The Top LIGHTING ADD-ONS for Blender!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video I'm going to talk about some of the top lighting and environment add-ons for lighting your scenes in blender let's go ahead and just jump into it okay so first off is a tool that's an absolute must-have partially because it's already built into blender it's called try lighting what you can do is you can go into your preferences and you can look for try lighting it's under lighting try lighting and you want to make sure that you have that enabled so when you do that what that's going to do is that's going to give you the ability to do a shift a and under your lights it's going to give you the option for three point lights and so what this is going to do is instead of adding a singular light to your scene it's going to add three lights in here as well we'll go ahead and jump over into Eevee for right now but notice what this does is this brings in these lights and it places them based on a location that you set so if I click and drag this right I I can set how far away from my object these lights are so I can use this in order to bring these lights in and create a try lighting setup in my scene so you can also adjust the angle of each one of your lights using this setting right here and you can also set the energy and the kind of lights that you have in your scene so say you didn't want these to be area lights or say you only wanted one of these to be an area light you wanted these others to be Point lights so you you can adjust this so that you've got different kinds of Lights in here so for setting up fast and easy lighting setups like this one try lighting is an absolute must-have okay so next up we've got one of my absolute favorite add-ons for setting up procedural environments this one's called physical Starlight and atmosphere and basically what physical Starlight and atmosphere does is it allows you to create these atmospheres that are actually adjustable it's not using hdris what it's doing instead is it's basically simulating all of the different things so like your sun your fog your ground plane it's got tools in here to set up all of those different things so in my opinion this is probably one of the more popular environment add-ons just because it contains all of this stuff and it makes this setup really easy so let's say for example and so I've got this model from sketchfab that I downloaded it's the Southern District police station by Katie Wolfe what I want to do is I just want to quickly set up an environment in here and so the way that we can do that and I'm going to jump over into rendered mode but I'm just going to leave it with EV for right now we can jump over into rendered mode and what this is going to do is this is going to give us the ability to add an atmosphere by checking the box for physical atmosphere and so when we do that notice what that does is that sets up this procedural atmosphere in the background from there you've got options to adjust things like your sun location so you can set this to rotate your sun you can also set the height notice how when the angle the sun gets to a certain level this kind of transitions from lighted or dusk down to dark you can use this to simulate different kinds of days different times of days other things like that and so you've also got the ability down below and there's a ton of atmospheric settings which we can talk about a little bit I'll actually link to a video I did on this one you've also got the ability to add things like a ground plane so if I had a ground plane in here you can set like your ground offset so like how high up your ground and your horizon is like this so in this case we would set it to zero because it actually looks the way that it's supposed to but you've also got the ability to adjust things like your clouds right so see how I can procedurally generate some clouds in the background you can set the scale of the clouds the thickness of the clouds other things like that you've also got the ability to add like stars at night so let's say that we were to bring this down like this then we wanted to bring the Stars up you could turn up that Radiance intensity right here in order to kind of customize number of stars other things like that and at a certain point these Stars actually emit enough light to light things in your scene and so in addition you've got some presets that come along with this and I don't know why my thumbnails aren't loading this is probably something that I've messed up in here but you've got these different presets for things like different Earth settings like this you've got the hazy summer so if you want to add something it's kind of hazy this is kind of a preset that's got a little bit of that Haze as well as some other ones that are a little bit further out there like for example this one kind of simulates what the atmosphere on Mars might look like you've also got the Retro wave which gives you kind of this more like retro color right here I really like the big sun that's in here on this one note that by the way you can adjust things like the intensity of the Sun as well as the size of the sun as well so you can adjust the color temperature so just a ton of things that you can control and adjust and I just love how you can quickly add these in just by dragging them and then making some adjustments over here to the right so one other massive benefit is that this is set up to work in both EV cycles that can be a huge Time Saver because you can use Eevee in order to get your initial lighting set up before you toggle over to Cycles to do your final render so instead of doing everything in Cycles working in EB first can save you a lot of time alright so next up we've got a tool for automating your lighting setups and this one is actually from blender Guru so um this tool is basically set up to allow you to quickly set up different kinds of lighting