Welcome to lighting in blender.
So in this video we're going to understand that the lamps themselves mainly apply to blender render
not the cycles engine in fact light is handled differently in cycles.
Amongst other things we're going to be adjusting lamps properties and seeing its affect.
We will switch into rended mode in the viewport shading options to see what is actually happening as
well.
Now before we hop over into blender Let's look at the different lamp options.
So we've got a nice table here with the type of lamp on the left.
Moving across to its description and a real world example.
So we have a point lamp which is an only directional point light source so the light comes out of it
evenly in every direction much like a traditional light bulb.
You'd have at home.
Now a spot light is a directional point light source.
So it's very similar to the point source only it has direction to it so if you imagine like a spot light
or perhaps when you put a lamp shade over the top of a of the normal bowl it makes it into a directional
light.
Now an area lamp simulates an area that's producing light.
So like an open window or a TV laptop screen something along those lines.
Now Hemmy is the odd one out here.
It doesn't produce any shadows.
It's a soft and far away light source much like the sky is on a cloudy day without any direct sunlight.
You'll notice that shadows are few and far between outside.
When that happens and finally the sun.
Well no guesses there is simulates the sun a far away but still direct light example the sun.
This of course is like a spotlight in many ways because it has a direction to it so it casts a shadow.
But it will light up the entire scene evenly.
Okay let's hop straight on over into blender.
Right so we're in a blender here.
And let's just work out our workspace.
Now I've opened up a new blender file.
If you haven't done this yet please save the stuff you're working on and open up a new blender.
So I'm just going to organize my workspace here and just remove the bits that I don't need to get rid
of the time line at the bottom.
I'm going to pull out these two windows here because we're going to use both of those in a moment and
that's going to make the outliner a little larger.
Okay so we can see in our scene and you probably spotted it before that we have at least a camera a
cube and a lamp in our scene.
Now all of these are objects in can she'd grab the transform handles and move them about to your heart's
content or hit G and move around the lamp as well.
Absolutely fine.
You can do that with any other any object that's in our 3-d view.
So first of all let's go and play with the lamps and see what they look like.
So in order to do that.
What I'd like you to do is select this cube here and move it up just so it's floating above this surface
here.
And then we're going to add a nother mesh which is just a plain and simply scale that up to act as a
floor it doesn't really matter how big it is.
In some ways the bigger the better.
But there we go.
And now next to where it says object merode in the 3D ed where you can switch it backwards and forwards.
We have the viewport shading options.
And usually we've been working with solid right at the very top of that is rendered.
Now this was is what it will look like if you have a blender render selected.
If it looks a bit faded out something like this you probably have cycles render selected and we will
be working for the rest of this certain section in a blender render so make sure it selected a blender
render on the info header.
They're brilliant So we're in here.
Now let's play with our lamp.
So we have a lamp here.
And once it's selected in the Properties window we can see a long is the same icon It's this circle
with for arrows coming out of it.
And this is these are our lamp options essentially.
And if we scroll down there's a preview there that gives you an idea of what's going on.
But even better is the preview.
We can see right in front of us here.
So I'm going to scroll down so you just see lamp.
So at the moment set to a point lamp omnidirectional light source so it fills up the scene but as you
can see it fades away as a couple of ways you control that fade.
No one is the starting energy and if you turn up the starting energy obviously makes the lights really
really bright.
And obviously if you turn it all the way down eventually it will just go black.
And beneath that we have the fall off which tells blender how to manage the way that it gets dark how
quickly the light falls off.
Essentially you can change those about and just see constant.
Inverse Square is usually quite good to work with but you can play to your heart's content with that
right.
So we've got those two options there and further down we can go in to shadow we can have it cast no
shadow which is a bit odd.
I do like it casting a shadow because it looks a bit better and we have our sampling for a shadow.
Now in general you want to have that add a bit higher than one but I don't suggest putting it too high
otherwise you may slow computer down to a crawl.
If we set or a hundred for instance you can see how slow that is to get the detail into our scene.
If we say Sorry I say sets to 100 you can only send it to 64 Maxima sense is something like 10.
It's relatively quick to finish off the rendering of that scene.
Now the soft sighs if we increase that as you've probably gathered it makes the shadows sense were under
shadow a bit softer.
And eventually we end up with something that looks a bit better than that harsh square that we had before.
So let's have a look at the other lamp types that we've got so sun will also cast a shadow.
But as you can see the rest of the scene is uniformly lit apart from up.
If we move round you can see that some sides of the cube are darker than others.
And in fact some of them are black so this is something that you have to get used to with Blender.
Is that if a surface is not being hit by any lights at all.
It just turns black.
There is no detail in there whatsoever.
Okay.
Let's zoom out and move round and turn on the spotlight.
So here we have our spotlight not highlighting our cube very well at all.
And if you were setting up a scene like this you could hop back into solid mode here and actually see
the cone itself.
We can see here that our spotlight is basically not highlighting our cube at the moment.
And if I do that the good chance is that it's now doing that bobbing back into rendered mode.
And there we go.
Cube is now being hit with that spot and you can see very quickly.
Rest of the scene that isn't in our spot light goes black.
You can control that as you scroll down you can actually change the spot shape so that's underneath
the shadow options we were playing with a moment ago the spot shape you can increase the degrees that
light is or even narrow it down.
If you want to.
Now we've got the blend which dictates how easy or how smooth the blend between light and dark is you
can have a square spotlight if you like.
And this one I really love this the halo.
It produces that wonderful thing that intensity one is too much.
But if we turn that down a little Let's or more probably even point one that's pretty.
So that's it's almost like a window opening or something like that.
I do like that affect.
It does.
Now this beam here can end up being quite short.
And that's all to do with this distance here under falloff.
