 Can you make some noise? Thank you Blender conference. I'm so excited to be here. Just and Have you guys drunk at least one cup of coffee today by show of hands at least one. Oh, that's good. I Guess the rest of us have drunk two cups of coffee. Yeah Whoa That's a good start very excited about it and And now we have this sleek new hands-free microphones and that's Kind of makes sense free software free hands. Yeah, and I I love using my hands to think it somehow helps and If you watched at least one of my videos, you know that I'm doing it way too much over the top I just love jettering and some guy told me in YouTube comments section something like Gleb, can't you just tie your hands to your chest or whatever? But that helps me to think and I want to share with you the moment of my life that I enjoy very much Every time I see this photo. It just puts a smile on my face Look at this douchebag This is 70 year old me and I was playing some stupid computer game and Just by looking at my face you can tell that I Was spending quite a lot of time playing games. I have the dark circles under my eyes. I look bad and To prevent me from dying my parents used to hide the keyboard Or even worse my mom just disconnected the power cable It was cruel and I always wanted to say something like Mom stop. I'm not just playing some stupid games. I'm doing a serious business But I understood that it wouldn't cheat anyone. Okay, so I didn't say this And it took me some 20 years To actually reach that point where I can say that I'm doing business. Yeah, I Still do stupid things. I record tutorials. I run the creative stream blog But that's a kind of business for me We hit 43,000 subscribers on YouTube channel and by the moment of speaking It's more like 45,000. So it's growing pretty fast But I no longer live with parents. So anyway For the next 15, I guess minutes. We'll be talking about fun stuff about computer graphics and lighting and Some third thing that will become clear to you in a moment I want you to take a look at this render. This is one of the most realistic renders I've ever seen honestly, I would happily sell my mother into slavery to be able to create something like this Yeah, that's how it works. So I Want you to guess what kind of render engine is it? Is it maybe cycles? This is blind conference after all this must be cycles. Yeah So this was rendered Technically speaking in Johannes Westmark's brain because this is not a 3d render. This is a painting by Johannes Westmark and He didn't use sophisticated technology to calculate the light bounces and so on He used his hands his brush his brain and some acrylic paint to create the perfect illusion of Reality and he tricked me and hopefully he tricked you into thinking that what you see is real stuff or at least a 3d render and By the way, I contacted Johannes Westmark and I know that he's watching the stream right now leave So can you give him a nice round of applause? He describes himself as an old CG nerd He started his career in 3ds max and then he moved to painting and By the way, this is not a photo. This is an acrylic painting too. So this just sucks The good news is that in blender we have all the tools we need to create the realistic renders. Yay and the bad news Some of these tools are not so obvious and we have to use our cunning brains To their full potential to make use of these tools. Yeah, and there is no such thing as make realistic renders button I asked Don He said no and Actually, he didn't say no He replied with a joke. He said is the same button as on cameras make great photo You pressed it many times. So I but I realized that that was a joke We don't have any kind of make realistic renders button not even in the next version of blender and If you take realistic rendering for granted bad things happen Let me give you an example caustics If you have a glass of water I mean in real life if you have a glass of water and you put the light source behind it You see this beautiful envelope of refracted rays, which is obviously called caustics and You may think all right. I'll just launch blender I'll create a glass of water put the light source behind it and voila But that's not that happens What happens instead is this which is a nice render. Yeah, but no caustics whatsoever And if you desperately want to create caustics It just doesn't work this way if you take realistic rendering for granted But things happen. You have to help blender to give you realistic results You often have to help blender. You have to do what your harness Westmark does You have to trick viewers into thinking that what they see is real in other words You have to cheat and to the right. This is blender render plus some cheating But you have to do it do it like the artist and for the next 15 or 10 minutes We'll be talking about how your art may improve if you cheat a little bit Let's start with caustics As I've said no need to bend your head against the wall You can just use the light texture for example You can take the photo of the caustics and just project it onto the geometry It's much much easier. Yeah, then simulating the caustics effect in a physically correct terms It's often much more Punchy and much more realistic I should say and you this effect is very versatile, of course you can use it for many different purposes for beautifying your zombies for example and Even if the object is not refractive you can still have caustics so this just gives you a control over what you do and Light texture is a very cool way very fast cheap and cool way to influence the throw pattern of a light source So how you can add the complexity to your lighting you can? build additional geometry to block the light to create some interesting patterns or you can influence the light throw pattern itself So the idea I want to share with you is that to achieve very realistic results You can cheat and do it like the artist point number two light maps Sometimes we can use the old-school techniques to kind of take our light into the next level baking light maps means storing lighting information in textures and Games in mid 90s like quake I've used this technique a lot because