Ways to improve your lighting (demonstration)

g'day this is Andrew price with a new type of video well this is a one-off maybe but I'm gonna be taking some blend files that people sent in to me and I am going to be improving the lighting trying to improve the lighting starting with this guy right here so this was sent in by MOBA Ness and this is it's a mafia dude by the way these blend files were sent in I did a call-out I got like a hundred submissions and these were the three that I thought were pretty good and also the authors of these files graciously let me provide them to you to download as well so if you haven't downloaded them I would suggest you do it because I would suggest try lighting it yourself first before you watch the rest of this video because you'll learn a lot more trust me but anyways this is one we're gonna start with I removed all the lighting in it so that I can start afresh and I also removed this smokey thing just cuz I felt like it was too distracting like you can have like stylized smoke like this but I think it really only makes sense and it fits when the rest of the scene is stylized as well and this characters a little bit too realistic so I thought let's just pull it so anyways I'm using blender 2.8 and this specific scene was made in Eevee which is very cool you just add a point lamp and you can see now yeah the cool thing is is it's in real time right you don't have to wait for things to render which is very cool the only downside is is that when you're using Eevee you got to fiddle around with all these settings for the light like contact shadows and all that kind of thing just turn on contact shadows and like crank up the distance and turn down your softness oh is it that softness this softness there's always one of these things like see this like weird effect there I always hate that okay bleed bias I guess that's what we're gonna start with anyway not off to a good start anyway so when I am approaching lighting right lighting something the first question I ask myself is what I want to say with this right because if you wanted to just create something that looks cool that could be a totally different you know process then I want to create something to show off the specific sculpting that I did for example so that I can maybe get a job in the industry or something because that would be like you want to show the form whereas if I want to create something cool I might want to hide form you know it depends on what you're going for but I'm just gonna show like what I would do for this specific thing everyone's got a different take on it I'm gonna try and make a story right so this is a mafia boss I don't think there's any point in making him look like he was lit in a studio let's put him in an environment so I'm gonna pretend that there is a car headlight right so this light here is gonna be a car headlight and it's got to be a little far away from him which is important for fall-off which we talked about in the lighting course right so put it around about here and let's just crank up this light so as I mentioned as well like you want to use false color if you want to check like the exposure of something I just want to make sure that this gray value is somewhere on the face which gray would be like at zero exposure so it's pretty good and let's go back to filmic there we go okay so the car headlight is there looks looks pretty good okay turn up what's my distance enough distance they just gotta make sure you got the distance of your contact like contact shadows I mean okay so if I pulled this all the way out here you can see that it's flattening him like flattening the the volume that the shape of him so if I put and it also reveals too much of his face like too much of his character whereas I want to sort of make this guy like he's a mafia boss right like he's kind of he's a little scary like who is ease a little creepy right so I'm putting it to the side and I'll also just make it look like the light is lower than him right car headlight somewhere about there and I'll move it just so that this eye starts to fall into shadow and I just want to try to get this line here like that specific brow there I want that to be I want that to be highlighted so it looks like he's kind of angry perhaps right just a I don't know something I'm trying right let's get false KOA oh yeah the other thing like if you use like in the color management section you can adjust the exposure which is kind of a way like instead of having two TWiki to the lamps one by one it just adjusts the camera exposure so it's like a kind of a way to like without having to jump back and forth anyway so I got one lamp that's pretty good now it's nighttime right so let's add in a blue like moonlight because also you can see like there's no shape around him I don't know where he stops and where the background starts so I'm just gonna duplicate this lamp and let's make this sort of a light blue color like this and let's put it behind him like that so it's just sort of highlighting his coat there now it's bringing him off the the background a bit so a little bit bluish like that and it's like the sky so let's make this radius really big and you can see that when you do that it kind of like it highlights more areas of the Hat and everything so something weird happens with evey though when you go like too high so yeah ah this bleed value these these values I swear I never know what would actually correct a lot of this stuff I know they're like softness oh no softness actually improved that a little bit softest yet oh there we go it's the softness of this value that's not good anyway yeah that's that's it's cool like Eevee is fun but it's also can be annoying sometimes alright so that's good now this this is okay but he's a little too ominous like we want to see the rest of him like some of his face here now you could just add like an area lamp which would be like just a small lamp here to kind of show that and that's one way to do it that's okay but I'm telling a story here right so it's there's a car headlight what other light could there be there could be another car headlight right like this or it could be the back of a car like a red tail light right like maybe he's parked on the side of the road there's moonlight and he's got the trunk open and who's in the trunk oh it's some poor fella I don't know right now oh here's the other thing right so if I if I pull this out here you can see