 All right, thank you very much So my name is Gleb Alexander of I run the creative stream blog where artists learn tips and tricks about computer graphics art and coffee Obviously, and I'm super excited to be here Today we'll be talking about how to create awesome lighting in blender by expressing yourself and there is a hint, you know in the title and And first of all I to put the things in context I want to ask you how many of you guys have heard about me raise your hands, please. I Oh, oh 37 37 millions probably Thank you. Thank you. I just can't skip the talk then but and another question for you Have you seen an artwork or a photo and thought to yourself that lighting is amazing? Have you ever seen such artwork? All right, and now please raise your hands if it caused you any anxiety any anxiety at all if you thought I'm never gonna make it It's too good. Oh There are many of you. All right, I know how you feel and Three years ago when I was still working at the game studio I started to notice that I follow the same kind of procedure over and over again Then it came to lighting, you know, I was a tech geek. I Just started always with creating a decent model and then I applied all My technical knowledge and spend all the effort to make this model look cool usually it was just positioning the kill the key the fill in the hairline and hoping that it's enough and Then I was just tweaking the light bounces the render settings and I learned everything about V-Ray I worked in 3ds max back then and I knew everything about it, you know, how to choose the right size for the render bucket how to Tell the difference between various NT allies and algorithms, but on some level it sucked, you know I can't just create amazing things using just that knowledge and It was a disturbing feeling you know and Every evening then I left the office. I was making my way through city streets And I was just looking around me and I saw weird and exciting things related to lighting Imagine falling snow and street lamps shining bright and If you squint your eyes a little bit, you will notice a giant vertical light streak like a lens flare in your eye The light diffracted through the eyelashes The light diffracted through the eyelashes you never notice it But when you do you'll never forget our imagine going by car from Amsterdam to Vilnius at night You see blazing trails of light infinite motion You see dim lights of a distant city Refracted by the tiny raindrops on the car windshield When I just was traveling looking around me, I saw weird and amazing things related to lighting And at work and in my own creative doodles, you know, I just use lighting To showcase how cool I can model and I was concentrated on a technical aspect of lighting And I had a disturbing feeling that I miss something crucial and I even started to think that maybe a CG is not my kind of thing Maybe there is a photographer hidden somewhere inside me, you know It was a very very disturbing feeling and it haunted me for years Meanwhile, I quit the day job. I Switched from 3ds max to blender and that was quite an achievement for me. I Met my wife She worked at the same studio as a concept artist and we were fired together And you can tell why just by looking at the picture Yes, so it took me a few years I'm kind of slow when it comes to my life and my career to realize That the experiences from my life Don't collide with computer graphics. I create the life The life is awesome weird unspeakable What I see is just unbelievable and in computer graphics. I use lighting only to showcase how cool I can model and And that really sucked I was stuck in in the box of production quality rendering, you know And it's a pretty comfortable box, but I asked myself Will the knowledge of shaders alone will help me to create the art that connects and the answer was no and This kind of problem of limiting your vision to the technical stuff It's very common, you know I took 500 renders from CG society blender artist and 3d total and based on my selection I can assume that's kind of a general approach to CG lighting is to use it as a tool as a supplementary tool to reveal the shape of the model in the most appealing way you know to sell the shot and Don't get me wrong. I love these 500 artworks and all respect to their creators But among my selection there were practically zero artworks That's like subject but still connect because of lighting. There were zero abstract works you know and So we just use lighting as a tool in the most cases, you know But I must admit that the ball of boobs was kind of interesting I stumbled across it on CG society and just shoot an email to Matthias model a and I asked Matthias I was talking blender conference may show your boobs and he said all right Go ahead show it to the world, but let's return to lighting You know, what's wrong with learning shaders and techniques? What's wrong with being a tech geek you may ask and there's nothing wrong with it I love tech geeks and I know that among you there are many tech geeks But I thought what if these knowledge of particular techniques that originated in cinematography for example the three-point lighting and As well as the knowledge of how to set up the right amount of light bounces How to eliminate the noise in the rendering? What is black-bodied temperature node? What if this knowledge is just a small chunk of the whole process of setting up lighting in computer graphics and You can tell by looking at this beautiful Pacman chart that they prepared for you So what if this just a small chunk of the whole process and