Realistic Lighting Hacks in Blender

can you make some noise who Oh Thank You blender conference I'm so excited to be here just and heavy guys drunk at least one cup of coffee today by show of hands at least one oh this is good I guess the rest of us have drunk two cups of coffee yeah whoa that's a good start very excited about it and now we have this sleek new hands-free microphones and that kind of makes sense free software free hands yeah and I love using my hands to think it somehow helps and if you watched at least one of my videos you know that I I'm doing it way too much over the top I just love Jett rink and some guy told me in YouTube comments section something like glib can't you just tie your hands to your chest or whatever but that helps me to think and I want to share with you the moment of my life that I enjoy very much every time I see this bottom it just puts a smile on my face look at this douche bag this is seven year old me and I was playing some stupid computer game and just by looking at my face you can tell that I was spending quite a lot of time playing games I had the dark circles under my eyes I look bad and to prevent me from dying my parents used to hide the keyboard or even worse my mom just disconnected the power cable it was cruel and I always wanted to say something like mom stop I'm not just playing some stupid games I'm doing a serious business but I understood that it wouldn't cheat anyone okay so I didn't say this and it took me some 20 years to actually reach that point where I can say that I'm doing business yeah I still do stupid things I record tutorials I run the creative shrimp blog but that's a kind of business for me we hit 43 thousand subscribers on YouTube channel and by the moment of speaking it's more like 45 thousand so it's growing pretty fast but I no longer live with parents so anyway for the next 15 I guess minutes we'll be talking about fun stuff about computer graphics and lighting and some third thing that will become clear to you in a moment I want you to take a look at this render this is one of the most realistic renders I've ever seen honestly I would happily sell my mother into slavery to be able to create something like this yeah that's how it works so I want you to guess what kind of render engine is it is it maybe cycles this is blended conference after all this must be cycles him so this was rendered technically speaking in Johannes West Marx brain because this is not a 3d render this is a painting by Johannes Westmark and he didn't use sophisticated technology to calculate the light bounces and so on he used his hands his brush his brain and some acrylic paint to create the perfect illusion of reality and he tricked me and hopefully he tricked you into thinking that what you see is real stuff or at least 3d render and by the way I contacted Johannes Westberg and I know that his watching the stream right now leave so can I give him a nice round of applause it's incredible he describes himself as an old CG nerd he started his career in 3ds Max and then he moved to painting and by the way this is not a forum this is an acrylic painting too so they just sucks the good news is that in blender we have all the tools we need to create the realistic renders a and the bad news is some of these tools are not so obvious and we have to use our cunning brains to their full potential to make use of these tools yeah and there is no such thing as make realistic renders button I asked Don he said no and actually he didn't say no he replied with a joke he said is the same button as on cameras make great photo you pressed it many times so I but I realized that that was a joke we don't have any kind of make realistic renders button not even in the next version of blender and if you take realistic rendering for granted bad things happen let me give you an example caustics if you have a glass of water I mean in real life if you have a glass of water and you put the light source behind it you see this beautiful envelope of refracted rays which is obviously called caustics and you may think all right I'll just launch blender I'll create a glass of water put the light source behind it and voila but that's not that happens what happens instead is this which is a nice render yeah but no caustics whatsoever and if you desperately want to create kha'zix it just doesn't work this way if you take realistic rendering for granted bad things happen you have to help blender to give you realistic results you often help have to help blender you have to do what in Hannes Westmark does you have to trick viewers into thinking that what they see is real in other words you have to cheat and to the right this is blender render plus some cheating but you have to do it do it like the artist and for the next 15 or 10 minutes we'll be talking about how your art may improve if you cheat a little bit let's start with caustics as I've said no need to bang your head against the wall you can just use the light texture for example you can take the photo of the caustics and just project it onto the geometry it's much much easier yeah then simulating the caustics effect you have physically correct terms it's often much more punchy and much more realistic I should say and this effect is very versatile of course you can use it for many different purposes for beautifying your zombies for example and even if the object is not refractive you can still have caustics so this just gives you a control over what you do and light texture is a very cool way very fast cheap and cool way to influence the throw pattern of a light source so how you can add the complexity to rely think you can build additional geometry to block the light to create some interesting patterns or you can influence the light throw pattern itself so the idea I want to share with you is that to achieve very realistic results you can cheat and do it like the artist point number two light Maps sometimes we can use the old-school techniques to kind of take our lighting to the next level baking light Maps means storing lighting information in textures and games in mid 90s like quake abuse this technique a lot because the computers were very slow obviously so the artists had to