 What is up, it's EJ from iDesign.com and today we're gonna be talking about how you can get better at lighting, how to improve your lighting workflow, and I'm gonna be introducing a new plugin that's gonna help you do just that called Light Solo. What Light Solo does, it's very simple. It helps you solo any selected lights very easily and allows you to dial in those lighting looks, get fine-tuned control, be able to see what each light is contributing your scene and really dial it in and really push your lighting to the next level. So we're gonna be covering Light Solo. We're also gonna be covering how to improve your lighting and some of the most common lighting mistakes that I see so you can fix them and we're all gonna do it with the help of Light Solo. Let's go ahead and dive right in. I'm super excited to talk about Light Solo and how it can help you become a better lighter, a more efficient lighter and a more accurate lighter and basically on a surface level what Light Solo allows you to do is solo any lights that you have selected. I'm just gonna hit the Light Solo button and you can see that this is just going to solo those selected lights and turn all the rest off. Now you can see I'm using all Redshift lights here but Light Solo works with any light from Arnold, built-in renderers, Octane lights, VDB volumes, Redshift lights. If I go ahead and I solo that mesh light it's gonna turn all of the other lights off. We're talking the environment lights, spot lights, day lights. You can see all of the different type of lights that I just kind of threw in from the built-in C40 renderers, the Arnold renderer lights and skies and mesh lights and volumes, same thing with Octane, same thing with Redshift. So VDB volumes, these are all supported and can be soloed using Light Solo. So it's as easy as just selecting lights and hitting the Solo button or you can map this to a shortcut key. Now the best part is is once you're done soloing all of these different lights you can easily just go back to having all the lights turned back on by holding the Shift key down and clicking Light Solo and that will turn back on all of your lights and that's where you can start going in and soloing again but this is a super easy way to be able to dial in looks and see light contributions work more efficiently, work faster while you are lighting in any of these third-party renderers. So let's cover the basic ways that Light Solo works. You can see that again I can click on any light, click the button Solo it. I have this actually mapped to a shortcut key which is just the semi-colon key so I can just easily click on any lights, hit the shortcut key and be able to solo any selected lights. Now what if I want to go and select all these lights and maybe I just want to see what that background light's doing so I can go ahead and hit the shortcut key that's only gonna show that background light. Okay, what if I wanna go back to all those solo lights that I had before? All I need to do to do that is hold the Control or Command key down, click the Light Solo button and that will go back to your last state or the last state of soloed lights. So if I wanna see what are these lights doing, I'll just solo these. You can see we can quickly audition lighting setups here and if you actually don't want a light to be messed with by Light Solo at all, say I wanna always have this kicker light turned on, all I need to do is just put a underscore right before the light and I can go ahead and solo the background light and you can see that that's not going to affect that kicker light so this is great if you wanna keep lights turned on or off no matter what you're doing with Light Solo. So I can go back to the previous state by holding the Command or Control key down and clicking and I just love having this docked in my UI here. So to do that, I'm just gonna bring up the Commander, Shift C and I'm just gonna type in Light Solo and you can see I can just click and drag this, bring that into the UI. You can see I already have one there. So you can see I'm just gonna go into my Customized Palettes and just double click on the one and remove that one there. Now one really awesome workflow I like to use is if I wanna addition different lighting setups like I have all of these different light setups under these nulls, what I like to do is create selection objects. So for each lighting setup that I wanna audition or mess around with, what I'll do is select them all. I'll go up to Select, selection filter, create selection object and here we will have this selection object and you can see I already have a menacing selection object there but if I go to this selection object and just rename this menacing and you can see as I select this object all of the lights that you have underneath that selection and to recall that selection, all I need to do is double click on this little icon here that will select all the lights and then all I need to do is simply hit the Light Solo button or again if you mapped it to a shortcut key you can totally do that. So you can map shortcut keys by going up to Window, Customization, Customize Palettes and here I'm going to look up Light Solo and there it is and basically if you wanna assign a shortcut key you select that object and you can see I just use the semicolon to do that all I did was hit the semicolon button, hit assign and then you can see that assign that shortcut key. If I wanted to do period, I