 All right, are we good? I think we're good. All right, thank you guys for coming. Welcome. If I haven't met you yet, I'm Jonathan Lampell, and I work at CG Cookie as a Blender instructor. So today, I wanted to talk a little bit about lighting because it's my favorite subject when it comes to 3D. Definitely my favorite. And did anybody go to Glob's talk earlier this morning? That was fantastic. But one thing that, if you look online for tutorials about lighting or composition or anything like that, with those subjects, usually it goes in one of two directions. You either get super, super specific. This is how to do this exact thing. And it only works in that exact scenario. And you get super cookie cutter results. And it's just not that helpful, really. Or you get super abstract. And you're left wondering, how do I even apply this to everyday production? So my goal in this talk is to help bridge those two a little bit and share my workflow of how I go about lighting. And hopefully that's practical and helps you guys. So the first thing, before we go into lighting, a lot of the things that go into the decision-making process happen before you even open up Blender. So first, we're going to cover a few basics to how to approach this in the first place so that when we do get into Blender, then we can go and start making things right away. So the first thing I want everybody to remember is intentionally communicate. So the art that we make says something. So it either tells a story about us or it tells a story about the brand that we are communicating for. So the models, the textures, the lighting, all of it works together to say something. And if it's not all pointing in one direction, if your lighting says one thing, your model says something else, it just gets really confusing. So you need to make sure that you are intentionally communicating something throughout all of these aspects of your scene. So one thing I was thinking about when I was making this presentation is public speaking. I haven't really done a lot of public speaking, so I was worried, like, what if I get up here and I have something I really want to share that I think is super cool, but it doesn't come across right or I just can't find the right words to say it? And that's exactly what happens with lighting a lot of times is the lighting and the layout of our scene is like the presentation skills. So even if you have a super cool model, if you don't present it in a way that's clear and understandable upon first read, then a lot of that work is lost. So a quick example is we have this car render here and all it shows is it's a car. You know it's probably a really nice model, but there's nothing really special about it. It's not really saying anything other than, hey, I'm a car, I'm a Lamborghini, and it's red, that's pretty neat, and that's about it. So it gets a little boring, especially when you see hundreds of these a day. So it's much better to actually have a story or something that's a little bit more interesting and it says something about the work that you're doing and about the project itself. So everything when it comes to lighting, everything that you do, all the decisions that you make should be based around what it is that you're trying to communicate. So whether that's the color of the light, the strength of the light, where it's placed, the size of the shadows, all of that, if it doesn't serve to articulate what the point is of the render in the first place, then you should probably get rid of it and start over, and that'll save you a lot of time in the long run. So the second thing we need to get to is the idea of framework over formula. So we've all heard of three point lighting, I'm sure, and it's definitely something we've heard a lot about, and it's a really great framework that I use all the time, but it's a really boring formula, and what I mean by that is a formula is more of a step-by-step process of checking boxes, okay, I did this one thing, I did this other thing, I guess now I'm done, and you end up getting the same result over and over again, and you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing, but a framework is the underlying principles of what makes that important in the first place. So for three point lighting, we're familiar with key lights, fill lights, and back lights, and the key light highlights the form of the subject, the fill light softens by lighting the shadows, and the back light separates the foreground from the background. But when I'm talking about viewing things as a framework instead of a formula, we're not really thinking about having three lights in the scene, and this one is this specific light, we're thinking more about what those lights are supposed to do. So as long as we're thinking in terms of highlighting, softening, and separating, then we have a much better way to approach things and making sure that instead of having these three lights need to go in these three areas, you're looking at your under as a whole and saying, okay, this is where I need to separate the foreground from the background, this is how I'm going to go about it. So that's definitely helpful. So a way that, you know, a practical example of this is this office chair. So the model was actually off of a blend swap by E-Mirage, but let's pretend this is for a advertisement. And you know, this is the basic three point lighting setup, it's effectively lighting the chair, we can see it, so there are lights, but it's not really saying anything other than that. So this is the three point formula, you set it up, you're done, that's all. But if you take the three point framework and instead look at where the highlights are and where the shadows need to be softened and where things need to pop off, you don't really care about how many lights