bake lighting information in textures because the computers were enabled to run this in real time now the computers are a little bit faster and but we still can use this technique for artistic purposes yeah and by the way this is how it looks in quake three when you remove X Church and you are left only with the light map and some color information so we can use this for artistic purposes imagine you have this kind of nature scene mushrooms one light source usual stuff so one way to approach it would be to create the array of light sources some very complex rig and then tweak the material and that's alright that's what we do often but as I've said sometimes it's just better better to go the more artistic way and to approach it as an artist say you can bite the light map and by the way this system the light map the inverter is a this is called the complete map so you have the light information as well as textures so you bake this and then you just paint the hell out of it so you can do whatever you like you can treat this as a canvas you can do what your hand is Westmark does all the time so I just took this bike thing and I spent just like five minutes painting light and to me it looks pretty good and all right go ahead I'll need sleep to me it looks very punchy and pretty much realistic and I want to take this concept even further and maybe I'm stretching it too far I won't talk about photogrammetry photogrammetry is the process of automatic generation of 3d model out of photos so you just take like 60 photos of your shoe of your cat you handle it to the photogrammetry software it generates 3d model for you but what's even more cool it also bakes the textures and bakes the light the real-world light then you import it to blender and you can do whatever you like but still you will have this underlying layer of realism below the surface yeah so you can capture the real-world lighting and use it as a reference and build on top of it is it cheating well probably does it improve your art yeah I'm very confident about it and you can take it even further and ignore cycles lighting capabilities whatsoever I built this Millennium Falcon model out of paper then I further scanned it and it looks so so but you'll get the message you can just ignore cycles lighting capabilities and use a Miss emission shader with captured real word light and not before reflections and before you get bored because this is what happens eventually everybody gets bored if you Aaron's aren't satisfied with the reflection what you can do is change the camera angle try to find a different angle you can rebuild the whole world around this object or alternatively you can just sample the reflection from a different scene that's how we do it a it's is absolutely actually save is cheating at its purest em but nine times out of ten it gives you the result you want so what you do you take an HDR I I mean a spherical panorama and this one is made by Greg Zhao thank you Greg thank you so what you do is you're add this reflection from the spherical panorama on top of your initial one using the add shader and by doing this you also break the energy conservation law but who cares yeah as long as it looks right it is right and before I went to the conference I wanted to say something smart on stage and this is the right moment I think so physically correct doesn't equals doesn't equal realistic but you know what I realize that this is pretty smart after all because you can and get realistic results or you can stay completely physically correct and just produce crap it all depends yeah number five the final one before we go and get some coffee and exchange some jokes as usual volume light hack every 3d artist knows that volume rendering is a pain in the butt because if you ever tried to make a kind of a puff of smoke something easy you know that it's very very hard it can easily take like hours to simulate and like eternity to render I tried to make it this is not looking good what you can do is just cheat you can create a few planes positioning behind the object and do what game development artists have been doing for ages just create a transparent material are the smoke texture to it and pretty much you're good to go this takes just five minutes and this is looking pretty convincing if you don't move the camera too much the illusion works really well and if you haven't tried it go ahead and do it because you will be amazed this is simple things but they look gorgeous oh you haven't seen this and during this moment of the talk I probably should say something like but there are many more lighting hacks and you can find them on creative shrimp comm but it would sound like I'm advertising yeah and I will burn in hell for doing this so I won't do this don't visit creative shrimp there is nothing interesting here and nothing at all and they we aren't working on the new very exciting training about spice galaxy's nebulas asteroids black holes I'm kidding we are working on the new stuff it will be so damn exciting when it comes you like it I claim that we need to have courage to admit that we cheat all the time and we should do it even more often but do it like the artists that means to be smart because when Pixar artists uses 230 light sources in one shot to make it look believable they are smart that means to be resourceful when you're Hannah's whiz mark uses nothing more than his hands his brush his brain and some acrylic paint to create a complete illusion of reality he is resourceful and that means to be brave because once you step onto this path people will get violent at you they will like to punch you in the face and beat the crap out of you for doing that but that's totally worth it and I think that cheating is what makes me the better artist I hope so because I'm always ready to cheat and keep a straight face that means I'm always ready to find the unexpected solution to the problem you do the same thing and be prepared to be amazed and by the way I always had the replacement keyboard just in case thank you so much go grab some coffee

Channel: Blender

Views: 69,374

Keywords: blender, lighting, shrimp, inspiration

Id: TooIqZ1SS24

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2016