can type in period and that'll load there and I can say assign and this C4D error box will show up if you're overwriting a current shortcut key. So typically I'm not gonna wanna do that and that's why I'm just using the semicolon and assigning because no other option is using that shortcut key so that's why that's working for me and so I'll just close out of that and now I can easily hit the colon key and solo all of these different lights. So this just really opens up so many possibilities for just increasing the efficiency in how you work, seeing how lights are affecting your object and seeing and really dialing in each individual light and its contribution and that can really help you avoid some of the most common lighting mistakes that I'm gonna cover right now. All right, so let's talk most common lighting mistakes that I see and how you can improve them and number one is just having everything way too flat. You can see this render right here, everything is so flat and a lot of times that's caused by just lighting with a dome light or an HDR light. You can see that if I really crank up the exposure here, everything is gonna be fairly flat. We have too much ambient light here and that's why it's really important that if you do use an HDR light, you at least have a couple other area lights in there to really dial in and shape the form of your object because an HDRI is not made with the shape of the object you're trying to light in mind so that's when you're really gonna need to have that little personal touch and really finesse the lighting of your scene to help accentuate that form, okay? So you can see that this is just overall very flat. Again, we have this dome light kind of making everything super flat. Again, too much ambient light. So what we can do is I'm gonna solo this key light here and the one problem with this light position is that it's right directly in front of our object and this is just going to have that like on-board flash kind of look. So one thing that's gonna help is just moving this off to the side like so and you can already see by moving this off to the side, we're getting this nice gradient and we're really seeing the details, all the nooks and crannies of this light and that's why it's great to just solo a light and be able to really dial in and see exactly what that light is doing and what it's contributing to the scene because if I know this is my key light and this is what it's contributing, I can go ahead and let's add this overhead light. So I'm just gonna select both those lights and hit the solo button and you can see that, okay, this is the overhead and you can see those two added together but let's just see what this overhead light's doing. You can see that this is creating a lot of really nice contrasts as far as the shadows, it's right overhead. So we're getting all this nice contrast and shadows really accentuating the detail on this lion object here. If I turn on all of these lights together, I'm just gonna hit the shortcut key that I assigned for light solo, which was the colon key, you can see that this is looking pretty good. It's still a little flat, so maybe we go and solo that dome light and maybe we bring this down quite a bit so it's not really filling the scene with so much ambient light and then again, I'm gonna go back to my previous state which was having these three lights soloed so I'm gonna hold the controller command key down, click on the light solo button and we can see the contribution of all of those lights. So you really wanna have a nice gradation, a nice contrast ratio of highlights, medium exposed areas and then of course shadows because shadows really provide that contrast depth and can really help add to the mood. So really great to be able to just solo some of these lights and really dial them in, dial in all the key lights, fills, your rims, I'm just gonna hold down the control key to turn back on those three lights and this is looking a lot better than where we came from. Where everything was just so flat, you couldn't really get the details of this object and again, that's one of the major downsides of just using a dome light to light your scene. It's great for filling in little details and bringing up the fidelity of some of the areas in shadow just to add a little bit more detail and especially with reflections, it's great to add a reflection detail but you don't wanna just be lighting with a dome light or an HDRI. Now let's cover the most other common lighting mistake and that is over exposing your object. So before we had our lighting so flat that we're not getting a lot of detail, here we have the exact opposite where we have too much light and it's really blowing out the form of this object. So I can go in here and you know, it's a lot of times I'm like, man, I'm really blowing out my object and I need to find out what light is causing that like overblown highlight. So this is where it's great to use light solar to just like solo that key light. Let's see like that's just too hot by itself. So that's where you know that I need to bring down this light because even with all the other lights off in the scene, this light alone is really blowing out a lot of that detail so I can bring this exposure back. Maybe I go and adjust the spread of this light. So it's just kind of, you know, focusing more of the light on a certain part of the object here. Maybe I move this a little bit off to the side, rotate