Just wanted to offer some kudos, not just for the material which is not widely covered and very interesting, but also for your tutorial approach. I love the presentation of the "Ingredients" section, and your on-camera persona is friendly and easy to understand. Thank you for your work here and elsewhere.
The number of knowledge bombs you always pack into a shorter run time is just amazing! Great video...you're on a roll! Can't wait until you're at 100K subs cuz I can say I was one of the early ones 🤣
Great video! I’m actually a dp/gaffer, we do use this in live action. We use flags to control spill and dots and scrims to unlight certain parts of the image and the spot flood setting on the light controls the diffraction on the edge of a flag and it’s shadow penumbra. Which is how I’ve been doing it in blender, but this is amazing and will change my workflow.
I used the light falloff node on Constant on a light that only affects a certain object-- It helped get a much cartoonier, flatter look only on that specific object, as I was going for.
You know, I moved from Maya to C4D & now Blender, and I hadn't realized why my renders all looked crap, I've ended up relying to much on hdri. Which I almost never used in Maya. Thanks, now I get what's going wrong here. Great tutorial.
Beautiful! I really need to get into iterating and understanding all the later parts of the 3D pipeline--this is exactly the start I need to think about more specifics in lighting possibilities. Thank you for sharing!
Check out the uv project modifier In blender manual it says the modifier is great for making spotlights more diverse.....also using your method you can translate other textures into colorramp
Uh, I hadn't heard of this one! I do this with light nodes on a spot or area light, as I explain un my "Light Nodes" Video. I guess this way should render faster, since it's a "cheat" but you lack all the bounce light and such since it's a texture (?). Anyhow, I will keep this in the back of my mind, perhaps some day it may be useful. Thank you so much for your comment!
Making impossible lighting is common in still photography where you can easily paint out light sources. It also happens in film production too, if the DP wants a light to be in a specific place, but in reality that would appear in shot they might paint it out in post. This is so useful to know, I play around with light’s custom distance all the time in Eevee and I get annoyed when I can’t do it with Cycles.
You looks so passionate about what you're doing and that makes so special about you, thank you for all of your efforts, I just felt like I just got aladdin's chirag throughout your channel, thank you again.
Bend physics indeed! Who said art had to match the real world? Thanks for this. I've been after this kind of solution for a while. I've also been after a way to exclude objects from certain lights (why is Cycles alone in this deficiency?) Can you think of a way to exclude certain objects from certain lights?
Thank you for your comment! And as you say, blockers, light linking and light groups are things we can't get with light nodes and would be great to have in Cycles. For the things I would use light linking I try to set up my View Layers in a clever way and for light groups... I'm waiting! I've read it should come to master sometime soon. And for what you asked, what I was answered by Pablo Vázquez and then read in this blog studio.blender.org/blog/Sprite-Fright-Master-Class-Lighting-Rendering/ (step 20) is the following. You position real objects that cast a shadow and then you have them be only visible to cast shadows, so they disappear from the camera and any reflexions. I even the alpha in the material properties of this blecker objects to get the result that I want. My first impression was that this was a very cheap trick, but when reading from people who worked at Skydance Animation and Animal Logic, I learnt that they did the same most of the time, even when having blockers in their render engines. That's because blocker objects create more believable effects, since they affect all lights and generate shadows that increase in softness when getting away from the object. Short answer: I place objects in the scene and disable their visibility from all aspects but the shadow
@@homspau Thanks for the response. Ya, hidden blockers are a common trick here too but it doesn't work all the time. Especially when you don't want the exclusive light to have any shadows (as it will cast those shadows on the exclusive object too which might be one too many shadows for the environment "truth" - usually we're using the light to add a "kiss" where it's needed). And given the number of exclusive lights we use in our scenes in Arnold (which does respect exclusions), you can spend significant time in Cycles making sure the blocker objects aren't casting a ghost shadow in places that will show. Another technique we use is to solo render the object you want to light exclusively from the light's POV, then use that render's alpha as an inverted mask in that light. Depending on that object's complexity and the resolution of your mask and final image, you can sometimes get some artifacts at the edge but it does work well most of the time. Exclusive lights would be easier. I'm actually using Cycles in C4D and am long versed in Maya (Renderman, Arnold, Vray) and Houdini (Mantra, Karma) so this simple functionality that we're missing in Cycles is constantly leaving clumps of hair between my fingers. Going to see if I can attack it through Xpresso. Keep up the tutorials. I was very impressed with your presentation style, ingenuity in solving the problem and your enthusiasm.