the rest is the weird and charted territory of your creativity? What if lighting is much more than just a tool and That was a game changer for me and that is very important stuff What if the lighting is a way to express yourself in the first place and in this moment When I realized it My life changed forever. I nerd life Changed forever No, I realized that to get my lighting to the next level. I need to connect somehow my life That experiences from my life that relate lighting that night highway that block of ice in winter morning that burned out photos that got them lights Diffracted through the eyelashes. I need to somehow bring it to blender to connect it, you know, and maybe some someone after this talk will write a plug-in and I thought that is the way to go and In this moment, I began writing a book about lighting and Sharing everything with you on creative shrimp because I feel that conversation is a way to go No with this book. I wanted to give myself permission to express my personal feelings with lighting I wanted to give myself permission to experiment and to try new things to experiment with thickness of the atmosphere To experiment with some weird stuff but What we consider to be experimental in computer graphics is a pretty common thing in photography and in fine art There is nothing new under the Sun and if you look at photos by for example by Bruce bar bone You will notice that it's a totally different approach to what we used to see in computer graphics He uses lighting not only to showcase something Or to beautify your 3d models, you know, he uses lighting to paint To create an abstract works with lighting or if you just scrub through Photos on flicker for example photos by Sylvia graph. You will be amazed and When I looked at these photos, I thought oh, I'm still miles behind and I want to do this I want to paint with light. I Want to do exactly this and I thought it's clearly based on a static experience and A static experience is an unexpected interruption in the flow of the everyday It's a quote by Hans Ulrich Gumbrich the professor at Stanford University and during that moment We perceive the world differently with an intensified feeling for the here and now and I Think that is the single most important thing that we need to know that feeling comes first that you need to feel something first and then you apply your technical knowledge and all this stuff and for example, oh That's a reminder for me to not procrastinate, you know, I love procrastinating for me It's just chatting with you and social media and come and commenting and by the way, this is my best painting up today I was three. It was called an immortal hero and Never mind here are seven tips that will help you to create awesome lighting in blender the point number one Pretty obvious you live an interesting life. Just open your eyes. I Bet each one of you can remember at least one thing related to lighting One thing that impressed you one interruption in the flow of the everyday But you know what close your eyes for a moment. I wanted to close the rest and imagine the night highway Imagine the night highway the blazing trails of light the cars passing by at 100 miles per hour They look like a tiny fireflies in the dark and everything is refracted by the tiny raindrops on the car windshield and Open your eyes. Does it look like what I imagined if yes, please raise your hands If it does look a little bit like what you have imagined and now please raise your hands If it doesn't look like what you imagined raise your hands Oh, it's alright. I still love you and it doesn't matter at all because that's my perception of a night highway influenced by my vision and by a movie called lock with Tom Harley So and your aesthetic experiences are the building blocks that you use to create awesome lighting in blender You feel something first then you learn how to do it and then you apply to your technical knowledge Lighting is a thing on its own in fact You may have a very primitive geometry in your scene and you still can absolutely crush it use and write lighting For example, look at this one. This is considered to be a mistake, you know, this is this looks like a burnt-out photo Clipped at the higher end of range, you know With zero information in the highlights, this is considered to be a mistake But I'm fine with that mistake with that mistake as long as lighting works And you may have very primitive geometry just a few spheres and so on and still crush it using right lighting or this one This is a funny story behind this one. I was I Was caught in the rain and I just ran to the nearest building. It was a coffee house The best place on earth and I was just sitting With a small smoking hot cup of coffee in my hands and beyond the window that chill and rain won't blast in the street And hot versus cold was how I perceived the situation and you can see how lighting alone hopefully conveys the emotion and Let's face it the geometry wise this scene is kind of boring and primitive a few models from blend swap You know 2d background and the area light nothing nothing special but with the The right approach to lighting you can make something interesting out of it So the point number three always try new things and experiment and for me blender is a tool That I used to explore the new concepts and the new ways of doing things It is a tool to wake my inner photographer up No, once I was at a party and I drank way too much and when I woke up in the morning I noticed one thing no actually I noticed two things that my head hurt like it was gonna explode