and what I really like about this one is a it really automates the process it's kind of like that try lighting but significantly better but B it's got all of these different presets in here four different kinds of lighting that you can use in your scene so what it does is it lets you quickly toggle between those different those different setups in order to get different effects so basically the way that this works and it's really kind of set up for Cycles but the way that it works is you can just go into your world settings and you can just enable your lighting so if I enable this right here notice what that's going to do is that's going to automatically add in the different kinds of lights and these are basically set up in order to kind of replicate the little previews that are in here so um these are the different kinds of light that it contains so it contains object lighting setups as well as character lighting setups and there's different kinds in here so if I was to select one of these others right like if I was to select we'll go with the shadow play right here notice how those lights are now different so this is optimized to work with Cycles so if I jump over into rendered mode and I want to make sure that I'm actually in Cycles which I am but if you jump over into rendered mode you can see this lighting change depending on which setup you pick and so let's say we were to bring in an example model like this robot 2020 from Ulysses 3D so this is something you can download from sketchfab but let's say we're bringing this more detailed model notice how I can come in here and I can toggle between different lighting setups and notice how they're adjusting really quickly like this and again that means I don't have to go figure out these different styles or anything like that you can adjust things like the temperature right so if you wanted this cooler warmer you can adjust that but then there's also Tools in here to add things like backgrounds and there's a number of photos that you can place in the background as well as floors and notice how these have an image overlay which could make that look textured or shiny or other things like that and so this does a really good job of giving you the ability to set up an environment for rendering all right and then if you would rather work in Eevee there's a tool called EV production Suite that's basically designed um to do I wouldn't say the opposite of what pro lighting Studio does but it's more designed to work with EV so while that tool is designed to work with uh with Cycles this one's more designed to work with Eevee and so what that one's going to do is it's going to come with a number of different lighting setups that you can use specifically with an EV scene in order to do different things this actually comes with a few different things it also comes the material nodes add-on as well as a landscape Shader and some other things as well but specifically we're going to focus on the EV pieces of this so the way that this one would work and we'll just use Bonnie in here again but what you can do and I'll go ahead and toggle this over to rendered mode just so you can kind of see what this does this has all of these options on the right hand side for different lighting setups and so notice how when I do this what this is going to do is this is going to do the setup of the back background and the lighting for me so you can adjust between these different lights just by clicking on the presets like this and notice when you do that it's adjusting the background it's adjusting um the lights that are in here suggesting all of those different things in order for you to be able to quickly set this up inside a blender this also gives you tools for adding additional light smoke other things like that and so one thing to note about this is you do want to make sure when you make a change right so if I adjust this like this you want to make sure that you go back and you bake that indirect lighting that's how EB kind of works that indirect lighting needs to be baked you also need to make sure that you're in render preview here but this tool is really good for setting up those EV renderings if you're not planning on doing very much with Cycles okay so next up we've got a tool that's designed to help you create and set up hdri backgrounds inside of blender so this tool has something like 480 hdri images you can get the different uh resolutions in here write 1K 4K 8K and it makes that set up really easy but what I really like about this one is the ability to create a dome inside your scene so let's jump over into blender just for a second and so the way that this one works so it gives you the ability to bring in all of these different hdri options so we've got mountains we've got Interiors other things like that you can also create your own custom but let's say that we were to select let's say that we were to select an open world one maybe this one right here well what you can do is you can use this to add an hdri background you need to toggle over into rendered mode in order to actually see that but you can see how that is fine right it just sets up an hdri there's nothing really special about that now you do have options over here to adjust things like the strength so the emission value how strong that's going to be other things like that but one of the settings that I really like is the Dome function you can click on ADD Dome and what that's going to do is that's actually going to set up a dome around your object effect that's going to yes use this as a background but it also gives you kind of a ground plane right here so you can scale and rotate that Dome using your Dome properties and so one of the other cool things about this particular tool is the ground feature right so we've got the dome in here we can scale and rotate the dome but then you can also add an object in this case I'm going to use ant landscapes