that his whole coat is like lit up here and it's kind of like like using that emphasis thing that we talked about in the last video it's kind of like it's too like a blanket uniform amount of light whereas if I pulled this in close you can see that now the light is almost exclusively on his face like that which is really what I want I want just his face I want that to be the focal element so I'm putting that there and now let's turn this down so that we can still see it but like it's yeah it's obviously not as bright so something like that and the other thing that I'm gonna do I want this little cigarette butt to be costing some light as well okay you wouldn't normally have it necessarily right like what I mean is like the amount of light that this car headlight would be creating you would not be able to see any light coming from a cigarette butt but a little bit stylized right we're having a little bit of a creative license so I'm going to duplicate this and then where I put that 3d cursor shift s cuz it's a selection and hey his face is on fire so let's dial that back something like that ah it's horrible dial back the softness is it the softness where is it you always you always fiddling around with it oh I see that actually kind of improved it okay and now dial back the brightness and the other thing I want to do is you can see it's sort of casting light every alt also different color a little bit yellow like that and custom distance so I don't want that to be light everywhere I'm just gonna you know stylize it and make the light fall off like about there perhaps I don't know something like that it's a little I don't know it's a little weird but it could work just subtle right something just a little bit like that to kind of show part of his face and some of the scene and that's pretty good now the other thing I want to do I've been watching YouTube I want to put a background in it right cuz it's just black and it's like yeah you know it just doesn't look as professional right so I if I typed in fog forest that was what I was going for I wasn't acting like night forest you can quickly like just grab one of these images the one that i actually used was there it is this one here you just download that and I mean I tried like three four or five whatever it was and what I do I just want to chuck it in the background right so I'm just gonna go file import images as planes and that'll save me from having to actually like add in a plane apply the texture and get the aspect ratio then I just click on shadeless oh by the way I'm sure much do you already know this but that add-on it's in blender by default but you got to turn it on so type in import images as planes you turn that on and then you've got the file import images as planes anyway so I check that I'm gonna make it shadeless I'm not gonna use any alpha and I'm gonna hit import and there we go mr. forest to himself okay so we could put a like right behind him but I want to use some depth of field from the camera to make that pot look like out of focus so I'm gonna put that in the background point a few at a camera let's scale that up and then rotate it so it's sort of like facing the camera a bit and then move it up actually I want this bright area to be behind him and so we can just see some of the trees in the background now obviously the color of this is way too much so I'm going to the node editor and just for this thing right here all I'm gonna do is add in a huge saturation value note and then I'm gonna turn down the value like drastically to like something like that right and I'm gonna change the hue and make it look a little bit blue I want that blue something like that and look at that and the camera I think by default I already had the camera set to have a depth of field where's my camera there it is I'm gonna name selected it there we go yeah so I said like I the focus object to be the bandage but anyway oh I just did like a little camera course like watching YouTube over the weekend f-stop it goes in like 11.4 to 2.8 except about like there's certain stops so an f-stop of 1.9 doesn't exist so I'm gonna go 1.4 not that it makes much of a difference this is more like stylized but anyway I just thought like keep it consistent there and that's basically it I would call this pretty well finished I would do a render of this this is the one that I ended up with so I think I went a little darker on the face it's up to you and I also added in some smoke which was again I just typed in smoke on pixabay and OH literally typing a big sub a this one right here right this is the one that I ended up with I took that into Photoshop and then you use the lighten blend mode and then you've got like the smoke and then you add that in and it's much easier than having to do smoke simulation if it's not for an animation like who cares it's static and it's gonna way better than anything you could generate with a smoke same anyway so I went with that but there you go guys so that is the mafia boss done and dusted all right next up we have this lounge room by Blake Lisbon so this was his you know what have I done I do not know the shortcuts of 2.8 yet so I hit something this was his image that he sent through and you can see that he went with a very sort of just an overcast day like sort of white light coming in through the window now I asked for his permission to do this um I rearranged the house a bit to make it something that you guys could play with a little bit easier because I felt like currently like with his his setup it was only two windows on the left hand side and you couldn't really control a lot and also I felt like some of these books were a little jarring in their colors so I wanted to make it a little bit more uniform and I also felt like that room on the right there could just sort of be sealed off to make things render a little bit faster so and I also rearranged the furniture a bit but this was for a real seeing like a real like blueprint of a house so he didn't have this creative control but I did anyway he let me do this so let's let's try to improve this now this you could go for a nighttime scene if you wanted to but that's something we didn't talk about in the lighting course which is like interior lighting that's like a whole different ballgame briefly if you wanted to know about it like you would want to like for interior lighting accent lighting which is like lighting - hmm accent lighting to emphasize areas of