You're a true hero to the blender community. When I just got started I was always fiddling around with lighting for hours and hours and would end up being confused because it wouldn't look very real, after all that wasted time. This is the answer to all of my questions regarding this. Thanks!
I am writing an entire book about color and light and zou are the first Artist on RUclips actually learned something from since my Masters Degree about 9 years ago...
Hey, physicist here. Note that sometimes light is even more complex than that: even with exact temperatures, wattage and so on, an LED lamp will only look like the sun if you stare at them directly, not at the things they light up. The full spectrum of LED lamps is still different, and different materials (paints, plants, tissues, tinted glasses) can look very different under two "matching" lights. Oh and there's polarisation, but that only matters if you want realistic looks through sunglasses or something, otherwise just adding a bit of color filtering would be enough to mask any apparent effect it might've had
I remember some LED Chrismas tree lights. They appeared pretty bright, but barely illuminated the tree itself. In the end the tree just looked like a bunch of bright dots.
I really liked how you used scientific facts to make your add on, and I’m really great full that you have a free version! I’m currently a student so I Can really use these type of things!
I found this addon just this morning( Oct 3 2022)while surfing around Blendermarket. I saw this video (very nice information, btw) and I bought it immediately. I built some cool light textures using the node setup you provided in this video, but the fact that you’ve organized so many lights and settings overwhelmed me. I had to have the lot.
Thank you!! This lighting stuff always drives me nuts and I've never been able to figure out what measurements Blender's lights are in. Here's to hoping this addon will eventually get integrated into the main Blender build, but until then, I'll go grab your addon.
Blender’s source code at intern/cycles/util/util_ies.cpp defines a conversion factor between IES lights and Cycles lighting intensities, which might be useful.
thank you for this video! based on this advice i went to me eevee settings, changed exposure to -9, gamma to 1.2, and set my main sun light to 500 strength. it works amazing. if i want the "overbrightness" look, i can still increase my light to 1000, on the other hand if i want smooth, dark looks i can set it to about 100 or 200. it works amazingly, thank you!!!
Thanks for this video! I was beginning to learn this as well during ACES research and so with real world scale scene I'm not afraid to even crank my sun and sky to 400 and 30 and use exposure to bring down. Makes a huge difference in light bounce
12:23 Also, part of the shenanigans with studio lighting could be to simulate non-inverse-square intensity falloffs. Blender has alternative falloffs available as an extra built-in node type.
7:42 Yup, the intensity of solar radiation at the surface of the Earth, in fine weather, is a kilowatt per square metre. That’s why people get so excited about solar cells. But it’s worth noting that’s total energy, not just visible light.
Such a beautiful addon! i always knew that the blender default lights were wack, and have rarely seen tutorials on using nodes for lights. Lighting is where my scenes always fail! So I am really excited to give this a try.
7:13 Fluorescent lights are not black bodies, though. The mercury vapour ionizes, emits UV, which hits the fluorescent coating on the bulb and is re-emitted as visible light.
Wow! This is amazing. Great work! Can't wait to try the plugin out and looking forward to the course. I'd been having a hard time figuring out what the lighting values should be even when I'd been hot on making sure my units match.
Get the full Extra Lights addon with 60+ presets on the Blender Market 👉 blendermarket.com/products/extra-lights You can also find it with the 20 basic presets on GitHub: github.com/jlampel/extra_lights Also check out the Photographer addon! gumroad.com/chafouin#FWQf
This is a top-tier RUclips video aside from the real information and totally useful design concepts. Great presenter too, exceptional really. Really solid, good job. And well lit :)
3:04 That washed-out effect is a common hazard of what you might call “naked emission shaders”. That is, objects with emission shaders in their materials that are directly visible to the camera. I can think of two ways to avoid the problem: 1) Cheat. Use a Light Path node to adjust the emission strength, keeping it low for camera rays and high for other rays. 2) Use a translucent shader for the visible lamp structure material, and hide the actual light emitter behind or inside it. This way you can preserve a lot of detail (bump map etc) in the appearance of the “lamp” object, even with the light set quite bright.