the computers were very slow Obviously, so the artist had to bake lighting information in textures because the computers were unable to run this in real time Now the computers are a little bit faster But we still can use this technique For artistic purposes. Yeah, and by the way, this is how it looks in quake 3 when you remove textures And you're left only with the light map and some color information So we can use this for artistic purposes. Imagine you have this kind of nature seen mushrooms One light source usual stuff So one way to approach it would be to create the array of light sources some very complex rig and Then tweak the material and that's all right. That's what we do often, but as I've said Sometimes it's just better better to Go the more artistic way and to approach it as an artist say you can bake the light map And by the way, this is not the light map in blender is this is called the complete map So you have the light information as well as textures. So you bake this and Then you just paint the hell out of it. So you can do whatever you like You can treat this as a canvas you can do what Johannes Westmark does all the time So I've just took this bake thing and I spent just like five minutes painting light and to me it looks pretty good and All right, go ahead. I'll need a sip to me it looks very punchy and pretty much realistic and I want to take this concept even further and maybe I'm stretching it too far. I Want to talk about photogrammetry? Photogrammetry is the process of automatic generation of 3d model out of photos So you just take like 60 photos of your shoe or of your cat You handle it to the photogrammetry software it generates 3d model for you But what's even more cool? It also bakes The textures and bakes the light the real world light Then you import it to blender And you can do whatever you like, but still you will have this underlying layer of realism below the surface Yeah, so you can capture the real world lighting and use it as a reference and Build on top of it. Is it cheating? Well, probably Does it improve your art? Yeah, I'm very confident about it And you can take it even further and ignore cycles lighting capabilities whatsoever. I Built this Millennium Falcon model out of paper Then I thought the scan did And it looks so so You'll get the message You can just ignore cycles lighting capabilities and use a mission shader with Captured real world light number four reflections and before you get bored because This is what happens eventually everybody gets bored If you aren't aren't satisfied with the reflection what you can do is Change the camera angle try to find a different angle. You can rebuild the whole world around this object or Alternatively, you can just sample the reflection from a different scene. That's how we do it. It's it's absolutely How should I say it? It's cheating at its purest. Yeah, but nine times out of ten It gives you the result you want. So what you do you take an HDRI? I mean a spherical panorama and this one is made by Greg Zall. Thank you Greg Thank you So what you do is your add this reflection from the Spherical panorama on top of your initial one using the add shader And by doing this you also break the energy conservation law But who cares? Yeah, as long as it looks right it is right and Before I went to conference, I wanted to say something smart on stage This is the right moment. I think So physically correct doesn't equals doesn't equal realistic But you know what I realized that this is pretty smart after all because you can sheet and get realistic results Or you can stay completely physically correct and just produce crap It all depends. Yeah number five The final one before we go and get some coffee and exchange some jokes as usual a volume light hack every three artists knows that Volume rendering is a pain in the butt because if you ever tried to make Kind of a puff of smoke Something easy You know that it's very very hard. It can easily take like hours to simulate And like eternity to render I tried to make it. This is not looking good What you can do is just cheat You can create a few planes positioning behind the object and do what? game development artists have been doing for ages just Create a transparent material add the smoke texture to it and pretty much you're good to go This takes just five minutes And this is looking pretty convincing if you don't move the camera too much The illusion works really well, and if you haven't tried it go ahead and do it because you will be amazed This is simple things But they look gorgeous. Oh You haven't seen this and During this moment of the talk. I probably should say something like But there are many more lighting hacks and you can find them on creative shrimp calm But it would sound like I'm advertising. Yeah, and I will burn in hell for doing this So I won't do this Don't visit creative shrimp there is nothing interesting here and Nothing at all and we aren't working on the new very exciting training about Space galaxies nebulous asteroids black holes I'm kidding. We are working on the new stuff. It will be so damn exciting when it comes Do you like it? I claim that we need to have courage to admit that we cheat all the time and We should do it even more often But do it like the artists that means to be smart Because when Pixar artists uses 230 light sources in one shot to make it look believable. They are smart That means to be resourceful When Johannes Westmark uses nothing more than his hands his brush his brain and some acrylic paint To create a complete illusion of reality. He is resourceful And that means to be brave Because once you step onto this path People will get violent at you They will like to punch you in the face and be the crap out of you for doing that but that's totally worth it and I think that cheating is what makes me the better artist. I hope so Because I'm always ready to cheat and keep a straight face That means I'm always ready to find the unexpected solution to the problem You do the same thing and be prepared to be amazed and by the way I always had the replacement keyboard just in case Thank you so much. Go grab some coffee