interest within the rooms this sort like down lights over couches that's one part that's there's four parts do interior lighting this is like speed through of like interior lighting course so accent lighting over areas of interest down lights over tables things like that decorative lighting that actually doesn't cost much lighting but it's supposed to look like it is so like a chandelier or like a candle or something like that to make it look like it's casting lighting but it's actually not there for that purpose and then ambient lighting and this is a very clear like this is a really important one it's like bount like a sort of a nice sort of soft lighting of everything so usually like you bounce lighting off the ceiling and it creates like sort of a warm filled in light to everything and then the the fourth and final one is task lighting so like a reading lamp over a couch or LEDs are like over a kitchen bench that kind of thing but anyways that I'm not going to do in the nighttime interior one for this since I feel like it wasn't really explained much in the course I'm just gonna do a daytime scene right which is pretty common for interior architectural renders anyway so we're restricted to like natural light so the sky is this this white light here so the sky is blue that's a quote you can quote me as that I'm happy to go down in history as the guy that said it was blue so we'll go with that so the sky is nice and blue now we've got to have a Sun right because this is just pretty drab at the moment by the way if you see lamps over these doors here these are just portal lamps which is like an area lamp oh gosh okay 2.8 it's in beta it just has a portal enabled and it just means that more rays are going to be guided in through the windows I got our video on if you want to check it out anyways so I'm gonna add in a Sun lamp okay and just make it come in through the window let's rotate so we can see it a little bit increase the brightness maybe not too much something like that and then these the size of it like you can see that if you set the size of the Sun all the way to zero it's like a really harsh needlepoint shadow which is not what you really want but you don't want something really drastically smooth either so something something about there will be fine you just do this by eye really I mean depending on cloud cover and everything there's not an exact value anyway so whatever you you think will look nice now as I mentioned in the last part of the lighting series when it comes to environments most of this is going to be determined like like most of your lighting decisions should be decided by a composition because this is where your eyes are gonna look so in this case I actually think like these back this back T V and this back bookshelf is probably where you want the eyes to actually look so I'm gonna have the light come in like pretty harsh right like it's coming in like it's a sunset or something and let's have it that away yeah something like that right this I might change this I don't know anyway let's go for something a little yellow as well like this is like morning sunrise yeah so this is a like a protic like I always employ what's the difference between sunset and sunrise not a lot really other than I think sunset is generally speaking a little bit more saturated colors I think but then now that I think about it it's just like tilting of the earth I uh like they shouldn't really be a difference but that kind of is so this kind of feels more like morning light whereas something like like this kind of feels a little bit more like a sunset so anyway I'm gonna go for like morning light nice fresh early morning and you could leave it like this but it's a little bland and also is the last part of the last video remember what I talked about implied lighting which is casting shadows in from things outside of a scene to make the scene look bigger than it actually is so let's do that and throw some tree lighting in here so I just got this off of polygons this texture here we don't actually have a lot of these textured polygons probably add more but anyways this no it wasn't that one it was this one this one any of these will do but just something like alpha mask trees you can get them anywhere online you could use any of these these will be fine as well but it's just something that's alpha masked you're not even gonna see the color of it so doesn't even really matter how it looks just the shape of it and then you want to just like I mentioned before import images as planes we're gonna use that as well I mean again and it just looks like this and I'm gonna set this to diffuse use alpha that's the important one use alpha because otherwise you're not gonna have any transparent shadows and that'll be a waste so rotate this I'm just gonna position it somewhere near the door until we can see it there we go got some nice little tree shadows I guess you know now that I think about like this is actually a pretty heavy shadow it's a little heavy I kind of want something where like the light is sort of coming through the branches a little bit more so let's go with like let's go with this this one might actually come out better normally I would I would prepare this but like I don't know I I did the render before and I was like yeah this will be fine but now that I'm thinking about it like looking at this like it would be better if we could have like some more interesting shapes come through because currently we don't have a lot of control over the composition right so anyway we've got a render happening right now and I have a very slow internet because I'm in Australia and evidently our government messed up the internet called the National Broadband Network and we spent sixty two billion dollars on a broadband network for the whole country and it still hasn't been delivered and it's like my parents just got it at their house it's like 30 megabits a second and that's supposed to be like mind-blowing it's like oh my gosh we're so far behind anyway so that's Australia anyways filling in some time let's bring in that new that new tree so let's go import image import images as planes let's go back back and we got the new one yeah this one diffused use awful straight yes all right increase this and this and let's see let's hope this is better is it bad I hope it is otherwise I've just wasted a lot of your time by downloading a texture that I'm not gonna use I just want it to hmm is it better