest but what I normally do is because the normal map is generally used with a texture that's meant to be a normal map so we're going to do is I'm just going to use a vector bump node connect that into the normal node and then this can be the height of the bump node and then we can control the strength right here and I can make a little bit stronger like at one point too and then I also thought that making a scale a little bit smaller here more like a 500 allowed it to show a little bit more of that textured look that you go in for and that's just thought it'd look pretty good and I'm just going to go ahead and tweak a few of the other materials around in the scene here so if I jump to our camera view here the glass over here both this class and the class back here over the bedroom is supposed to be kind of a frosted glass if I select them to you you can see this glass frosted but what I found better is just modifying the glass material that we already created so I'm just gonna grab the glass material here check that box to make its own material and then to modify it you just need a multiply node that's what I was looking for a multiply node it connected into the finale Eider here so I'm just going to go a math and then change it to multiply it and this can kind of control now the amount of glossy you have in the scene or in the material I should say and we also want to change this from sharp to becam as we can then get more of the roughness value that we want and that's gonna work to kind of give it the frosted glass look I'm gonna go about a point zero eight and then I'm just going to control the amount with this you can see that's really frosted completely glossy and if I take it down it's less I'm also gonna give it a little bit less roughness as it's more of a clear when we go more or less so here we have it and I'm just gonna leave this around a 1 I think that's a pretty good amount and if I change the glass back here from glass frosted to the new glass material we made class four you can see that that updates back there as well now I thought kind of cool to turn I think this was supposed to be more of like a mere but I thought was kind of cool to make him look like first Windows actually so what I did to make that happen is let me just select this back here and then in our viewport here I'm gonna switch to wireframe so we can kind of see the while we're looking for right here what I did is I'm gonna go out of wireframe grab this wall you go shift much let me grab the wall behind it as well through the address here not only or shift H to hide everything but these objects that were selected sonar con zoom in here and work on this wall real quick and I'm just going to make it so that it's open behind so these kind of work as windows to the outside that are frosted so to do this I'm just going to add two cuts control our pull it up right there control our pull it up right there and that should do it maybe one more on this end as well and then switching to face select mode I'm going to grab both these faces inside here mmm let me see yes I got right there X delete the face and then I can just delete the whole face in the background here as it's not visible for the scene and doesn't need to be there okay and now you can see that we have kind of those cloths frosted windows doing their thing up there and we can tweak the material a little bit now if we don't want it to be quite so quite so visible through the glass there you can make it a little bit more frosted by giving the roughness a little bit of a higher value and tweaking this multiply node so here's look and what the assets are looking like now and I think it's looking quite a bit better the last thing that I wanted tweak was the wood material behind the bedroom here I thought it just looked a little off so I grabbed that material and made it the same that I used for this one so just grab that same material go here and grab this material oh wow and change it to the updated material and it's possible you need to tweak the texturing on it but it looks pretty good I must really click that button though and make it so it repeats a little bit less now this version I'm gonna go one and one and then you can see it looks it looks pretty cool so that's the updated wood texture everything else is looking very nice so let's just give our lights little bit of love and then we'll be able to go ahead and work on the final rendering settings and getting that last bit to make it really pop so for the light here as you can see if I go to wireframe there's just a blank bulb in the inside that's emitting light and I didn't think this looked too realistic so what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to just import a bulb I'm out a link to a blend file where you can get bulbs in from blend swap for free but otherwise you can create a bulb yourself I'm just doing this to be a little bit quicker but basically I'm just going to append the bulb so once you locate the blend with the bulb you're just going to go to that bulb and I'm sorry to that blend and then you're gonna go out group and just grab the group with the bulb on it I'll include a blend file to the bulb so you guys can follow along with this if you want I did make just a little bit of an edit to it here by making the terminals lit up so it gives some light if I switch to rendered view you would see that it's a little bit you know the thought just looked a little bit better so I'm gonna grab this bulb now and I'm going to move it into position so I want this bulb instead of the emission bulbs basically inside these hanging lights let me go top view hit v grab the bulb Center it up over these lamps right about there looks good I'm gonna hit period so zooms in right on this area so I can now grab it along this that access and pull it right into position on this bulb on this light I should say and I'm gonna scale the whole thing down