Blender Beginner Tutorial – Part 8: Lighting


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Beginner Blender tutorial on lighting – the different types of light in blender, and how to create a pleasing lighting setup.
Watch Part 7: https://youtu.be/4_niVFliJ0E?list=PLjEaoINr3zgHs8uzT3yqe4iHGfkCmMJ0P
Watch Part 9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25N775uHb_4
Get the PDF Shortcut Guide: www.blenderguru.com/articles/free-blender-keyboard-shortcut-pdf/
Get Pro-Lighting Skies: www.blenderguru.com/product/pro-lighting-skies/

Related Tutorials:
Mastering Lighting in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-N149FMlWk
How to Light Objects in 3D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o0PauhFQyo

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20 responses to “Blender Beginner Tutorial – Part 8: Lighting”

  1. A little more info about the way how light works in 3D. Personally I think you should at least understand the basic mechanic of light if you're going to do 3D, because light is the essence of 3D, and pretty much the whole evolution of 3D graphics since the 90s up until this point, that huge difference in quality and realism that you notice between a 3D scene rendered back in the 90s and a scene rendered to current day standards, is 90% the evolution of the understanding of lighting and lighting related algorithms.

    Unlike the other light sources which radiate light rays, the "sun" produces parallel light rays all over the scene according to the selected inclination which is the realistic way the real Sun lights the Earth. Theoretically if you'd take a normal point or spot light and move it away from your object at the same distance that there is between the earth and the sun, you'd theoretically get the same effect as a sun light, because the distance between the object and the light source is so great, that the divergence between the light rays that touch the object is so small they can as well be considered parallel.

    The Spot and Area are basically sub volumes of Point, they emit divergent light rays but it allows you to control the cone/area where the emission occurs. The size does indeed affect the sharpness of the resulting shadow being cast, however, that's not what the size is about, the size is literally the size of the emitting light source, and you can best observe that in Area light where you can actually visualize the rectangle of the light source.

    During rendering, random rays are cast from each light emitter which bounce around between objects determining colors and shadows. As such, the direction in which light travels greatly affects the end-result. The size of the light source relative to the size of the objects being lit, boils down to how the light rays are hitting the object, so if you think about it, having a small flashlight in your hand and pointing it at a car in front of you, if you imagine looking at the scene from the top, no matter how you randomly cast the light rays, the left-most hitting ray will always have roughly the same origin as the right-most hitting ray, and as such, if you imagine a wall behind the car, your flashlight will project a very crisp contour of the car on the wall, that's because the only light hitting the wall is originating from that small point which is the tip of your flashlight. However, if you then imagine you can magically enlarge your flashlight so that its diameter is larger than the length of the car, then the left-most and right-most hitting light rays are no longer originating in the same spot, they no longer form a V to the edges of your car, in fact they're all over the place and even overflow the edges of the car, so you have light coming in at many different angles, and as such, the shadow of the car on the wall looses its sharpness simply because what happens is that each light ray casts a different contour on the wall, based on the angle at which that light hits the edge of the car, if it even hits it at all, but since there are billions of light rays that fly around, we can't really perceive each individual shadow cast by each individual ray, instead we see the blended result of all shadows combined which is a blurry shadow.

    Rendering replicates the way light works in reality by randomly sampling light from each light source, the engine basically randomly picks a point within a spherical region around your light's coordinates (and that region is your light's size) and then it shoots a ray from that point, into a completely random 360 degree direction (this gets clamped by Sun and Area lights, and it is not random at all for Sun lights for which it always matches the light's orientation (but not also the origin)). The rendering engine does this ray casting multiple times for each light source, the more times it does it, the more realistic the end result will be.

  2. When I press Shift Z and get into the render mode while tweaking the values of the lighting, the shadows and the mug are blurry, is it something to do with the settings, or? The donut looks fine. It's not because of the brightness or anything like that..

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