doesn't look like it let's try the other side rotate a little bit [Music] okay I mean really we just want to have the appearance of trees right like there's something outside the window I could actually know them to think about it we could make this shadow size a little sharper so we could actually see the definition of the trees but then that's also going to make it look like the trees are closer to the window because the closer the object is to something the heart the sharper those shadows are gonna be so I don't know something like this could be okay it could be but anyways we could turn down the brightness here we could adjust the contrast overall of the entire interior and I will probably use false color to check what my values are yeah we're getting near the edge of the exposure foot but like most of the scene is in the middle there which is pretty good what I will do though is I will go medium high contrast something like that and that'll just make it look a little bit more punchy because the filmic tends to make things look a little washed out but that's deliberate so that you've got a lot more range to play with but then if you use one of these it'll look a little a little punchier anyways this oops nothing on it this was the one that I actually ended up with for my final render sent it to blake and he said wow look he really liked it obviously he didn't have this creative control but came out alright and also by the way i'll just throw in a little tip here i rendered it using the d noise which is this free plugin which does like an AI d noise a from nvidia and it works really well for interiors where you've got a lot of bare walls because the denoise ofor blender is notoriously terrible at uniform like this white wall here for example it will be very bad at making that D noise but that's exactly what this one excels at so denoiser is actually really good for textures but the D noise by Nvidia that one's better for like flat uniform shapes in my opinion but anyways that was the one that I ended up with so now the final one we are gonna do is this lovely girl here and this one was sent in by sebastian sylvester dog ooh now i really like this model because the model is actually it's really well done very well detailed and actually i think this has the the most potential to be drastically improved with better lighting because I feel like currently the lighting is like it's hard to see her face it's hard to really focus on the character like the and this is really where we get into like the emphasis readability that's right part four of the series we talked about using contrast so that you can actually read the differences the difference in contrast between the background and the character is very low like there's not a lot of difference there so I feel like there's a lot of a lot of potential to make this great make it great so I think by the way for my father I sent out the dot blend I think that ground the texture wasn't actually packed in it for some reason so you might actually find that your yeah the ground like might be like underneath her feet so that was my mistake if that happens just like unplug the displacement and and it'll actually be where it should almost but anyways just just for those that were playing along at home and they're like you know Andrew why why does the floor look terrible anyway okay that's what happens in blend is sometimes you know you pack a file and everything's packed except for one thing it's very frustrating anyway okay so I'm gonna set this I'm gonna it's gonna be a nighttime scene okay that's that's the vibe that I'm gonna go here because she's like she's a street girl right she's edgy she's an instagramer let's say she's an instead grandma she's an influenza right and it's nighttime right so she's on the street that's why there's a street below and so we're gonna have like just a blanket amount of like moonlight but let's overall let's just focus on one key light okay so let's add a key light and this is by the way using cycles which you know it means you have to wait for things to render but it also means that you don't have to you know fiddle with all the shadow and the like glitchy stuff that we had Viva now we could if we were like you remember in part 1 we talked about direction and why it's important to see the form of things and you know we could have like something some lighting coming from here but then like if this is a scene that she's on the street like where would that light actually be coming from like it's got to kind of make sense for the scene but also and and this is how I actually landed on this lighting setup in part one I explained how like beauty shots generally you want to have like butterfly lighting which is like typically if I look like front on of a character it's like right in line with the nose but just like positioned above it so you could have something like that and then I thought well like this light is so close to this screen here that why not just put it on the screen right okay so the lights coming from the screen now this radius here is actually the like the size of the light like this is almost a ball of light so way too big I want it to be roughly the size of the screen so something like that okay and there we go now what's interesting about this light that we've created is the emphasis now is going to be because of fall-off right there's gonna be a huge amount of fall-off between the face and the the shoes there right like really sharp fall-off which is great because it's gonna put the emphasis on the face because that's where we want the focus to be the face is the focus so I think it's overexposed now I'm going to check that with false color and you can see that it definitely is so I'm going to turn down the brightness of my lamp here just so that it's like a little bit yellow on the forehead so it's like in the Opera of range of the the exposure range but something like that okay yeah look at the fault like it's up here it's like light is yellowish green and then down here it's becoming blue right so it's falling into like much lower exposure ranges which is great it's what we want so let's go back to filmic and there we go right so that's that's great we've got one key light and that's what you want to start with get a nice key light that's you know showing the form of things but like the back part like a our left leg left left side of the image there like it's very hard to see the