just a little bit smaller and then grab it along this Ed access to be right about there now that I have this I can take our mesh tab into edit mode hit L just to grab it in to ear light and hit X and delete the vertices because we already have our bulb now doing the work for this so there we go with our bulbs in there now if I want to camera whew just to check out what the lighting of this looks like another thing you want to quick do is set the material here to glass like I did here for our chandelier sort of light fixtures here and then if you want to give a little bit of the frosted glass you could try giving it that glass material for which might actually look good if we switch to rendered view here we can kind of check that out now and there you have it those light fixtures look pretty nice something to leave it at that maybe making the gloss a little bit different I'm going to hit that three on our glassy material so I can tweak a little bit here and I'm just gonna make it a little bit more rough so I'm going to about a point zero two and then I'm gonna take the amount down a little bit as well and then you have some decent looking light fixtures so with that said and done we're ready to start heating everything worked out for a final render so the last few secrets here to get a bit the best looking result possible it's gonna first be to set up some depth of field so to do that you're gonna have to turn your camera on I'm not sure which layer it is on Hugo just enable all for now I'm gonna go to my camera view here so we set the depth of field up I'm gonna first grab the objects that I want to kind of focus on like the flower here I'm just gonna hit period on my number pad to kind of zoom in on that area and then rotate around so I can see my camera here I'm gonna grab the camera and we're gonna choose limits under our camera settings we're enable limits and then I'm gonna choose the distance with our option right here on the depth of field and I'm just gonna pull this slider out until the crosshairs you see here is right over the shot in this the part of the scene that we want focused so right about four meters is good for me I'll leave that at that and then the last step is gonna be your aperture to give it that depth of field we want to choose f-stop and I'm gonna give it about a 1.4 in the f-stop and that'll be some nice depth of field also you can leave the blades on something like five to give yourself some a little bit more of that bokeh effect blur and with that done we can now change the mist settings the mist is gonna help give us a lot of depth to our scene because if i zoom out here you can see this a lot of buildings on the outside here and to give some mist is just gonna make it look a lot less two-dimensional and a lot more three-dimensional and that's what we're looking at so on enable the mist sitting here as well and then I have to go to the render layers and also enable mist here in the passes while I'm here I also scroll down you guys can see that denoising is enabled so you want to leave that checked because for interior scenes especially they can be quite noisy so you need denoising four cycles to get the best results in my opinion and then I'm gonna jump over to our world settings here and I can change the missed pass so I want to start about five meters if I go to Z to go wireframe you can see that's right about the little bit pass to depth of field is where the mist is gonna start and then I have it to set here to 80 that's gonna make it go all the way to about the last building here so we have a lot of depth then and that'll give us some good options to work with in our compositor so with that all setup we can go to our render settings make sure everything looks good and if you left everything has default if you're following along it should be good to go so you guys can go ahead and save your project now and render it alright so here is our seen rendered now with the new lighting setup as you can see we don't really need that much interior lights once you have the environment lighting working the way it should we only have the interior lights to add to the scene in creative ways like the bulbs here and light here and for this scene you really don't need to overcomplicate the lighting any more than that but we can really make it pop now with some of that compositing effects that I was talking about so let's switch over to our compositor here and there's a little bit of settings already set up here but I'm just going to start from scratch I'm gonna go ahead and delete these and we'll start over so what I'm gonna first do is if you're adding AO which I am you can see I have the AO pass here and if you don't know how to do that you just have to make sure it's enabled in the passes right there and be an occlusion and you want to add that first so I'm going to add in a color mix and let's change that to backdrop so we can see your scene I'm gonna go control shift click our image so we're seeing that in the background there let me drop this down so it's nice and big and you can see we have our image there if I go V it will zoom out a little bit and that'll help so there we have it so let's first add this ambient occlusion in and to do that is just going to be the AO on the bottom sockets the image in the top sockets and that is going to speak to multiply of course and then you can see a oh right now it's a hundred percent ambient occlusion and I don't want that much so I'm gonna drop this down to be about 0.4 or 0.5 even and you can see that before and after Amy inclusion can sometimes just add a little bit of detail you can see long rafters and stuff it makes it a little bit darker another thing that I did change when I worked on this image earlier is it did change the ceiling as the material I felt was just gonna off on the ceiling boards here and you could easily tell it it's tiled as well right here so what