in order to do this but let's see we're to add some noise right here we're going to scale this out in order to scale it down just so we've got a little bit of up and down on this plane right here well now what you can do is you can scroll down you can click on the option to add ground and when you do that this is going to project the material on your ground right here so you can use this to really quickly set up environments that are completely adjustable using this tool so I actually use the Dome function on this one all the time and it does really make life a lot easier when you're trying to work with hdris alright so if you're looking for a slightly less expensive lighting Library you might try alt tab lighting this add-on which is usually under ten dollars and it's even cheaper in the blender Market sale right now gives you access to 50 different lighting presets that are going to procedurally generate light in your scene so they've got a bunch of different preset lights in here that you can easily apply to your scene so if you open this up in blender basically the way that it works it's just got lightings setups right here and you can click across them and click on the append button when you click on the append button what that's going to do is that's going to apply the new lighting presets in here now one thing to note about this is you do want to make sure that you toggle off the old lighting presets otherwise you're just going to get a bunch of Lights stacked on top of each other like this but you can also come in here and randomize your light colors if you you can select different lights than randomize those so you've got a fair amount of control over here so you don't have as much control as you would in like pro lighting Studio but but it's also a much less expensive option if you're looking for some lighting presets to use in your scenes so extra lights by orange turbine is basically a collection of lights that are physically accurate what that means is that means that these lights are all based on real world fixtures and are set up to actually kind of like mimic the strength of those lights in the real world so there's a bunch of different kinds of Lights in here so Point light spotlights all designed to be adjusted in lumens rather than watts and what that does is that allows you to adjust your lights based on what would be seen by the eye and so there's a bunch of math involved but generally speaking what you need to understand is this is set up to work in lumens which are based on how bright something appears to be with the human eye so it's basically a collection of lights that are actually like physically accurate and so if you're looking for a collection of physically accurate real world based lights you can check out extra lights alright so next up we've got the polyhaven ass set browser add-on so you're probably familiar with polyhaven it's a website that has a number of different textures and models and hdris all available you can download all of these a hundred percent for free from polyhaven's website you can download these you can bring them in as hdri's other things like that so you don't need to pay for this one however the asset browser itself what this does is this just gives you access to all of the assets directly inside a blender so basically what it does is you install it and it brings it into your asset library and they're just sitting there ready for you to download so what that means is that means that you don't have to go find these and set them up yourself so this gives you access to all of not only the hdris but also the materials and the models that come along with this so this is also a great way to support polyhaven for the work that they're doing if you don't want to go download that stuff and bring it all in manually now gobo's light textures is a tool that's based design to let you add artificial lights that actually simulate things like Shadows right because having just just a light that's shining in here might not be that interesting but if you look at like this image right here right it's showing these shadows as if the light was shining through a tree so it could make your images or shining through tree branches and you're getting different shadows right so it makes it look makes the light look more realistic and so this is basically a collection of gobos or light textures that you can use in in order to quickly add Shadow projection to your scene so um you just drag them in and then you get lights that kind of look like this and so the way that that works is it's pretty simple so let's say that I wanted to add a gobo in here what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drag these leaves over as just an example and I'm going to move this up notice how the shadow that this is projecting or the light that this is projecting has the leaf and tree shadows in the background and then note that down here at the bottom there's a ton of different gobos that this comes along with that can create different kinds of Shadows and so say that I was to drag this chess set in from the polyhaven asset browser you can see how that light is basically shining across it and it's also making it look like there's some kind of trees in the background or something like that so this can make your lighting a lot more interesting in your scenes okay so leave a comment below let me know if I left anything off this list I just love having that conversation with you guys I will link to all of those in the notes below this video as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 20,944

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender lighting, blender lighting add-on, blender lighting add ons, blender pro lighting studio, blender eevee lighting, blender physical starlight, blender hdri maker, blender hdri, blender hdri lighting

Id: Gx7JWr1SiCY

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023