you're using or specifically where they are, but you get a much better result because you're focusing on the things that actually matter. Now, so this is better than the first result, but you'll notice that I didn't apply the first principle. I'm not intentionally communicating anything. And the way you generally, or at least the way I like to do that is with textures and colors. So if you're in a production environment and you have a tight deadline, you don't really have time to fiddle around with colors and see, you know, what works and what does this one mean when contrast to that one, you know, that would take forever. So one thing that I have is a book called The Complete Color Harmony. And I knew for this project that, you know, if you want to buy a chair, what are you looking for? Well, you're looking for, is it, you know, dependable? Can I sit on it and it won't break and is it comfortable? That's all a chair really has to do, is be comfortable and not break. So I looked for colors that in this book, so this book is just a whole bunch of colors and they're all organized by different, either like cultural significances or meanings or color schemes, so every possible thing you can think of, there's groups of colors for it in this book. So I looked up dependability and that was like yellows and reds and browns and I looked up, let's see, what was the other one? It was classy, it was like lots of blues and grays and I forgot what the other one was, but it had to do with yellows and such. So I just took those, I didn't even think about it, I just looked it up in the book and plugged those straight in and it got a much better result. So I also added like a little barn doors texture, but so you're getting a much better result because you're taking the colors of things that actually mean something and plugging them in instead of just going with the same black and white. So if you can help it, defaults to using colors don't use white lights unless, you know, that's something that you're specifically trying to communicate, just stay away from it and try not to use black shadows and that'll help you go a lot longer, a lot farther in the process. So another example of a framework instead of a formula, so we've all heard of three-point lighting, but one thing that I found super helpful is this framework for adding depth to a scene. So I don't know if you've ever worked with a client and they just say like, hey, I want this to pop out more, what do you do? You're just like, okay, I'll do something. So let's take a look at how we can add depth to a scene fairly easily and this is something that you can apply today. So this is a cube on the screen, but it doesn't really look like a cube because it's completely flat. There's no lighting information and so we can therefore say that by adding light to the scene, that's what adds depth and more specifically, the change of light from one face to another is what creates the illusion of depth because it's not an actual 3D object that's poking out of the screen, it's just the illusion of depth. So we can say that the change of light creates the illusion of depth and so once we have that, we can turn that up a notch. Instead of saying the change of light from one face to another, you can say the change of light across the face is what creates depth as well as from one face to another. So by adding gradients to the surfaces of your objects, that's going to give you even more depth. But of course there's more things that we can change across the face and that is also color. So this is what traditional artists call a hue shift or a color shift and that's just making sure that you're changing the hue of the color along the face as well as the value. So I don't know if that shows up well on the projector screen or not, but if you compare that to the one above it to the left, it's definitely a much better result and it's popping out and you're giving definition. So of course you want those colors to at least communicate something. So I was looking for an example of a render and Chris Kuhn let me borrow one of his scenes. So he modeled this and put it on CG Cookie and I thought it was a lot of really cool modeling with the robots and stuff, but the lighting is very flat. And so I asked him if I could borrow the scene and just tweak it briefly and he agreed. So just by applying those frameworks, very quickly we're able to get a much different result and when we're focusing on gradients over the surfaces of the objects that we're trying to attract attention to and communicating something in this case, focus and work and that type of theme, then we're definitely getting a better result. So you can also definitely take a look, focus on the face as I like flip between these two. So they're definitely communicating two completely different things. The first one is kind of like I hate my life, what am I doing? But the second one more accurately portrays the concentration I'm trying to do something, don't bother me. So I think that works a little bit better and so by making sure that your lighting is communicating the same thing as the modeling and the layout, then you can get a much better result. So let's jump into Blender and show how this works. All right, so I have this chair example that I used earlier. There we go, this laptop isn't super powerful so it might take some time. But over here on the left side of the screen I generally just have a render preview so I can be looking through things all at once. I have some nodes over on the bottom and just since I'm using a laptop and don't have a number pad, I switched to quad view so I can easily rotate all of these lights at once. So a couple of things that we can do to make this better for lighting quickly. One thing that I do is go to the layers panel and under