that. But here again, it's just so critical to be able to see a single light's contribution to your scene, maybe angle this up so we get a lot more of the shadow detail. And this is where it's great to just shape the form, paint with light, right? And really dial in that look. Look at how contrast-y this looks and you know, this is looking really good and it sets the mood and that kind of leads into the next common lighting mistake that I see a lot. Let's actually go to the overhead lights here and see what that's doing. That's actually not bad, you know? Maybe we can position it over, maybe dial that back a little bit. Let's solo this kicker light. You can see that this kicker light by itself is super blown out. So with kicker lights, with rim lights, sometimes a little bit goes a long way, so just don't go crazy when using your rim lights. Again, sometimes a little bit goes a long way. Let's check out this other rim light. You can see that that's not terrible. It's still a little bit overblown here. We're losing some of the fidelity here, especially right here as well. We're losing that nice bump texture so we can pull back on this a little bit. You can see that for the most part, I'm not using your traditional three-point light setup because really the three-point light setup is more about how to use a light versus how many lights you should use. So again, I'm just gonna solo this dome light here and this is pretty bright. It's adding a lot of ambient light to this scene, probably contributing to just having everything just way too overexposed. And let's go ahead and just solo all these lights here. And you see that we're getting a much nicer result. Again, we've achieved that nice contrast ratio, that nice gradient from left to right. We have brighter spots, mid-tones, and darker areas and this is really helping to accentuate the form. There's so many nice details on this model that we should really light to accentuate that. Now, I am seeing this still really blown out over here. So again, that's where you can go in and see what light is the culprit there. I think it might be that rim light and the kicker light. I can just solo both of these lights together and see exactly, yep, they're both kind of blown that out. So I'll just bring them both down because I have them both selected and just pull back there. Let's just solo this kicker. And again, just being able to quickly solo a light with a click of a button and pull back and dial in your lighting setups is just such a huge time saver when it comes to lighting. You can light more efficiently, light faster and really tweak to your heart's content without having to waste all those button clicks trying to solo each light manually by turning things on. So that's looking a lot better. Let's go ahead and cover another lighting mistake and that is not using light intentionally. So usually what helps you light a scene is going into it, knowing what kind of mood or story, like what is the story you're trying to tell? What's that mood? What is the feeling you want to elicit from the viewer? And that's really important because when you light with the story or mood in mind, the process of lighting becomes that much easier. So you can see I have this menacing light setup here that I'll just go ahead and solo. Again, I have so many lighting setups here and it's just great to be able to jump into one and audition it and see what it looks like and be able to jump out again and solo another lighting setup. So here you can see that not only am I using the angles here to tell a story and you can see a lot of the detail is in darkness, the face is really menacing. I kind of pointed a light right at the teeth so you can see just a little bit of the teeth. We're also using colors and that's a huge thing as well. That's another lighting mistake as well is not using color because no light is 100% pure white. So even in this top light that I have here, if I go to, let's solo this light, you can see that nice rim red highlight there. Let's go and I think this is the overhead light here. You can see that I'm using temperature and color. So if I just dial in just a little bit of temperature here, I get this really nice blue and let's check out all of these together and adding colors really helps add to the believability, especially if you're just using that temperature slider here and getting that more natural warm tone or cool tones that you'll get from like the sun or ambient bounce light from the sky. So that's super important. It also helps to either cool off or warm up the overall tone of the image as well. And color can also help add to the mood. I wanted to make this very menacing. That again is the intentional choice that I wanted to make and the story I wanted to tell with this lighting. So what did I do? I added some red to this light. You can see without the red, let's actually go to this other light here as well. It's not as menacing. It's not telling the same story, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and undo that. And just by adding that red in there, just red feels like anger, passion. So be sure to think about the psychology of color. Use complimentary colors too. Think about your color theory when you are using colors with lights. So again, to light more intentionally, that looks a little menacing. Again, I wanna reiterate the fact that I can turn on all the lights in my scene by holding down shift and clicking the light