lighting can be one of the most important
factors of making your scene look presentable.
Oftentimes you can spend hours on a model but none of the
detail is visible at render because it's either too dark or too bright
for this.
We're going to go over a very simple way to make sure your lighting setup looks good.
Three point lighting.
Three point lighting is a standard set up for lighting that has carried
on through the ages as one of the best ways to light a scene
in film, photography, painting
and now digital graphics.
Let's go over exactly what it is, why it's so good and how to set it up in blender.
three Point lighting consists of three lights hence the name.
These lights are called the key light. The fill light and the rim or backlight.
Let's go over each of these real quick.
The key light is the main light.
It's the primary or key light source.
So when someone looks at a scene and says,
oh the lights coming from the top left hand corner there,
most likely referring to the key light,
that's the light that defines the light source in the scene.
Now,
the fill light is the one that sort of fills
or softens the shadow that the key light casts.
It's usually the least bright light in the scene. But it's very important,
the fill light acts as a way to keep the shadows from being too dark on your subject.
That way you can still see those details
and soften the contrast that the key light makes
The 3rd light is called the backlight or the Rim Light.
Now this as you might be able to tell from the name is cast onto the back of the subject.
Usually it's actually the brightest light in the scene
but it's there. Just to give a sliver of brightness around the edge of your subject.
This gives the subject an outline or a rim of
light which helps it stand out from the background.
So let's try to recreate this in blender
instead of our default scene. Let's go ahead and replace our cube with a monkey.
To do this simply left click, select your cube and press the delete key,
then go to the admin. You at the top, go to mesh and select monkey.
We're also going to right click it and select shade smooth.
Now that we have our monkey in our scene,
let's get our three light sources set
up According to the three point lighting technique
we already have a light here.
But if you don't you can simply add it through the same ad menu but go to light
point light.
I'm going to go ahead and treat this first light as my key light.
Let's use the move tool in the quick tools bar to bring
our lamp to the top left hand side of our monkeys face.
Now you may notice that are seen is not showing any actual lighting effects.
That's because we're in solid mode
to see how our light actually will look at render.
Let's go ahead and change our view port to rendered mode.
You can do that by going to the top right and clicking the
right most fear or pressing the Z hockey and using the pie menu
now that we can see the effect of our light on the monkey's face,
we can adjust the light a bit more as needed.
If you would like to adjust the brightness of your light,
simply go to your light properties tab
indicated by a green light bulb icon
in the properties editor.
You can then edit the power of the light by left click dragging
Or you can left click tap the property and type a number manually.
I'm going to go ahead and leave this at the default value of 1000 W
next we'll make our Phil light.
Now as long as you have one light,
it can be very easy to make more as you can
simply select the first light object and press shift D to duplicate
with this new light, let's place it on the other side of the key light.
If the key light is a little higher than the monkey,
make sure the place to feel like a little lower.
However, it seems a bit too bright on both sides.
If you remember from our previous descriptions,
the fill light is meant to be the dimmest light in the setup.
I'm going to go into our light property tab and slide our power
value down with left click drag all the way down to zero.
Then I'll slide it right back up just a little bit to a
point where I feel like it's bright enough but not too bright.
That's perfect.
Now we can finally add our back or rim light,
let's create a third light object in the same way
we did before and place it behind the monkey's head
for now we can place it directly behind the monkey's head but often
times it is a bit off center depending on where the camera is.
Feel free to experiment with this to get the best outlined shape for your subject.
Now if you remember the rim light is typically the brightest light in the setup.
So let's just start off by dragging that power cider in the light property stab as
high as we can get it until we see that bright white outline around our subject.
Just to save you some time.
I'll say that the number I decided to use was around 50,000,
definitely the brightest light.
But feel free to tweet the numbers based on your scene
awesome. Now you have your three lights set up and it looks pretty decent.
However, let's add a cube to act as our environment. Real quick
to do this. Simply go into the ad menu of the view port,
go to mesh and select cube.
We can then scale the cube up with the scale tool until we find ourselves
inside of it.
Now you might notice something a little weird.
Our cube is almost completely white.
What's happening here is our environment is now
super bright because of our lighting setup.
This isn't very ideal especially if you want to have your character stand out.
One reason for the environment being so bright is because
we're currently using point lights for our light sources,
meaning that they cast light in all directions
in film and photography.
The physical lights used are typically directional
lights specifically to avoid this problem,
let's try to do the same.
Starting with our brightest light, the rim light.
If we select it with left click
we can go into the light property tab to see other light options.
Point sun spots an area.
Feel free to experiment with each light type.
But I personally like the spotlight for this purpose as
you'll be able to focus the spotlight column as needed.
Simply select the spot option and you already notice a difference.
Our environment is more clear but our monkeys room light is no longer there.
That's because our spotlight is currently rotated the wrong way.
Let's use the rotate tool two point it back at our monkey
now because this is a spotlight,
you can also adjust your spotlights effective area by
dragging the size value in our light property tab
awesome.
Now are back white still has the same effect it
had earlier but without the issue of over lighting our environment
optionally you can do the same thing for your other two lights,
but this can be situational, so feel free to experiment and adapt.
And that's it.
You now have a beautifully lit monkey and blender.