material you can add a material override for all of the materials in your scene. And this is super helpful because I can just take a clay material and apply it there and then in the viewport render if I go over to this right side and click render layer then I'm just seeing this as just the clay material and so I can more accurately see the gradients across the surface of the object and I can more accurately see the colors that are being applied. And if I need to switch between the two you can just toggle this and it's a much faster workflow. Second thing is over here on this right side if you have a really complex scene it can be very difficult to hide lights and find them again. So I just switch this from visible layers to same types and that way if I just select one light I can see all of the other lights in the scene right here and I don't have to worry about all of the other mess of objects. So I'm going to delete all of these lights and we can start over. So right now we're just seeing the chair lit by the environment but the thing that we need to do is well I guess I'll show this first. So if we add a light let's go to lamp and I like to use area lights. So let's take that and we can start positioning this and playing with it. But you'll notice as we place this we can't see things as clearly as we should be able to. So I turn off everything except the light that we're working on. So in this case the background needs to be gone and that way with just the one light we can see very clearly exactly what it's doing because if it's muddled up by a bunch of other lights then it's very difficult to actually figure out what it is that it's doing. So if we just place this somewhere where it's getting the most amount of gradient across this top over here. We can see if we place it too close then it's starting to look flat again so we just want to make sure that we have a lot of gradient over those little bumps over there and this is going to be our main light. So if you're doing the three point formula you'd say okay this is my key light now I have to fill in with a fill light. But since we're not really thinking about that we're thinking about gradients across the surface of the object and we're thinking about highlighting the things that we need to highlight we're definitely not done because you can see this part of the chair over here is completely flat from left to right and also this bottom part of the chair also just doesn't have any gradients across it so it's going to look flat and uninteresting. So we can just take this light and duplicate it down and place it very specifically so that it lights exactly that backrest lumbar support thing. So it's definitely adding too much of a shadow so let's take this and increase the size to something where it's not being an issue and probably turn the strength down a little bit. So once we have that then we now have a gradient over there and we can do the same thing for this bottom part right here. So now we have our fill lights because now we can see that it's accurately doing what our key lights are supposed to do. So we're creating gradients and we are making sure that the chair is highlighted. So now we can fill in the lights and I'll duplicate this over and for this one we can see that the things that need to be filled is this right side of the chair but instead of trying to fill it like it is because we're not seeing exactly what the light's doing if we're looking at all of these other things as well we can't really see it clearly so let's go ahead and turn all of these off but we have the render layer on so we need to turn off the cameras instead and now we can just look at one thing at a time. So again, we're continuing to look at gradients and in this case from the top to the bottom and then we also need to fill in this area down here on the bottom so let's duplicate that again and this is so much of a tedious process but it doesn't really take any extra brain power I'm just doing the same things over and over again however, you need to be consciously aware of this but it's certainly much better than just adding whatever formula you have so let's take that and we can call that good and make our back lights so then we can move on to a different example then let's take this and duplicate it one more time turn off the other ones so that we're just looking, there we go so we're just looking at that one and so we're just doing the exact same thing for this light but we're focusing on how it's popping it off of the background and making sure that we have the gradient from the top to the bottom we can also do that for this arm rest over here and if you need to focus something so that you can see that maybe we don't want it over here on this side of the chair since we already have the key light there then we can just change this to a spot lamp and direct it there and not worry about any of the other parts of the scene all right, this is definitely really small but that's okay all right so we have all of our lights and if we look at them all at once, like so we are definitely getting a much better result than the three point lighting that was on that layer so you can see there's a pretty big difference between the two again it's just the idea of making sure that you're going back to the original intent of what is this light trying to accomplish and making sure that every single light has a purpose for that so I hope, I don't know that was somewhat of a boring example because you're just doing the same thing over and over again but that is lighting and you're just making sure that each light has its own job so with that I think I have, yeah I have one more example yes, okay so here's a room and this is a different technique that is good to use and that is exaggeration so a lot of the time if