The Only Product Lighting Video You'll Ever Need (Blender Tutorial)

this is the newest first and fastest way to light products and characters since blender 4.0 since the coming of geometry notes it was bound to happen procedural lighting but before we dive into that let's first have a look at three ways to light products that always work so right here we've got a pretty common lighting setup that's being used not only in product venders but also in normal lighting and photography but we are going to use this as the first example of how to make good Lighting in blender so right here as you can see I will move around it is actually quite an interesting looking scene and you might be like all right so what's going on here but basically what we've got is a three-point lighting setup and I'm going to lead all of this and we're just going to do it over again right now we are in a black scene and the reason why it's entirely black is because I put the world strength to zero and I always do that because I want full control of my lighting because if you have this it's going to be grayish I don't like that so I'm going to set it to zero shift a shift a mesh plane let's add a plane right under need our blender let's do this in modeling mode place it right over there make it a bit bigger we also need something on the side I'm going to make e and z bring it right over there and this part I want to be reflective why well I want it to be wide but we're going to get to that later the first thing we need to add is a area lamp so I'm going to do that shift a light area lamp and I'm also going to explain some of the basics about this so you actually know what we are doing and why we are doing it RX 90 RZ 45 we've now got a 45 degree angle of this lighting GCC to move it on its normal axis the further the light is the softer it's going to be as you can see right here on the blender it's going to be a bit harder right over here it's going to be a bit softer you can see it in the shadows as well now the farther you place this the more you have to crank the light probably I'm going to set it right over there and give it this nice looking light now this is the basis of the three-point lighting setup and this is called a key light this is basically the light that I have on my face shining right now and it's shining from right over here usually in video in cinema they don't film from the side that it's being lit they lit the other side and they film from that side and the reason why they do that is because it looks more cinematic when you film from the shadow side so keep that in mind that's just a little knowledge fact you can now see in every movie you watch they don't do it in any other way so first of all this is our key light which means this is our strongest light and now we also have to add the rim light I'd like to do it in that order so shift d gzz bring it right over there RZ 180 and now it's directly opposite to our other light it gives us a rim light right over here I'm going to increase the size of this on the Z scale just so it covers the entire area now GCC we can play around with this as you can see it will change the reflection on our Blender make this bigger and it will become softer but I'm going to leave it like this because usually a rim light is supposed to be quite hard why well let's turn off the key light and you will be able to see the Contours or the edges of the blender or our object your object I don't know what you're using and that will make it stand out from the background and basically basically all Cinema tries to do is make contrast so they try to make contrast between colors such as blue and orange they try to make contrast between the four in the background by giving some bokeh to the background for example so that it's blurry and the foreground is sharp all things in cinema usually have to do with contrast anyway that's just a little side note so I'm going to add my key light back in I'm going to take the areial lamp shift d x bring it over on this side and now I'm going to mirror it right Mouse click mirror X Global and now it's exactly in the other position like so G and X make sure that it is kind of intersecting in the middle line and the thing with this light which is called The Fill light is that we don't want it to be as bright as our key light reason for it well if it's going to be evenly lit from all sides it might make a flat image and as I just said flatness skills The Cinematic effect of it so what we want to do is go over to the area right over here and we have size and we can increase this size and it will make it softer the larger your light is the softer the light will become and that's why in Hollywood movies you will often times see a light that spans across an entire area and it's so big that it's unfathomable basically and financially Impossible by the way anyway the bigger the light the softer the light will be so let's have a look at this and now you will see that this light is a bit softer we can also place it a bit more backwards so let's see if we decrease the size back to one you can actually see it happening that it becomes a lot harder and now it's becoming softer and that's exactly what we want and now I'm going to dial it back gcz to move it on its normal axis and bring it backwards until I see something that I kind of like because I want to keep some shadows in this maybe right over here and then play around with the power of this so if we set this to zero you can see that we have some Shadow right over here just going to fill that up a little bit there you see the before and after you can make it as Extreme as you'd like I like it to be more like this so the key light and the rim light have more of an effect so this is our three-point lighting setup we have our key light right over here we can name it accordingly by the way we have our fill light right over here which is supposed to fill up some of the darkest Shadows on this side and now we have a rim light which separates the foreground from the background some more by placing a light on the back now you're probably wondering why does it look like this and why do we have this black background because it doesn't really work out for our product vender yet well the reason why we are using this is very simple I'm going to show you if I enable this plane right over here which is the usual backdrop we would use of course this would be placed a little bit more upwards and make sure you don't get these hard edges Etc but just for example this is the normal backdrop we could use but there is a way to get some Reflections in this without messing up the entire scene so I'm going to add a plane right over