The Ultimate Guide to Portrait Lighting in Blender

hey guys henning from flipnormals here and in this video we are going to go through how you can do portrait lighting in 3d this is going to be a bit of a different video compared to other lighting videos because we are going to be talking way more about fundamentals instead of just how to place the lights we're going to be giving you a way of thinking about lighting which hopefully is going to help you way more long term than just knowing where to place the lights so we're going to be doing these three light setups and they're quite different now if you want to follow along in this video you can get the david head on mymanufacturer.com with also link in the description to that the first thing we will be talking about when it comes to lighting has nothing real to do with 3d and that is how to find reference reference is something that a lot of people don't really use when it comes to lighting simply because they just start to block in their scenes in 3d and never really consider that their issues might have been solved earlier luckily most of our lighting issues really all of them have been solved by professional photographers and painters throughout the last 100 years so that's where we are going to be going for reference believe it or not pinterest is actually one of the best areas to get reference when it comes to this kind of things we are simply just searching for portrait lighting and then we're seeing what we find it's a really good idea to try to find a bunch of different kinds of reference before you get started these guys have solved your issues before and there's no reason to try to reinvent the wheel of course you should understand what's going on and understand what works but it's purely visually find some cool reference and try to reconstruct that now here's reference we've found so far and these are quite different and they show very different lighting situations so we're going to be trying to recreate these in 3d now we're not going to do an exact replication often we don't care if the light position is exactly the same when we're trying to match 100 we'll be using this as a starting point more than anything else if you have a better idea than what they had in when they were doing these shoots do that this is purely a starting point so we will be starting off with mr hugh jackman from limits lab and we'll be doing this light setup now instead of just trying out a bunch of different things with a bunch of different lines we're just going to be analyzing this a little bit and what we're seeing here is that this is really just a single light there might be a few that are here and there to support it but in reality this is one light from the top and we have one light from on the back just lighting up some drapery which is sure just done in post for them or it was all lit up and then they darken up darken the areas around it so what we're going to do now is we are going to set our render engine to cycles you can use gpu i'm using cpu simply because that's better for video recording but i recommend using gpu if you have that option available and then we're going to be starting to light this make sure to set the viewport up here to be fully rendered and then we'll get started we'll hit shift a while we have the limits collection selected shift a lights and we'll be using an area light area lights are awesome we'll scale it up and then we'll we'll hit g instead to move this up like so and the first fundamental skill i want to talk about apart from getting reference is get your values right before you get your colors in this case there really aren't too many colors in the light but even so keep get your values right beforehand don't mess around with colors until the values are looking right so go to right view and then we'll rotate this a little bit and we are going we're going to be having a look at this view here and we have to add a lot of series to this don't be too concerned about the exact value of what you're seeing here be more concerned with what the visual result looks like and it's kind of funny we're almost there that's how simple you can do lighting get to position right and get to get to value right and you can do lighting incredibly fast and easy now what i'm looking at here is that there's a bit of the shadow is a little bit off to the side and this is just purely straight down now so what we'll do is we'll just move this a little bit to the side so just g and then just move it a little over here and then if you saw our previous video on lighting which we released pretty recently which is covers the basics you'll know that if you hit shift and t this is going to target whatever you're hovering so this now means that we can just hit shift t and we can just make this go everywhere we want to and now you can see that this follows a little bit more again don't be too constrained by the limitations if you want to if you want this to be way more to the side do that we're also going to make it a little bit brighter so i'm going to make them 2x just to make this twice as bright and then we are going to be adding a little bit of point light on the back here as well we want to separate this out a little bit from the background so let's add a light and then point light that was a spotlight but that's easy to fix we can just click here and change this into a point light and then we'll make this much much much brighter so let's add two series to this and nothing will happen because it's technically inside the model then we'll move this on the back here so it hits only the background and then we can just see the g key and we can move this in the viewport and that's just using the screen space for that so that means that we can very easily move this around you can see it moves in 3d space of course here as well but it means it's very easy to actually art direct our viewport so i just want to put this in the back here and there we go we're pretty good spot when it comes to this right now we can just make this half so divided by two and then we can start adding some light color to it for this slide here i want this to be white i i don't want this to really change the the color of the model at all but i want this light here to have a little bit of a color to it so it's like color and then we just add a little bit here i just want this to be a little bit blue like so just to