The Power of LIGHTING in Blender!

if you want to create amazing renders and animations they have to contain a few crucial components great composition thought evoking story elements an engaging flow and maybe most important deliberate and great looking lighting so let's get into some simple methods to achieve professional Lighting in blender blender has a bunch of ways to light your scenes so let's talk about that for a little bit before we dive into specific tips and methods blender provides four lighting types the first starting from left to right is the point light which is a spherical type lighting equally in all directions in a way you could compare this to a light bulb in real life second we have the sunlight resembling an actual Sun this provides directed lighting with high intensity and adds this to your entire Project's World third we have a spotlight which to me is the most easily recognizable from real life as we all know directional lamps which we can aim at something only providing light where you pointed to finally we have area lights which are best compared to Studio lamps providing lighting from a large surface area and come in rectangular and circular shapes all these lights have the option to control its power expressed in Watts just like for real lights diffuse specular and volumetric multipliers and whether or not they add Shadows to your scene for most projects you'll use a combination of these lights in case of outdoor scenes using an hdri or one of blender's built-in Sky textures can provide an alternative to sunlight I usually don't use the sunlight myself but instead opt to use the nishita sky texture now let's get into the fun stuff three-point lighting when lighting a subject something that almost always works is three-point lighting it's a very well known and commonly used lighting method blender even has a native add-on you can enable to instantly create three-point lighting setups for your scene the process consists of adding a key light fill light and rim light the key light is your main light source providing most light for your subject The Fill light adds fill on the areas which are darkened with shadows from your key light to add additional definition and exposed detail finally the rim light is added to separate your subject from the background and add definition to its shape in real setups three-point lighting has a rule set defining each light sources intensity angle towards the other lights and subject and the angle of the camera and position of the camera however in 3D I feel like we get a bit more creative freedom using this technique so just use what works best for your subject like groups like groups are a relatively new feature for blender only added since version 3.2 it works extremely simple in Cycles select the light go to the object properties shading Tab and either add your light to an existing or New Light Group now after rendering an image you can go into compositing enable use nodes and here you'll now see your light groups as available render layers by mixing layers together using a mix node set to add you'll get the same result as your regular render however you now have complete freedom to change the exposure with an exposure node or even the color of your lights with a u-saturation node and you can do all that without having to re-render your image in about two weeks me and the Mrs will be leaving for Japan and although we're really looking forward to it one big thing thing for us is not having access to affordable mobile internet luckily Japan has a good amount of public Wi-Fi points but as we all know accessing these points exposes your activity to anyone else also on there enter surf shark through their mobile app and browser extension I can be sure that no matter where I access the internet from I'm fully protected which is extremely important to me as a content creator another thing is that I really love watching anime but sadly Netflix in my country offers very little of this luckily with one click I can change my location to Japan and get access to tons of cool Japanese shows and Anime which I've always wanted to see surfshark gives me online Freedom keeps me safe from hackers and saves my wallet a little bit of money as well and that's a pretty big deal to me if you get surfsharkvpn now at surfshark.deals guys and tutorials you can now get 83 off and three extra months for free all and if it turns out that this isn't for you surfshark offers a 30-day money-back guarantee try surfshark now with the link in the description gobos gobas are essentially shapes put in front of your lights to create Shadow patterns they are commonly used to create things like the sun shining through trees or blinds but they have all kinds of creative and fun applications you can create your own gobos simply by adding a plane in front of your light just like we did for the softbox with in this case an alpha texture of an interesting shape for example of leaves or any other shape that you might find interesting to create unique Shadow patterns but to make your life a little bit easier you can also use the gobos add-on which will do all of this automatically for you provide animated versions of gobos as well instead of just static images and has a bunch of options to simplify this process and save you a bunch of time especially if you tend to do these types of projects a lot if you want to pick up a copy of the gobos add-on and help the channel at the same time as well make sure to use the link in the video description Global illumination one of Eevee's biggest downside is not having global illumination like Cycles Global illuminate is Bounce lighting coming from light rays shooting at objects bouncing from those objects against other objects and finally reaching your eye or a camera sensor this is common practice for Ray tracing engines such as Cycles but not so much in real-time engines such as EV it's supposed to be available in the long-awaited EV next but the release for that is still unknown so for the time being you'll have to resort to an old build of blender which you can download with the link in the description this build provides screen space Global illumination for Ev is completely free and is one of the biggest steps you can take for making Eevee look like Cycles alternatively you could also do this by baking your lighting with an irradiance volume but this isn't real time and also not functional for animations with changing lighting false color making sure your work is properly exposed is not only important for achieving realism but also to get the most color and quality out of your renders by changing the color management to false color you can change the entire thing to be shown in values ranging from dark blue meaning underexposed to dark red or even white meaning Overexposed by making sure you've got your lights set up in a way to ensure as many light green blue yellow and gray tones as possible you'll make sure your work is properly exposed also don't be afraid to overexpose some parts as for example sunlight tends to overexpose certain parts of the world even in real life soft box lighting area lights are one of my favorite ways to light my scenes but they often give harsh Reflections which are very noticeable on reflective and shiny objects to make sure the light is softer or more dispersed you can make your area light size bigger but this doesn't work for Reflections you'll just get bigger sharper Reflections instead reset your light's location and add a plane move it slightly below the area light and parent the two together now take the plane add a material and select the principled bstf hit shift s to replace the node and look up the translucent bsdf and and with that your light will now look like a real life softbox creating softer lighting and Reflections light colored temperature in real life lights range in color temperature from a very white tone to warm yellowish tones these color temperatures are expressed in kelvins with almost all ranging between one thousand and seven thousand kelvins you can make sure you're using proper light colors for your lights by again enabling use nodes for your lights and then adding a black body node here you can set your Kelvin temperatures to mimic real life color temperatures for lights for added realism steal it from the pros lighting as a creative means has been around for hundreds if not thousands of years I mean one of the most famous ways to light a person for photography is called Rembrandt lighting which he used in the 17th century and is a divining visual tell for his artworks so when it comes to lighting and blender don't try to reinvent the wheel just learn from the best in real life for doing character you can use any of the well-known portrait lighting methods for cars for example you can find ways to light and photograph actual cars for product renders there's tons of product photography lighting techniques just imitate what we already do in the real world as an added bonus this will make sure your renders look more realistic because your brain recognizes these lighting types from real life examples IES lights is in fact not part of the Illuminati but is a data format describing how light is distributed from a point source most major light manufacturers provide IES profiles for their lights which can be downloaded for free and used in blender to recreate authentic looking light profiles for your lamps this is especially useful for Arch phase renders as interior lighting can really benefit from this added realism it only works in Cycles by the way and is done by enabling use notes for your light source then open up a Shader editor and add in an IES texture lock this into your emission strength and set it to external downloading your IES file and you get your custom IES profile lighting I've put a link in the description to a place where you can download all common IES profiles and see thumbnails to see how they look as well so now you know a bunch of tricks to help you improve the realism of your Lighting in blender but you might just be struggling to get some good looking animations and if that's the case then you need to check out this video right here to help you learn more about camera animation in blender and as always I'd like to conclude by saying thank you to all my amazing patrons for supporting the channel thank you [Music]

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 357,748

Keywords: blender lighting tutorial, blender lighting tips, blender lighting addon, blender cycles lighting, blender cycles lighting tutorial, blender eevee lighting, blender eevee lighting tutorial, lighting tutorial, lighting blender tutorial, lighting blender eevee

Id: ElMM3u2MO5k

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023