Very interesting video and plugin! Coming from a photography background, having some explanation of how Blender manages the power of the light is very useful! And it's great that this is matching with the awesome Photographer plugin that we're already using with great satisfaction!
I always wondered like in 7:44 ; whats the difference between the emission strength in the nodes and the strength in the lights settings? btw probs for 12:25 caravaggio :P
Hi, thanks for that and for the plugin. I've got a question : Do you have consider adding HMI and classical real movie light (Arri HMI, skypanel, dedo light, aputure, par64, ......?). As a part cinematographer part 3d artist, the photographer addon really help me for matching vfx with live shooting plates. Having the match with the standard lights we are using for shooting would be a game changer for Blender it it can be done with your addon. Not mentioning the fact that will be easier for cinematographer to thing the same way IRL and on Blender. If you are interested, I am available to talk with you about a bunch of classical movie light (sorry for my bad english, i'm French).
Coming from a film production background I often find myself struggling with what I know about lights and cameras and what software thinks about lights and cameras. And sometimes sitting with my jaw agape hearing what some tutorials think about lenses. Ha ha ha!
Heck dude, this is great work, thanks! I wonder if there's any chance of Blender including any of this as standard, at least more realistic defaults and the option to use lumens as units
12:30 This reminds me of how much you can blow people's minds by adding additional lights to a scene lit by HDRI. 😂 Great video, I'm definitely going to check out your add-on, but do you have the node setup you demonstrated available somewhere, too?
As a perfectionist who is always distracting himself by wanting to add as much realism as possible, this is awesome! I don't get to work a lot with blender, unfortunately, but this makes me really want to dig around and try stuff and huge overblown projects again... :D
I can't say this enough thanks for this add on. Real world lighting in film making is hard to replicate in cg without numerous amounts of tweaking, I don't suppose your add on improves render time??? 😂😂😂 I guy can dream...
5:58 Does the formula hold for not-maximum-brightness colors? If R, G and B are all 0.5, then for 1lm I get 683/.5=1366W. If R, G and B are all 1, this brighter colored 1lm lamp is only 683W. Shouldn't the 1lm darker lamp get fewer (or at least the same number of) watts rather than more?
Just yesterday I opened some Blender files from 2013 that I had made for LuxCoreRender and was wondering how to convert the lights for Eevee or Cycles. This should be useful.
Finally. After so many years. And I've just started diving into Luxcore for lack of physical lights in Cycles. I haven't checked for accuracy/plausability with Photographer, but I'm getting similar results as in Luxcore. One question though, is the moon size correct? 0.75 degree sounds excessive to me. So the default sun/sky get set to 1000/200. I'm assuming this is supposed to be azimuth? Would it be possible to adjust these (and sun color temperature) dynamically using drivers within the addon to adjust for elevation (angle)? I'm using Sun Position addon (builtin now), but it has stopped working for me lately, but the way it's set up with coordinates, time zones, daylight savings, and northing adjustment suits me absolutely perfect. Maybe hook into that, or merge with that? Having a good selection of various types was also very good move. I'm missing two things though; 1) The ability to control falloff direction for area lights, simulating recessed, light grids/snoots, barn door behavior etc - I can sorta kinda mimic it with nodes. And 2) The ability to add an emission shader based plane to simulate displays. These are usually in NITs (cd/m2). All I would have to do would be to calculate the area, which for displays is easy (aspect gives diagonal whose size I have, which gives the angle which gives the sides -> area). Luxcore does have this option for emission geometry. But yeah, this is the best day ever in these bad days :) Thanks.