separate out a little bit like so so you can see how easy lighting can be and that brings us to one of the other fundamental skills i want to go through and that is keep your lighting simple there is no reason to use three lights if you don't need three lights something like a three-point light setup which a lot of people talk about including ourselves that is a fantastic tool but it's only a tool if you need one light use one light i've often find to be much more powerful if you use fewer lights it makes it easier to control where you want people to see so keep that in mind use as few lights as possible so that was it for this first light up very nice and easy next up we will have a look at this one this one looks more complicated than it is in reality this is quite simple it's very similar to this in the sense that we we can really have only a few lights one primary source of lights here and then we'll break it up this is where we have to think about this as a theater stage it's really easy to consider the cg space to be some kind of weird magical space where we have access to all sorts of freedom but in reality i find it much easier to be constrained by the physical restrictions so in this case you can see here i built a little a little bit of like a almost like a wooden curtain and this is very easy to do this is simply a plane where which has a solidify modifier and an array modifier on it so this means that we can just add more or less of this and we can make each part thinner or thicker so what we'll do is we'll actually use a spotlight for this and this just gives him a little bit more control so we will go to the front view and then we'll make sure that we are going to from the top right and we shouldn't be able to see anything here yet because it's not really bright enough yet and then we'll move this a little bit over like so hit the g key and then just move it over and then we can just make it target the face here so just hit shift and t and then we'll just target the face like so and then we have to go into light properties and just increase this by a lot i find that in spotlights i really have to keep increasing the power so we probably have to go even higher in this and what you can see as well is we have the shadows automatically we didn't have to do anything fancy for this to work we got the shadows for free because shadows is just the lack of light we didn't have to map anything fancy to the to the light we didn't have to add in text textures to anything it's a spotlight which just is blocked and that's as simple as it is and what you can do here is you change your radius if you want the shadows to be super hard you change this to be zero and if you want to be crazy soft you just increase the value if to make them too soft you're not going to see anything so we're using a value of around 0.5 and now you can see we get these nice soft and clean shadows like this so this matches the reference quite well the rotation is a little bit off but honestly that's okay then what we'll do is we will add a little bit of a fill light because currently this is black now this may look cool but it's not exactly what i want so we are going to be adding in making area light shift a lights and arrow lights then we're going to be scaling this up like so and then we are going to be roasting this around i find the rotation of blender to be a little bit awkward sometimes so i actually prefer to use the gizmo instead of just using the r key and then we can move it out like so and then we'll have to increase intensity quite a lot as well and that's way too much so we can divide this by three or four this is how i prefer to do it i prefer to multiply and divide it's just much easier than starting to like drag around here at least that's my my preference sometimes i'll just go in and i'll just drag here but i just think it's easier to just draw yeah this is twice as bright or this is half as bright and this is a perfect case of let's make the values work before we do the colors if you are dealing with lights you really have two things you have to wear but you have the values and you have the color you want to have as few variables as possible so first get the values right get the main lighting black and white and then get the colors right so now once we have this light we'll select it there we go shift d then we'll rotate this around and this will be more of a rim light we don't really have this on her but i think we need a bit of rim light to separate out her out from the background for him from the background rather and then we'll just increase this by a hundred and now you can see we're getting this nice frame right here which is way too strong so let's divide this by three the reason i'm using dividing multiplying is simply because this is this is more from a background from arnold where you're working more in stops where you go i wanted to be twice as bright or half as bright this is a little bit more of a practical way of doing it instead of just oh it's 200 watts no it's just make it twice as bright or half as bright it's more much more of a visual way of doing it so cool now we have the values pretty much sorted for this so what we'll do now is we'll add some color to it keep in mind you want color in your light i highly recommend that you don't just make your color just pure black and or rather just white so go in here and then we'll add i want this to be more like a sunset view so we'll make this quite bright like so or quite orange like so and when you when you're doing this you might be changing the value of the light as well so you might have to make this brighter later on so we'll actually do that we'll make this times 1.5 just to make this a little bit brighter and then we'll make since this is now warm light i want this light to be a cool light so what we'll do is we'll make this a little bit a little bit cooler like so so there's just a little bit of like a of a hint of some coolness in it and then we will select this light and here you can just add a little bit of a tint as well just you know you shouldn't go too crazy with this unless you want something more stylized but it means you can go in here and you can just add a little bit of a hint of something and there we go now we have something pretty cool which was made very quickly with only three lights here just a spotlight and two area lights the magic of this is really