figure and that's not good we want to be able to understand like so readability is very poor right now so rim light right that's how you separate something from the background so I'm gonna add in a lamp right about here and I'm gonna increase this like that so this is a rim light right now if I want to get the top part of this arm there I would position it there if I wanted to get the bottom part of the arm I'll position it down here it's really up to you but I'll go sort of like the top part of the arm and I'll make this size of this a little bit bigger as well just so that it wraps around things it's not like a harsher light and then the color of this light it's a street scene and you remember in the color part of the lighting course we talked about how in the natural world there's really it's stuck in the kelvin scale but the artificial lighting world is that there's two colors which you won't find in the natural world from light and that's purple and green so I'm gonna go with yeah like a purpley pinkish color and this is gonna maybe look like it's nighttime maybe she's walking past a I was gonna say strip club strip it could be red it could be like the red-light district and Amsterdam but I don't know a club a laundromat with a neon sign doesn't have to be a strip club but something like that okay so something that's gonna tell us hey it's it's pink I what I don't like though that now that I've got this light here I've got a lot of like I'm losing some emphasis on the face because now there's a bit of contrast on the ground and our eyes are kind of being drawn to the so I'm gonna change this to be a spot lamp and then I'm just gonna control this a little better and go about here like that okay let's make that a little bigger and a little brighter there we go okay so that's good now this side of her the right side of her is now also being just disappeared you've been disappeared into the background so I'm going to duplicate this let's drag it on the other side as well and since it's a different thing let's go like a reddish color we could go red or we could go yellow or we could go green Green is a little I don't know getting into that cyberpunk that I'm not a fan of everything is like saturated colors a light blue that actually looks kind of nice and then I actually for my final scene final thing I made mine blue on the actually from the screen right so it's like a little bit a little there and then you can see like the front of her like it's kind of hard to see the detail here so what I'm gonna do is dial this back just a little bit and let's increase and basically this this value here is kind of acting as our area light like certain high area light our fill light it's filling in shadows so that you can still see some detail from the front but you don't want to go too far right because it's also gonna add light to the whole scene which isn't desirable maybe something like that so let's give let's give this a render and there we go looks looks pretty good I think that if we have a look at the I'll just do one last check on the false color but pretty good I mean with you could probably maybe add in a better fill light just on the left-hand side here just to because I think I think this world lighting as I mentioned it's it's okay but it's kind of filling in like I need it to be a little brighter here and I can't do that without making the ground brighter so instead of using the world lighting as the fill I'm just gonna make another lamp here I will just obviously that's overkill obviously but something something a little better like that let's put most of the emphasis just on that tall jacket there like that perhaps I mean I don't know this kind of feels a little unnecessary but something like that now one other thing I might do and I'm just gonna try this this could totally fell and I haven't actually done I usually rehearse things but I'm like you know what screw it let's see if this actually works I want to create a volume right because I was just thinking like if this is a street scene like you know she's outdoors so there is gonna be some natural fogginess like because it's particles in the air so I'm just wondering if we add in a volume scatter and then let's go point zero one I just wonder if this could look good because then it would kind of instead of the background just being entirely black it might look a little bit more interesting I'll probably have to turn on the denoiser not that one but this one the in a video one because it's gonna be better at crushing some of that awful noise in the uniform volume anyway let's have a look see how this goes and there you go I actually like that it as I said it kind of fills in the background not so boring and you probably use a few more samples than I have because you can see that the denoise the thing is kind of filled it in and it looks almost like smoke which is not terrible but we've lost all the definition in the hair there so use more samples obviously but it came out pretty good I'm quite happy with that so the emphasis is on the face I probably also when I did this for my final render here I moved the camera around just slightly so that you can see the face a little bit better then than what it is over here because you kind of feel like you're not included in the scene like she's sort of off in her own world which is alright but you do want to be able to see the face a little better so I just move the camera up and to the right a little bit yeah change things but yeah there you go so that is it guys I hope you enjoyed this lighting series it's now officially finished yeah if you enjoy this kind of thing by the way like I don't have a patreon but one thing you can do is share it with a friend because I will I listen to what gets results and if if people like these series and I can tell by the number of views it has then I'm gonna make more like it maybe I'll do one on composition or color or something in the future if people want it but you got to show me show me that you want it with with some with some views so share this series with a friend if you found it useful and as always thank you for watching and I'll see you in a future video bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 658,105

Rating: 4.9629025 out of 5

Keywords: lighting, how to, tutorial, critique, improvement, cg, 3d, andrew price, blender

Id: bum0F00TaKU

Length: 33min 44sec (2024 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2019