you're working with like interior architecture does anybody here do interior design or architectural visualization much? Okay, a few people so hopefully this is helpful so a lot of the time you'll notice that in cycles it takes a really long time for the noise to clear, right? That's probably one of the largest issues so I took a technique out of like super old school Pixar and the way that they light things is they don't rely on the bounces that's something that I mentioned earlier is you don't want to rely on cycles to do all of the work and hope that it's realistic so what we're going to do is instead set up simple lighting for this room and make sure that it looks good without too many bounces so let's go to rendered view okay, so the first thing when you're setting up lighting like this is we can go ahead and in the render and light paths turn everything to zero so it's pretty much just like blender internal and now what we're going to do is fake all of the bounce lighting that cycles had for us so if we take that we can say that okay so we're going to have this spot on the ground that's going to be bouncing light back on to the rest of the room so we can add another light can increase the size so it's about the same size as the spot on the floor I'll see if that would make it easier to see and then rotate it so that it's bouncing up into the room move it down so we're just sort of approximating what the bounce is and then exaggerating it a little bit so of course it's going to lose some of that light as it scatters around but now we're getting a little bit more light in the room from that same effect and another thing that we can do to sort of fake the light that's coming in through the window because you know that's if it's not bouncing around then we're not getting that sort of soft glow that you usually get in interiors so we can duplicate that light and put it over the window and instead just sort of fake the atmosphere as it comes in so since we can't really see very clearly what this light is doing again we need to hide the other ones so we're just looking at one at a time so when we place this over the window and increase the strength we now have somewhat of the effect of the atmosphere coming in so with just these three examples you know you can definitely go crazy with this I've seen some setups where it's like they have a light on like every wall and even the left side that used to fake global illumination so that's they would put a light for every color that was bouncing off and it gets crazy so you could do that but we're not going to we're just going to take this and add some color to it so say the sun is a little bit yellow but the atmosphere is not yellow so we can make that a little bit bluish actually now that'll be more of a tan and then maybe as it bounces off then we start getting a different color so as long as they're not all the same color and they're sort of working together actually you know it would probably look pretty cool to make this more of like a sunset-ish atmosphere okay so we have that and now that we have this looking you know somewhat okay with just these this is one bounce and then we can go ahead and turn this back up and then when you do that you don't really have to render quite as much and your scene is going to clear up way faster than if you just cranked up the bounces and turned on the one light and added an HDRI this is going to save you quite some time so that went pretty fast but that's what I have is there any questions? I hope that was helpful did you learn something from that? okay cool yes mostly just because it breaks the habit of doing that and it's just something a lot of painters do and so they make sure that they get the colors of the surrounding objects in there right so I guess in this case yeah that's a good point in this case when it comes to 3D like you can't really I mean you can control the color of your shadow through the I forgot what it's called but in like the world settings but generally I just change it a little bit with color grading at the end but yeah as long as it's you can't have it black but it just kind of kills the overall feel that you're going for generally okay that's good to know okay so VFX but yeah if you okay make sense point taken all right okay so sort of like you would take you know an HDR photo and then increase it later very cool oh world I do use I like to use HDRs quite often but the reason I didn't really talk about that here is because a lot of people like they just put in an HDR and then it's it's done but if you if you take that and use that as you know some some fill or like reflection sources or as long as you're making sure that you're you're rotating in a way where you're getting the most amount of gradient across the surface of the object then it's good but other than that I don't really mess with that too much as long as it compliments the the lighting no I don't generally change that but that would be one way to get the get the shadows to be a different color but usually I fill it in so instead of changing the actual shadows fill it in with a light source of a different color that's just a little bit more subtle so it's not there's still a little bit of light in there does that answer the question oh yeah yeah well I like to have the background at least at least when I'm starting out being completely black because that way we can see the the color of the light more accurately um no I I definitely use it for interiors architecture and things like that um but if you do this technique of you know creating the bounce light yourself and sort of exaggerating it a little bit then uh usually then I don't because that has the same effect but it's a little bit more tweakable more customizable cool are we good all right thanks thank you