that we're blocking out the lights using some kind of geometry now next up we will have a look at the crazy colored lights this is a really fun one so let's hide the other ones and let's get into this one now here we will be using exclusively area lights and technically this is a very simple light setup to do the hard part about this is to get the art direction right that is why we're using pre-med reference that's why we're not just going in and trying to do this from scratch in 3d we're very much using primary reference for this which this comes directly from pinterest so we will be first getting the values right now that is a bit of a bit different when it comes to this kind of light setup because it's so color based but even so we'll still get the main key light here right first and what i'm seeing is this comes more from the top because there's a bit of highlight here on her cheekbones a bit of a shadow here and there's shadows under her nose and under her eyes as well so this comes more from the top though it doesn't come all the way from top so let's just make it go like this and we just have to definitely add a few more series to this and that actually worked pretty well and now you can see here just by by adding this light here is also we have the first light set we did with hugh jackman and that's pretty cool it shows you can make something really cool with only one light but in this case we need color in it while i said get the values right first in this case here it's so color based that we have to add color pretty much right away to it so i'm going to go in here and i'm going to be adding some color right away into it and then we'll have to just multiply this by something like 3 just to get this to look right and then we will duplicate this and we'll move it over like so and then we're going to get this pink light from the screen right and we'll just make this pink right away and we want this to be way sharper now it's crazy broad so i want this to be way sharper and don't really want it to hit the the nose like it is now and that's actually quite nice you also shouldn't be too concerned exactly about the position of the light in 3d right now you can be like oh but it doesn't actually hit the character yeah but it doesn't matter what matters is does it look good in the render that's the only thing that matters if something is animating of course that's a bit different but just be more aware of what the render looks like and less aware of what things might look like in the viewport so we'll make this a little less bright as well so we try to divide this by two and that's a little bit more balanced and then we'll take the key light as well and now we'll make this into a this light coming here and you can see where this is coming from because you can see where the the shadows are so try to analyze that it's a really interesting skill analyzing a real world reference like this when you're trying to figure out where the light is coming from so then we'll just make this aggressively orange and we'll probably have to make this much brighter as well so times three and then we'll start to just rotate this around and remember you can hit shift and t that's just going to shoot it straight towards our our model like so shift and t and also double r is really useful as well because this means that we can we can just start to rotate around like so and this is never going to match perfectly and the reason is that the model is obviously quite different but also i don't necessarily want it to look exactly the same and of course we have the fact that the model is is looking different like has a different bit of a different angle this is completely front and this is quite from the side like three quarters at least bit more of three quarters so it's not going to match perfectly but it doesn't have to match perfectly either just use it as a starting point so i'm just going to make this twice as bright and then i'm going to make this slide here a little bit less blue or a little bit more towards the just because i think it's a little bit too too intense so we can just keep balancing this a little bit and there we go this is how i'm lighting portraits in 3d so let's sum up some of the fundamental skills we went through in this video first off this is in no way a blender video you sh you can do this in literally any software and then look at real world reference it like a theater stage don't use the all the power in the world in cg just because you have all the power in the world don't just add 10 000 lights or 20 lights or portraits try to try to keep it simple try to think like a real world photographer they have solved the issues and by looking at how they've solved certain issues you can really speed up your lighting and you can make something look much much better than you would otherwise my lighting improved dramatically the moment i use real world reference for lighting it's so easy to forget that the real world exists when it comes to lighting we use reference for textures for shapes for everything else before lighting we forget that the real world exists and then make sure that your model is actually looking good beforehand it's really easy to assume that all like the issues you're seeing at this stage there are lighting issues but there could be texture issues or model issues so make sure your asset is solid and sound before you start to debug the lighting then keep it simple see with these two lights here actually all of them but particularly these two they're very simple this one here has one light and we have one light for the background this one here only has a few lights as well one key light here which is being blocked off one rim light from the side here and one fill light and this one here also only has three lights we can do incredible things just with very simple tools so that's it for this video i really hope you enjoyed it and that you really learned something about lighting if you have any cool tips about lighting as well please let us know in the comments and let us know if you have any cool resources like scripts or interesting tips in your render engine of choice and we will see you in the next one thank you so much for watching

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 100,412

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: kKXTU1EImF4

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021