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I just implemented a Spread Angle for area lights, but more controls like the ones you mentioned would be really useful. Would you mind adding each feature you'd like to see as individual issues on GitHub? github.com/jlampel/extra_lights/issues
Got both this one and the photographer) I should've gotten the photographer addon ages ago, been doing photography for a while now and it would probably make it easier working with cameras in blender now :D looking forward to checking this out. I actually wanted to pickup the lighting addon cause I'm working on a scene now and default lights just don't look right to me. I'm a noob though, so I dunno if it's just my hands, but i'll try to fix it with Extra Lights)
One time I created a HUGE room, I added a cube with emission and a color temperature, and I set the intensity to match the formula where the intensity varies with the fourth power of temperature, making a blue-hot object more than thousands of times more luminous than a red-hot one. Now I realize that would be inaccurate because an object only radiates out of its surface not its entire volume. That's why the UV-hot white dwarves aren't outshining a galaxy and they exists for trillions of years or more, not for few days.
Thanks, this is all super informative. :-) In the vid, in the Object Data Properties for the light source, there's a 'Physical Light' Drop-menu. I'm just curious whether this is another add-on or a new feature in 2.83?
2 questions: 1. why the efficacy in the video is different from the node group the addon? 2. what happened to the mentioned lighting course? I couldn't find it ps. GREAT video
Kenny G Jr! Should of laced Songbird playing in the background. Jokes aside, this video will go down in history as one of the top blender reference videos.
You're a true hero to the blender community. When I just got started I was always fiddling around with lighting for hours and hours and would end up being confused because it wouldn't look very real, after all that wasted time. This is the answer to all of my questions regarding this. Thanks!
1:10 The technical term for that soft shadow edge is the “penumbra”.
Wow, this should be in the Blender default addons!!!
This should be default
Of course...it's cool
I am writing an entire book about color and light and zou are the first Artist on RUclips actually learned something from since my Masters Degree about 9 years ago...
Hey, physicist here. Note that sometimes light is even more complex than that: even with exact temperatures, wattage and so on, an LED lamp will only look like the sun if you stare at them directly, not at the things they light up. The full spectrum of LED lamps is still different, and different materials (paints, plants, tissues, tinted glasses) can look very different under two "matching" lights.
Oh and there's polarisation, but that only matters if you want realistic looks through sunglasses or something, otherwise just adding a bit of color filtering would be enough to mask any apparent effect it might've had
A relevant buzzword in this context is "metamerism". But then avoid at all cost going down the rabbit hole of color spaces...
I remember some LED Chrismas tree lights. They appeared pretty bright, but barely illuminated the tree itself. In the end the tree just looked like a bunch of bright dots.
I really liked how you used scientific facts to make your add on, and I’m really great full that you have a free version! I’m currently a student so I Can really use these type of things!
Thank you, glad it was helpful!
I found this addon just this morning( Oct 3 2022)while surfing around Blendermarket. I saw this video (very nice information, btw) and I bought it immediately.
I built some cool light textures using the node setup you provided in this video, but the fact that you’ve organized so many lights and settings overwhelmed me. I had to have the lot.
This is mind blowing... A lot of this stuff needs to be integrated into blender as standard especially the default scene.
Thank you!! This lighting stuff always drives me nuts and I've never been able to figure out what measurements Blender's lights are in.
Here's to hoping this addon will eventually get integrated into the main Blender build, but until then, I'll go grab your addon.
Blender’s source code at intern/cycles/util/util_ies.cpp defines a conversion factor between IES lights and Cycles lighting intensities, which might be useful.
thank you for this video! based on this advice i went to me eevee settings, changed exposure to -9, gamma to 1.2, and set my main sun light to 500 strength. it works amazing.
if i want the "overbrightness" look, i can still increase my light to 1000, on the other hand if i want smooth, dark looks i can set it to about 100 or 200. it works amazingly, thank you!!!
Thanks for this video! I was beginning to learn this as well during ACES research and so with real world scale scene I'm not afraid to even crank my sun and sky to 400 and 30 and use exposure to bring down. Makes a huge difference in light bounce
12:23 Also, part of the shenanigans with studio lighting could be to simulate non-inverse-square intensity falloffs. Blender has alternative falloffs available as an extra built-in node type.