did it change the ceiling boards but I didn't do it in the tutorial so that's up to you guys if you want to change that but elsewise let's move on so I'm gonna go ahead and add some mist let me go color mix and we're gonna use the mist as the factor I didn't see right there that's a hundred percent mist and it looks it looks kind of cool actually but not exactly the amount I watch so I'm gonna change the color first to be a little bit of a greenish blue something like that I think that's looking pretty cool and then we need what's a little bit that's not greenish blue I don't know what I was doing looking at the wrong thing all right it's a little bit of a blue hue like that I'm gonna duplicate the mix shader' one more time I'm gonna get the image and to the bottom socket here so this now controls the amount of mist and we don't want them too much mist so I'm just gonna leave it right around 0.9 and that will be good next up is some rays so we have this bright bright window or doors here I guess and this would become shining some rays into our scene so what I like to add without actually doing volumetric lighting this is kind of a way of faking it and it makes it a lot quicker is it like to add the filter and we're gonna go down to sunbeams now I'm gonna take the mist pass and use that as the factor for our sunbeams and I'm also going to add a color ramp so Converter color ramp connect the image to the color ramp if I jump to this now and I give our mist length about 8.3 do we have some crazy crazy sunbeams I'm sorry I said missed again my head's all over the place I guess I'm just gonna move the location the mist to be up a bit higher and then over along the x-axis to be coming from these windows you can see that something like that gives us some nice window shine I think it looks pretty cool and we can use this now to add miss to our scene first off I want to first duplicate this color ramp and put it before the mist pass and I'm going to change this to ease and that kind of takes out everything but the window and that's what I want so now I can use just this to kind of control the amount of mist the intensity and just kind of cut it back a little bit if I want but I think that looks pretty good now before I add it back to our scene I want to give it a little bit of color somebody do a shift any color color balance and now I can just take the highlights make them look a little bit more warm by taking the highlights over to the reddish color here and then I can make the shadows look a little bit Bluegreen maybe if I wanted just a little bit that kind of a cool cool effect to our scene here excellent something like that as well and now I'm just going to duplicate our mix node here change to add and put this in the bottom socket and connect our mix node to the top sockets as you can see there this is gonna be just adding a little bit I'm just going to start with point one and probably go down from there you can see we have the mysterious coming into our our environment here now and I can tweak these even less if I want point eight zero eight or if you want to go 100% you can see extreme light rays so I'm gonna take this down to about a point zero eight our point zero seven for some light rays there and then the last thing I'm gonna do is some glows so I'm gonna go ahead and add a filter glare node and I like to start with the tighter small glows right now it's doing streaks and I'm not gonna do that yet I want just a simple fog glow so I'm going to change it to fog glow if I change the mix to one you can see exactly what is glowing a little bit more to close I'm gonna take the threshold down and you can see that we now get some of the environment they're glowing as well that's better and I'm gonna take the size to be a small tighter glow so something like that I think looks pretty good maybe crank it up just one more so about 0.5 for the threshold I'm going to duplicate this and this time it's gonna be a larger glow so I'm gonna take the size up to a 9 and the threshold you can go up a little bit higher as well so we get some of that window in the glow as well I'm sorry down a little bit so we get some the window glowing as well something like that looks very nice and I think that's looking pretty good so with that setup now I can change these both to be zero so we can see them in with our scene let that load and you can see it's working but it's a little bit too much of the glow so I'm going to turn down first of all this one can be the same but I'm going to turn this one down to about a minus 0.7 and that's just going to take the glow down a decent amount maybe even more becoming the threshold back up just a little bit as it's a little too overpowering and that looks better so you can see before the glows and after the glows it doesn't light a lot for our lamps up here as well and that's gonna be the last thing I do is add some streaks to our lamps up there at the bulbs I'm gonna change this now from fog glow to streaks we're gonna give it approximately six streaks I'll let that show up up there real quick that looks pretty cool you just need to give the threshold something higher so it's only streaking up here and give it about a four and you can see now we have the streaks just up there I'm gonna make it even more though so I'm gonna go 10 so it's only doing it up here let's that load in real quick and you can see there we have it now I'm gonna take the literation up and the mix down even more than it already is this going to be down to about a 0.9 and just turn that amount down on that and that looks pretty cool I think maybe eating less if you wanted but all in all I think that looks pretty cool so that is pretty much it for the effects now you can see everything is looking pretty nice if I add in a distort like I did in my scene just to add a very slight bit of dispersion to make the lens look a little bit less clear I'm gonna