here rx90 G and Y scate it upwards go to the materials and let's first do this one so press new metallic all the way up roughness all the way down and as you can see it is now reflective and it is reflecting this plane so if we remove this it will be entirely black which also has its charms but I am going to use this exp to make this entirely white so let's remove the principle let's add in an emission emission in the surface we have a white backdrop can increase this to 1.3 for example and of course this also lights a little bit of the blender as well so if you crank this up too much you will see that it will enter into the blender entirely but I'm just going to set it to 1.3 and then it will be pretty fine now there's one problem we have this reflection right over here and it's from the area lamp and there's really no way to fix that just kidding guys we can fix it right now because blender has light linking so yes I'm going to select our Rim light which is this one going over to the object properties tab go to light linking press on new and then I will see which plane is this one plane O3 so go to the rim light drag plane O3 right in here and now this light will only work on this plane but we want to disable that so I'm going to click on this button and now it will work on all the objects except for this plane and that's the way this works and now you have a pretty cool looking product visualization render now you can also change the roughness of this to give it a bit more of another reflection sometimes you have to crank this power up a little bit of the emission and also make sure that the emission is entirely committed to this plane okay and that's the way you get a white background like this and we can change the reflection the roughness of this make sure it's a bit more reflective or a bit less reflective if you want that of course you can change the color of the mission and it will automatically change the color of the entire scene and make it in whatever color you would like so this is the first lighting setup that we went through you learned how to make a three-point lighting setup this is the most standard lighting set instead of being used in photography Cinema product animation you name it everybody uses this and it has proven itself through the years so it always works just keep this in mind this will always help you out now there are two more ways that we can light this product that also look very cool so I'm going to delete all of this so it's pretty dark once again and we got to bring in some lights to make this look good so I'm going to bring in a area lamp shift a light area lamp R y90 make sure that it's set to the side right over here going to increase the power of this by a bit and I will bring it to the EXA same other side but how do you know how far it is well you have to set this to 3D cursor shift d take this S xus one and now it will be exactly opposite to the 3D cursor as this one so we have the exact same distance and there will be no visible changes in the way this lighting works okay so we can increase this if you like I like this so I'm going to increase this as well make it a bit stronger which you can also do is take both of these lights s and X bring them closer together SN X and bring it further away and what we can do now take this light shift d rc90 we are still on the 3D cursor by the way and this is now in the back set it to median point scale it upwards bring it upwards as well and we can give it some light from the back now of course what we can do is make this back backdrop better because we have some weird looking ashes right over there and the way to fix it once again is light linking so let's go ahead and bring in a sun lamp for example sunlamp I barely ever use this I think it's one of the worst lights to use in the entirety of blender I'm going to make this entirely white then I will go to the object properties tab light linking new drag our plane in plane over here and now it will only work on our plane and not on the other object because otherwise it would look like this and now we also have a pretty cool looking backdrop for this image and what we can also do is Select our original plane right over here if you don't think this line looks very appealing so you can just select it right over there go over to the object properties tab then go to visibility and turn off in the camera go to your favorite program such as the finy resolve or photoshop and place in a white background and things will look okay as well or another option would be to take all our lights and make sure that they only operate on the blender but I think it's a bit too much work for this tutorial so I'm not going to do that but you know how light linking works now so you can do it for yourself so there's only one more setup left to do and afterwards I will show you some more tricks that will improve your Lighting in product visualization some more and I will also show you the new procedural solution that you can use later on in this video it's going to make it a little bit bigger or smaller s shift C and then you can only scale it on the X and Y AIS so the final one is going to be pretty simple and then we're going over some extra tricks add a light area of course bring it over here RX minus 90 this time so we're only going to place a back light there's two ways to do this by the way going to bring this down and have it shine on our blender from behind now this is not necessarily the best object to do this with because it has glass uh but this is one of the versions that you can try simply crank up the power this might look pretty cool for what what you're doing so usually as I said in the beginning of this video you film from the shadow side and that's why shots like this also look pretty cinematic but there's another way to do it so even with our glass we can make it look cool RC 45 G and X bring it over to the side set this to 3D cursor shift d SX minus 1 set is the median Point RZ minus 90 and now we have 45° angles from both sides increase the power of this and let's increase the power of that one as well of course you can also Place one in the front to fill up some of those Shadows if you really like so let's add another area lamp rx90 bring it over towards this side make it a bit bigger so it's softer just like I said in the beginning and give it a small soft light like this and that's the way to make this third lighting setup but that's not all I'm also going to show you some bonus tips that will make you an undeniable force in the 3D space so let's go ahead and delete these area lamps once again add an area lamp right over here get it upwards rx90 rc45 let's GCC