This video proved once and for all that you have to be a genius in order to work in 3D
I love the Photographer addon. It’s super useful.
I’ll definitely be getting stuck into some of these lighting setups.
linked sky texture alone is kind of a big deal. Thanks for doing that! I'd always wished that was something Blender had as a default feature
7:42 Yup, the intensity of solar radiation at the surface of the Earth, in fine weather, is a kilowatt per square metre. That’s why people get so excited about solar cells.
But it’s worth noting that’s total energy, not just visible light.
Such a beautiful addon! i always knew that the blender default lights were wack, and have rarely seen tutorials on using nodes for lights. Lighting is where my scenes always fail! So I am really excited to give this a try.
What a well researched video, proper content!
I like it when people are technical.
7:13 Fluorescent lights are not black bodies, though. The mercury vapour ionizes, emits UV, which hits the fluorescent coating on the bulb and is re-emitted as visible light.
This was amazingly informative! I'll probably rewatch a couple times. Very well done!
Wow! This is amazing. Great work! Can't wait to try the plugin out and looking forward to the course. I'd been having a hard time figuring out what the lighting values should be even when I'd been hot on making sure my units match.
Thanks Stuart, glad it helped! -JL
Get the full Extra Lights addon with 60+ presets on the Blender Market 👉 blendermarket.com/products/extra-lights
You can also find it with the 20 basic presets on GitHub: github.com/jlampel/extra_lights
Also check out the Photographer addon! gumroad.com/chafouin#FWQf
I knew about the real world factors but I didn't know how to input them into Blender. Thanks.
This is a top-tier RUclips video aside from the real information and totally useful design concepts. Great presenter too, exceptional really. Really solid, good job. And well lit :)
Looking Forward to use this with ACES color management!
Very helpful resource even for more seasoned lighting artists, thank you!
I like how you literally said "blip" and then bleeped it out instead of swearing :D
Dude you’re a genius. Love your enthusiasm and drive here
This video is exceptional. Thank you so much for posting this!
Thank you, glad it was helpful!
3:04 That washed-out effect is a common hazard of what you might call “naked emission shaders”. That is, objects with emission shaders in their materials that are directly visible to the camera. I can think of two ways to avoid the problem:
1) Cheat. Use a Light Path node to adjust the emission strength, keeping it low for camera rays and high for other rays.
2) Use a translucent shader for the visible lamp structure material, and hide the actual light emitter behind or inside it. This way you can preserve a lot of detail (bump map etc) in the appearance of the “lamp” object, even with the light set quite bright.
I'm looking forward to your digital light course. Thanks for the add-ons.
WWoooww like a short documentary about light. Thank you 👍👍👍👍👍
Very interesting video and plugin! Coming from a photography background, having some explanation of how Blender manages the power of the light is very useful! And it's great that this is matching with the awesome Photographer plugin that we're already using with great satisfaction!
One day your hair will fill the whole shot, and that's great!
😂😂😂
😂 just what I had in mind
He IS Kenny CG!
He is actually bald and the hair is rendered in Cycles.
His hair is nice. nothing extraordinary haha
You absolutely rock. I loved the technical depth in your content. Thank you for the plugin and keep rocking.
Thanks mate! Will do 🤘
I always wondered like in 7:44 ; whats the difference between the emission strength in the nodes and the strength in the lights settings?
btw probs for 12:25 caravaggio :P
I’m definitely gonna download that ! Thank u so much helped me understand lighting more
You are a real light BLENDER Guru!
as someone who struggles a lot with lightning and coloring, this will help quite a bit.
my dude, both your stuff and you are absolutely awesome. Thank you
Thank you, this vid was so helpful, lightening is actually so important. Definitely gonna download it.
Glad it was helpful!
Dude! This was wonderful. Thank you!
Brilliant! ...literally and figuratively...Thank you!