So if we turn that down you can see that you can end up with it looking a bit like that at times which
just looks a bit odd.
If that does happen you just turn up the distance to a certain amount.
And there we go.
It's all the cone is all the way to the surface.
It's hitting now Hemmy.
As I said that's one of these other ones which is going to turn the energy down just a little and found
a type in one and set it back to default.
Now here we go you can see all around our objects.
This is one of the ones that doesn't cast a shadow but also means that the sides are not being affected
by the lichens hemming is still directional if we pop into object mode.
We can see that it has a line coming from it's in fact the sun also has a line coming from.
You see the icon changes slightly as well depending on what we do.
So it still has a direction to it but it does not cast a shadow but it illuminates our scene quite even.
So you can use a mixture of lamps in your scene to emulate the real world.
And finally we have area.
So let's hop back into a rendered mode on the viewport shading and all that's really bright so in this
case let's play with some of the options that's play a distance that looks a bit better and looks much
better.
And eventually you'll find a level that works for you.
How the.
Shallow here it looks a bit horrible actually to be quite old.
And that's because we got samples and the x direction at 10 in the y one I'm guessing.
So if we put that 10 in 10 it's a much smoother shadow so area.
So as the lights coming out it's not coming from a point anymore is emulating a size.
And we can scroll down and you can see the areas shape.
So this is where you would tweak and depending on the size of the window in the room or something along
those lines so you could have a really really wide window in the room 10 by 10.
I presume that's blender units there and obviously the shadow ends up being almost nothing but if you
had a tiny window in a room perhaps one by one that would be more like a point light source because
it would be much much smaller.
So feel free to play with these options here as much as you like.
It's great fun playing with lights in RC and you can see their effect in real time on the window here.
Now perhaps you want to work with the model and the lamp so you can move around independently.
Sure.
Grab yourself another window.
So you've got a rendering we're just going to move this one income working at quite a low resolution.
Can I get rid of my tool shelves.
So here we have our rendering onsets just two 3-d windows and we have our rendering on the left and
our 3D view on the right here.
And the great thing about this is we can move this to our heart's content and then on the left hand
side or wherever you've put it.
See the differences are can change that to spots and then move it and we can see straight away real
time changes that have been made brilliant.
So I think this is a challenge for you guys coming up.
Set up some lights.
So go ahead.
And in our chests scene place some lamps to light are seen.
Now is your choice of how you want to light it.
Play about an experiment.
I'll give you a few hints here.
I'm probably going to use a sunlamp and a Hammie lamp in order to generate a uniform light for our scene.
But if you want it to be more dramatic perhaps play with a couple of spotlights and casts long shadows
across the board.
It's entirely up to you this is your artistic choice.
Have fun.
Pause a video now and give that a go.
Okay guys.
Welcome back.
Now let's see how I would light the scene.
It may be different to how you've done it but let's have fun and see how we get on.
Right.
So let's open up our chess scene so open low poly chess set chess scenes.
There we go.
So this is how it's looking at the moment which is brilliant.
We've got our hierarchy all set up here.
Excellent.
So we've got one lamp in the scene and it's pretty low down.
First of all I'm just going to see how it looks.
So let's hop straight down into rended mode.
Well that's actually that's kind of dramatic.
Kind of like that.
But I do want to light up all my pieces I kind of want to show them off.
In this case and remember you can always alter your lamps at any point you're not stuck.
In fact you could create lots of lamps and you seem to move them about as if there was an array of lights
above you.
You know the choice is yours.
So in this case however I will want to have a sun lamp that does the entire scene.
Absolutely fine.
But what it does do unfortunately is create these nasty shadows.
So I'm going to simply select the lamp in the outline now and pop over to the 3-d window and duplicate
it not a linked duplicate that's great if you've got multiple lights and you want to control them all
at once.
However if I just do a simple duplicate we've now got two sons.
But what I can do here in all of moving that lamp I don't want to do that we just can't see us doing
that.
Some in the rendered mode.
This lamp here so we're going to call this one sun.
And I'm going to call this one ambient.
Excellent.
So you've got sun and an ambient or change of name them both the same.
That's really clever of me.
And I'm going to group these together into our lighting so I'm going to create.
You don't have to do this yourself.
I'm just doing it for my hierarchy.
I'm going to create an empty doesn't matter what it is.
I'm going to I'm going to make it a sphere.
I'm going to call this lighting and that just helps group my lighting all together as well.
So there we go all in there and set the parents object.
And I'm going to correct spelling mistake there.
There we go.
So enlightened and we got ambient and sun and both of them are a sun at the moment and we can see who
have got these dark areas.
However on the ambient one when it's selected I'm going to go to Hemmy.
Now it looks like that we still got some shadows.
But I think the heavy's habit is actually making the board very very bright in this case.
So I'm going to turn down the energy that the Hemi has perhaps even learned to as Tried point three
or thereabouts.
Yeah.
I like that.
That's that's good.
Let's go to the sun itself and I'm going to split this window so I can see what's going on.
Now the sun is here in our scene.
I don't want it there if I put it here and just rotate rotate round lift up a little more.
It is a sun off the rail rotate that down so you can have lots of fun with this.
It's now shining on our board that's for a take round the rendering.
Let's go to view and just view selected riego resumed in there.
Yeah that looks good.
I like that lots.
Nothing's blown out.
We've still got detail over the place.
I like that lots.
How did you guys get on please share your lighting attempt.
In the discussions I'd love to see what lighting schemes you came up with yourself.
Perhaps some groovy spotlights there or a deep dark thing.
Remember we do want to show off our pieces on our board at the moment that don't make it to know are
honest to dark and contrasty because we won't be able to see all the effort you guys are putting in.
Okay.
As I said put those in the discussions and I will see you in the next lecture.