point 0 0 4 you can see that that looks ok and then I'm going to connect this to the composite if we let that load you'll see the dispersion just a little bit corners here this image is also still pretty grainy you can see the denoising effect is kind of given it some blotchy looks up here so I recommend rendering it out higher for your final render but for the sake of this tutorial I'm going to keep it here and I'm gonna show you the last bit of color creating I did using some of blenders color grading features and then also using Adobe Lightroom you don't have to use Lightroom that's optional but I'm just going to show you guys how you can quick do some effects in Lightroom to kind of make it punch up a little bit more so first off you're gonna want to save the image so I'm going to go down here I'm gonna type in rendered results so we have that right here let me pop this up here and it doesn't look like the compositing effects is taking effect yet so I'm just gonna update this by popping it in there again and we should see the compositing effects take effect we give that a second tier is compositing up there and three two one composite and so you can really see how without the compositing the window here looks like there's not too much depth and you can see right out the window and now I want a thoughts done you can see that it's much more blown out and better looking out there maybe even too much you can always take the mist down a little bit if it was more than you wanted back there but I think it's looking pretty cool so yeah you can just the mist to see a little bit more back there if you wanted and yeah whatever you want so now I'm gonna save my image save as image I'm just gonna save it as a PNG for now and we'll do a final list name final I guess caps icon oh well save that out and then what I did let me save my project to you real quick I made a new scene and just to add some different color grading in blender I went to the compositing I make this 1080 by 1920 like it our render was I open up that image from the girl u s-- nodes backdrop delete that shift a add an image so here's the image I'm just going to open it up now and you can see if I co ctrl shift that's in the backdrop there just like we saved it out and the color great I did is actually because you can't use two of these at the same time obviously you can't use the filmic and film I save it out with filmic but then I can change it to film here and I just kind of gives it like a cinestyle fill look to it I think it looks pretty cool you do have to crank the exposure up a little bit because of how much it darkens the scene so I cranked this exposure up to about 0.7 or so and I thought that just looks pretty cool maybe the 0.6 because it's a little bright but that looked pretty cool so now you save it right out of here and do your last bit of effects in Premiere or I mean I'm sorry you can do it in here but like I said I'm gonna do it in Lightroom as you have a bit more control over the color there so I'm just gonna go here again rendered results save as don't whoops I'm just gonna choose the viewer node actually because we didn't render anything and then save as image and I'll just do this final film and then here with our image in Lightroom like I said this could be done in blender as well I just like having a little bit more control over the color in Lightroom I actually I received a preset for the colors that I did right here and you can see that looks quite a bit better but I'll go through here real quick and also show you what I changed so here you can see I gave it a little bit more tint in the temperature just to tweak the white balance a little bit give it a little bit of clarity as the clarity really kind of makes things stand out you can see it gives it a lot more effect it's kind of cool but you can't go too much with this just leaving around 20 is good then I like to take the vibrance up a little bit and then counter that by taking the saturation down a little bit so you just get kind of a cool result by doing that and Jana makes it look a little bit more realistic in my opinion I interested the highlights a little bit here with the tonal curve you can see as it was a little bit too bright and just a little bit of a curve here to take the highlights down and then I played around with some of the colors here the saturation I didn't touch but I did some hue and luminance to try to pop the colors and want to pop and turn down some of the colors that I didn't need I'm pretty simple stuff here just kind of play around with it and you can see that before and after it just did a little bit of a little bit of color tweaking nothing too crazy there then just a little bit of sharpening as sharpening the image can often make it look a little bit better after it's out of blender and some vignettes so I just add a little bit of vignette here in Lightroom you can do that in blended again I've shown multiple times I don't do that in tutorials a little bit of film grain just kind of makes it look nice but there's our finished result guys is how you do some realistic lighting and improve some materials and you're seeing hopefully if you guys are struggling with the scene to achieve that photo realism this tutorial kind of helped you figure out what you might have been missing so if you liked this video leave a thumbs up if you dislike this video uh don't don't just like the video just just like only love but uh yeah leave your results in the comments if you create something cool with the help of this tutorial and I will see you guys in my next video bye bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 204,883

Keywords: Realistic, Lighting, Blender, Realism, How to, Learn, Tutorial, Render, Easy, CG Geek, 3DSmax, Modo, Environment lighting, Modern, interior, 2.8, Cycles

Id: VJ2SAx6tZKM

Length: 40min 12sec (2412 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2018