Good job. Since you used photos as reference, it might be a good idea to talk about the difference between cameras and our human eyes.
i undertand the sumarry of this - but not all the technical details - SALUTE TO YOU MAN - been waiting for this kind of idea
I've just purchased this, it's a fantastic plugin! Thanks.
Finally some sense! Thank you!!!
Always a very good teacher this guy- big thanks!!!
Thank you for this wonderful and very informative video.
Great vid Johnathan! I'll be getting the addon
Thank you, glad you found it useful!
Thank you. +Extra Cool Points for Peep Show clip :)
Jonathan from CG Cookie: *Precisely Describing Light*
Bob from Despicable Me: "IlluminAtion, IlluminAAtion, IlluminAAAtion...."
This is really a A++++ content
Hi, thanks for that and for the plugin. I've got a question :
Do you have consider adding HMI and classical real movie light (Arri HMI, skypanel, dedo light, aputure, par64, ......?).
As a part cinematographer part 3d artist, the photographer addon really help me for matching vfx with live shooting plates. Having the match with the standard lights we are using for shooting would be a game changer for Blender it it can be done with your addon. Not mentioning the fact that will be easier for cinematographer to thing the same way IRL and on Blender.
If you are interested, I am available to talk with you about a bunch of classical movie light (sorry for my bad english, i'm French).
Hi Julien, I would be happy to chat about what other lights would be helpful! Please shoot me an email at jlampel@cgcookie.com
@@cg_cookie Maybe just make a paid tutorial on how to make custom lights yourself? i would definitely buy that.
Please also do the photography lights
I was thinking the same thing. It would be great to be able to carry that knowledge over to Blender.
Coming from a film production background I often find myself struggling with what I know about lights and cameras and what software thinks about lights and cameras. And sometimes sitting with my jaw agape hearing what some tutorials think about lenses. Ha ha ha!
Man that's incredibly cool, I reeeeaaally wanted an add-on like this one
You are a true scholar sir. and thanks for the add-ons
Came for the info, got an education instead. Love it!
wow, I'm getting those!
Heck dude, this is great work, thanks! I wonder if there's any chance of Blender including any of this as standard, at least more realistic defaults and the option to use lumens as units
So many pieces of knowledge and information shared here, very impressive and very useful... thank you very much
12:30 This reminds me of how much you can blow people's minds by adding additional lights to a scene lit by HDRI. 😂
Great video, I'm definitely going to check out your add-on, but do you have the node setup you demonstrated available somewhere, too?
Answered my own question by thinking about about it for 5 minutes. 😂😂
Good add-ons.Thank you!
I haven't watched Peep Show since it went off the air, and I started re-watching it yesterday. Now this. Kind of spooky!
👻👻
Nice tutorial!!
As a perfectionist who is always distracting himself by wanting to add as much realism as possible, this is awesome! I don't get to work a lot with blender, unfortunately, but this makes me really want to dig around and try stuff and huge overblown projects again... :D
Brilliant Tutorial
Very very useful stuff. Thank you !!!
very *enlightening* video! :D
Wow very good tutorial! Thank you
Sold. Great work mate
Thank you!
Holy crap. Fantastic!
I can't say this enough thanks for this add on. Real world lighting in film making is hard to replicate in cg without numerous amounts of tweaking, I don't suppose your add on improves render time??? 😂😂😂 I guy can dream...
Yay, glad it could help! 🎉 Haha render time is the same though.
5:58 Does the formula hold for not-maximum-brightness colors? If R, G and B are all 0.5, then for 1lm I get 683/.5=1366W. If R, G and B are all 1, this brighter colored 1lm lamp is only 683W. Shouldn't the 1lm darker lamp get fewer (or at least the same number of) watts rather than more?
Very informative! Though I'd recommend using a "De-Esser" for the audio as they were a bit aggressive throughout the video.
If the scene isn't world scale initially what would I use to figure out what the wattage should be?
Just yesterday I opened some Blender files from 2013 that I had made for LuxCoreRender and was wondering how to convert the lights for Eevee or Cycles. This should be useful.