Absolutely agree! As you say, most stuff can be fixed in comp but ruins the fun when lighting. Let's hope we can make some noise about this! And I'm curious, I wasn't aware that you could use Cycles in C4D. May I ask in what industry are you working? Animation, VFX or something else? Your point of view seems so interesting! (Again, I'm here to learn) Thank you!
@@homspau Animation, VFX and public facing screens (like those 3D wave LED curving walls). X-Particles (Insydium) has made a bridge called Cycles4D that gives you all the functionality of Cycles inside C4D. Very fast, but still a few quirks (scene nodes aren''t able to render in the cycles GPU yet).. It is a little challenging to get used to after coming from Arnold and Vray (really Cycles? 5 nodes to rotate a texture?), but we're getting used to it. Your trick of the light fall off made my week.
Please make a breakdown video of how you light that example scene (superhero doll scene at 1:09 ) and the changes. As we Blender users never have this Light Decays by default, then almost no video explains it for creative lighting approach.
Yes! I want to make some videos on how I approach shot lighting. The subject is super broad, though, and it goes way beyond the tools you use. It has a lot more to do with shape language, color theory and such. I'm still writing it, but I hope I can help! :)
This is great! Thanks, I was wondering if the material you used for your muppets render was made by you or is it someone else’s cause I would love to see how it was made, maybe a new tutorial about it?
Yes! All the aspects of that render are made by myself. The quick answer is that it's not a material, I brute forced it. I modeled some curves as hair clumps, gave them a translucent material and scattered them gently over the surface of the characters. :)
Now we have light groups with Blender 3.2 as well as this. Blender is so awesome, and you can also use an object and use nodes and use that. so much more to have animated video GOBO masks. As a photographer as well as a visual artist i can atest to its you not the tool that makes the image and Blender is as good as any of the tools out there, Light is everything in visual arts of all kinds.
in some cases when i make only one opening (window) in interior design lighting only with hdri is not enough even though i dont want to add more lighting. Does using light ray can fill the scene with light nodes
Beautiful, are you have preference or tutorial premium, to know how about Lighting , Compositing and rendering. because i really want to learning that things
Hi there! Thanks for your comment. If you're serious about learning lighting for animation, I suggest you check out the work of Chris Brejon. He's a Lighting Supervisor with a long experience in feature films and he has a blog/book free on his Web around CG lighting. It's godsend. About a 10h read but worth every second
@@homspau thank you, that really helpfull. My basic is an animator , and now i want lighting compositing . because its make the shoot look beautifull. but i still confuse with pipeline lighting and compositing
Hi thank you so much for your video, it is very interesting content ! Do you know how we can add a 'vector' entry to you amazing node tree 'CustomDecay' ? Like so it would be possible to change the orientation of the decay when using an Area light.
Thanks for your kind words! I'm not sure that I get your question. The decay acts on the length of the ray (a float value). The direction of the ray isn't determined nor influenced by any of the operations done here, so I don't know what vector would you want to tweak. The decay depends solely on the distance from the light, independently of the type.
@@homspau Oooh yes of course... I just didn't think enough before asking my question... In fact what i wanted to do is being able to change the direction of the decay, for exemple when you add an Area light, the decay acts like it starts from "bottom" of light and end to "top" of light and i wanted to do my decay from left to right instead... But i just need to reorient my light of 90 degres and that acts like i want... Thank you for having taking the time to answer my question :)
@@relaxmusic77 I get what you mean now! There's lots of crazy things you can do with nodes in lights, but the truth is that most times a clever placement of lights is all that matters. Thanks again for the comment!
Per a ser catala el teu angles es impecable! Molt bo el tutorial per cert! Ja tens un suscriptor mes I de mes a prop ( who also speaks a wee bit of English, cheers m8!)