this let's increase the strength add a plane like this rx90 rc45 and place it right over here to get a type of Shadow and let's turn the plane off and on and now you can see that this side will be a little bit more dark than the other side you can also add another plane so select this gxx place it right over there and now you get something that looks like this so if we turn these two off and on and this is a lighting technique that a lot of people use to block off some light now if you want to make a gradient light you you can also add an area lamp go to the Shader editor use notes right over here bring in a gradient gradient texture gradient into the strength let's decrease the spread to one and now if we place a color ramp in between you can decide where the light ends or where it doesn't of course you can increase the size of this and play around with all the values so if you want to make a gradient yourself something like this will do the trick anyway so now you've learned three different lighting setups that always work for product visualization I also showed you how to make a gradient texture and light blocking and now we're going over to the final part which is procedural lighting and this is a product that you can get on blender Market or gumroad so right over here I will go over to the aid browser select geoly Pro and I've got geyes Pro right over here so right here we've got it in the scene and in the modifier stack we have a couple of different options so we have the emission strength which increases the light power and as you can see we already have our three-point lighting setup so if you move this upwards you can now rotate it around using this slider and in this fashion you can very easily see different lighting setups that's not the only thing we can also offset the lights meaning Zoom this out we can get a three-point lighting setup starting from over there but also from over there or maybe over there or over there and we can very quickly see which looks the best now I increase the emission of course by a whole lot so let's decrease that it has temperature so let's say that in the area lamp so let's remove this for now let's say we add an area lamp right over here and we want to change the temperature you go over to the use notes option color black body and now we change the temperature right over here but in giz Pro we can simply go to our modifier stack change the temperature right over here to 7500 for example and it will be a bit more blue as I already showed we can rotate this around using the z-axis then we can change different lighting setups like so maybe it looks better from this side or that side we can also change the amount of lights so maybe we only want two or one or maybe we want four or five or whatever how many lights you would like going to set it to three for now because we are working on three-point lighting setups I also have the light scale so if the light is too big you can scale it up or down and they will scale accordingly and bring it inwards like so now you might be wondering uh okay so now I've got a white looking ball in my scene so how do I fix that go over to the object properties go over to Ray visibility and disable it from camera and it will be removed so now you don't have these balls in your scene anymore and I'm going to turn it back on simply because I want to show you guys how it works so modifier step what we can also do is take the X position and it will move those two away from each other and it will also move away the Y if we move the Y now if you want two lights on the Y you have to change the offset like this and now those two on the Y will move one thing I added as well is this one this is a top light and a top light can be used to fill in some Shadows from the top and it's also very often used for hair so in a movie you will probably see that the hair is lit from the top as well in order to get some more texture and light in there and the top light is a very great way to add in some Shadows from the top which otherwise we would not have we can increase the strength of this naturally we can change the temperature 7500 let's make it the same as the other ones we can also use the top light scale to make it bigger or smaller and we can also move it upwards so right over here we have the top light height so we can bring it upwards or place it all the way down to whatever place you would like and now we've got this setup very simple but maybe I like this setup better RZ rotated around a bit to get a better Edge light maybe I want another light in there that looks pretty cool as well now let's turn it off by object object properties Ray visibility camera and now it will be removed from the vision anyway that's a very easy method to play around with your lighting if you're anything like me I used to play around with my area lamps and then you have to select this one oh I going to move it around or it doesn't really look good okay now I have to select all of those and I've remve them around and then I have to change the black body in each of these area lamps separately so I click on the area lamp make a different temperature and by the end of the day I fall asleep and I figured why not make this in blender and turn it into a modifier so now now you can just use your lights you can increase the amount of lights switch them around real easily and it also makes sure that you're less emotionally attached to the lighting setup you made because you spend some time on it but now it really doesn't matter anymore because you can play around with it click on some buttons and things will look different and you can get back to the same setup really easily as well so you've learned how to make three lighting setups that always work for products and I also showed you the new way namely the procedural method of lighting if you're interested in the first fastest and only procedural lighting setup in blender available go to my gumroad or blender market and check it out and if you want to know more about product animation check out this video next [Music]

Channel: The Blenderender

Views: 6,337

Keywords: Blender, Blender tutorial, Blender Beginner tutorial, B3D, Blender for beginners, product lighting in blender, lighting tutorial, Lighting tutorial blender, Product lighting blender, Blender product lighting, Blender lighting product tutorial, Blender lighting product, Blender product lighting tutorial, Blender product visualization, Blender product animation, Blender product Lighting, Blender lighting tutorial, Lighting in Blender, Blender lighting tutorial cycles, B3D Lighting

Id: yPekIQMoKYM

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2024