and The second thing that the empty bottles standing on the table. They looked so amazing for some reason Look, they look so very interesting You know and I recreated this experience in blender. I just created a bunch of bottles and I'll place them on the table I carefully recreated everything except the headache, you know, I then I hit them with the light coming from virtual window and Then I took a virtual camera by pressing shift F Just started searching for the shot, you know, and I knew that if I recreate that experience That multiple Refractions and caustics going on in the bottles It will give me a chance to find a good angle and create a good looking picture Always trying new things and experiment and try to adopt the workflows that originated in photography, for example Or in cinematography think I was outside of the box For this is the quote by James Gurney and James wrote an amazing book about lighting cold lighting and color I encourage you to Google for it after the conference. You won't regret So James said the world is not made of plaster indeed the world is made of a whole range of different substances and Explore them all no don't get stuck with these new diffuse shaders and With following this approach when lighting is meant to reveal this subject So for example, do you remember langoliers these tiny little creatures that devoured today when it becomes yesterday? Scared the hell out of me when I was a child. No You can think of light Lighting conditions such as fog as a ungolier, you know the fog can devour your scene and Don't get stuck with diffuse shaders all the time, you know This is my sound contradictory to what I said earlier, but in this case being tech geeky is a nice thing No cycles allows us to create a very complex interactions of light and material and One light light rays travel through space and they hit that I block part of it gets reflected part gets refracted some of them gets blocked by the tiny particles inside the eyes and It's getting so complicated. That's a light poetry is going on and Cycles allows us to create this kind of light poetry and by the way Thank you so much Blender developers for for doing cycles and please give Blender developers nice round of applause because they deserve it and They are rock stars So use a whole range of different substances five Beautiful is their own word Feeling different is the right word and it's not about me. I'm not different and I'm not beautiful Even my wife admits it. So it's about the wall and At the moment of aesthetic experience. We perceive the world from different side Martin zeal German philosopher called this an appearing when out of the blue bam, the ordinary object becomes something different you feel something new about it and Maybe because you have been traveling for a year and now you're turning home And you see the night high when you feel something different about it And maybe maybe it's something personal or maybe be your trunk Anyway, the moment comes and the ordinary object becomes something different. You just need to be To notice it in the right moment. I'll look at it the fog the bottles Strange thing the night highway these are pretty ordinary things and that leads me to the next point Stay tuned for aesthetic experiences because they come and they go they if you don't pay attention They will vanish before you can say blender, you know so always always stay tuned for them and Sometime ago I was surfing the internet and I stumbled across an article on the mental health talk website Where some person described her visual over stimulation that she suffered when she experienced in the shopping center She said it was like Taking LSD. She said it caused her panic attacks her quote Then my visual perception shifted and it was like every object within my visual range was reaching toward me No, and when I read it, I thought that's amazing. I can feel it I can feel it almost and That was an aesthetic experience for me and I started to think how can I turn it into the picture in blender and for me it became this big CD With light coming effectively from every direction at once It causing yeah, I don't know. It's visual over stimulation for me more than hundred light sources and Tom Rosendahl hidden somewhere inside the image. No, can you see him? alright and This one guess what I was watching Harry Potter all eight movies I'm just kidding just first seven so Always stay tuned for by the way, this is classical three-point lighting nothing special always stay tuned for a static experience Bruce Barron sent to his students. The idea of using intuition has something to do with photography But much more to do with life your life and while we are here at blender conference, and you're amazing I want to refresh this quote The idea of using intuition has something to do with blender But much more to do with life Your life and the biggest project of my life right now is that book about lighting that I'm writing and I will continue to share everything every chapter for free with you because I want to hear your Feedback and I appreciate each one of you and I will keep it open. No a transparent so Embrace your intuition Because embracing intuition leads to a more creative approach to lighting and Perhaps even more importantly it leads to a happier life embrace your intuition explore the new things and If you take away just one thing from this talk, I hope that it is this Bring your own static experiences to see the lighting and to blender See that light diffracted through the eyelashes and start expressing yourself Thank you so much