solo button. You can actually see the light solo button is no longer blue. So that means that light solo is not active. But the moment I go ahead and maybe just select these mysterious lights here and click on the light solo button, it's going to turn blue, meaning that the light solo is active. And you can see that we're just soloing these mysterious lights here. And again, we're leaving a lot of the object and shadow. And we can go in here. Gonna hit the shortcut key for light solo. And you can see each contribution of each light. So this is kind of like, this is actually more of a fill light, I would say. It's always good to name your lights too. So when you are soloing each light, you know which light's doing what. And you know where to pinpoint and solo. So here's the key. You can see the key is leaving a lot of the object and shadow. And this is actually really great to elicit that sense of mystery. And one tip that I'll tell you is use the 70-30 rule where you either have 30% of your object really lit up and the other 70% in shadow. Or the opposite where you have 70% of your object in light and 30% in dark shadow. That adds a nice contrast ratio. You don't want it to be evenly split 50-50 because in design, when things are 50-50, it looks boring and the same. But the moment you add some contrast and like scale and lighting and gradients, that's when it really starts to come together. And again, I can double click on this selection object here to select some lights and hit the shortcut key to solo. And I'm again, auditioning a new lighting set up here. Where here I would say we're probably a little bit more 70 illuminated and 30% in darkness. And it's just, again, just a really nice contrast ratio. Now, if I go to this bright set up here, it's always important to also match that background illumination. If I had this pretty dark, so this is my background light here, if I just solo it, you can see that's the background light that I just brought down the light on. You can see that that's actually pretty cool with a silhouette there. But if I hold the command or control key down to turn back on all those other lights, it's actually important to match the brightness of the background with the actual brightness of the object itself. So if I bring this background light down pretty dark, you can see that it doesn't really make sense to have this very illuminated object in the foreground in a very dark background. So that's where you wanna balance things out and make it seem like the background is in the same world as this object, right? So if I bring this background up, you can see that's looking like it's a little bit more believable. They're both in the same space, the background of the object itself, and that's looking really nice. Now, maybe I decided like, okay, let's look at this kicker light. Is that too hot? I think that looks pretty good actually. And maybe I wanna move this back a little bit and let's see what kind of shape we get, how we're shaping this object just with that single light. Again, I love tweaking lighting setups and using light solo just really helps me scratch that itch to help really dial in these looks. So let me just hold the shift key down, click on light solo to turn it off. And again, that will turn on all of the lights in your scene. And I'll leave you with one last tip and that is when you are lighting here and you are having the ability to solo lights. If you ever solo a light and it's like not really adding to the lighting setup at all, like let's just say I solo these lights and maybe I have this overhead light here, maybe I turned it down, maybe when I was in my lighting setup, you know, this looked like a good idea. But if I go here and solo this overhead light, maybe I find out, maybe it's not doing all that much at all. And that's a great thing to discover when you're soloing lights. So if it's not contributing much, if I go ahead and turn back on all these other lights in this group and just kind of turn that on and off, you can see that that's really not contributing much. And in that case, it's good to remove those lights because the more lights you have in your scene, the more render time you're gonna have as well. And there's always a little back and forth with how many lights do you use in your scene. All I know is that if it looks good to you, it's good. So whether that takes two lights or 10 lights, knock yourself out, but just make sure that each light is actually doing something and accentuating a form and has a job, okay? So I don't know about you, but lighting is a lot more fun when it's this easy to be able to light and dial in lighting setups with light solo. All right, now I hope you realize now how important each and every individual light that you place in your scene really matters. And light solo is going to be able to help you see how each light is contributing and really downline each of them and push your renders to the next level and allow you to have a way more efficient and fast lighting workflow. Now, if you have any question about light solo or any of the lighting that I covered in this video, please leave those questions and comments in the comments section below. As always, I always appreciate your support. Hope you check out light solo. And if you use it and you love it, please let me know, I'd love to hear it. And as always, thank you so very much for watching and I can't wait to see you in the next one. See ya.