Glad this could help!
Wow, this is very impressive. Great video, great work. Keep it up!
Extremely valuable informations. Thanks a lot.
Really cool stuff!
Finally. After so many years. And I've just started diving into Luxcore for lack of physical lights in Cycles. I haven't checked for accuracy/plausability with Photographer, but I'm getting similar results as in Luxcore. One question though, is the moon size correct? 0.75 degree sounds excessive to me.
So the default sun/sky get set to 1000/200. I'm assuming this is supposed to be azimuth? Would it be possible to adjust these (and sun color temperature) dynamically using drivers within the addon to adjust for elevation (angle)? I'm using Sun Position addon (builtin now), but it has stopped working for me lately, but the way it's set up with coordinates, time zones, daylight savings, and northing adjustment suits me absolutely perfect. Maybe hook into that, or merge with that? Having a good selection of various types was also very good move.
I'm missing two things though; 1) The ability to control falloff direction for area lights, simulating recessed, light grids/snoots, barn door behavior etc - I can sorta kinda mimic it with nodes. And 2) The ability to add an emission shader based plane to simulate displays. These are usually in NITs (cd/m2). All I would have to do would be to calculate the area, which for displays is easy (aspect gives diagonal whose size I have, which gives the angle which gives the sides -> area). Luxcore does have this option for emission geometry.
But yeah, this is the best day ever in these bad days :) Thanks.
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I just implemented a Spread Angle for area lights, but more controls like the ones you mentioned would be really useful. Would you mind adding each feature you'd like to see as individual issues on GitHub? github.com/jlampel/extra_lights/issues
wow, very helpful video.
Does the addon work in 2.79?
JISUSCRAIST!!! Jonathan, I just can´t thank you enough for your amazing Add on , it is not only deliciously intuitive but also correct, congrats.....
Me:*Sees the sun based lightning*
*c4d octane flashback noises*
Please what theme of blender is that, I love it!
Minimal Dark!
Got both this one and the photographer) I should've gotten the photographer addon ages ago, been doing photography for a while now and it would probably make it easier working with cameras in blender now :D looking forward to checking this out. I actually wanted to pickup the lighting addon cause I'm working on a scene now and default lights just don't look right to me. I'm a noob though, so I dunno if it's just my hands, but i'll try to fix it with Extra Lights)
One time I created a HUGE room, I added a cube with emission and a color temperature, and I set the intensity to match the formula where the intensity varies with the fourth power of temperature, making a blue-hot object more than thousands of times more luminous than a red-hot one. Now I realize that would be inaccurate because an object only radiates out of its surface not its entire volume. That's why the UV-hot white dwarves aren't outshining a galaxy and they exists for trillions of years or more, not for few days.
Thank you so much for the video. I can't wait to put your advice is into practice
Great job !!
That hair is the bomb!
Thanks, this is all super informative. :-) In the vid, in the Object Data Properties for the light source, there's a 'Physical Light' Drop-menu. I'm just curious whether this is another add-on or a new feature in 2.83?
That's the Photographer addon beta. It should be released by Fabien any day now!
@@cg_cookie Nice, cheers!
Awesome video.. Thanks mate!
This is very informative. I wonder about HDRI's. SHould we just keep background strength at 1 for interior scenes and adjust exposure as well?
This is probably the highest production value Blender video I've ever watched.
Okay okay, you sold me with your technical mumbo jumbo... when is this course gonna be available??
I'm still recording, but the goal is next month. We'll post a trailer when it's ready!
2 questions:
1. why the efficacy in the video is different from the node group the addon?
2. what happened to the mentioned lighting course? I couldn't find it
ps. GREAT video
This is brilliant. Thank you.
Kenny G Jr! Should of laced Songbird playing in the background. Jokes aside, this video will go down in history as one of the top blender reference videos.
do you mind making a course for the Photographer addon? I have yet to figure out the right way to use it with these assets.
This addon should be part of blender!