Create AWESOME Effects with Light Nodes in Blender! 

Share your alternative methods in the comments 😉

My man... in Blender, I've done hard surface modelling, sculpting, animating, UV editing, texture painting, worked with shaders and geometry nodes, as well as done some compositing... wtf are light nodes?!?! You are definitely right about this going under the radar, will enjoy this one!

Blender is like a box of chocolates that has several layers of false bottoms and hidden compartments with more chocolates.

I like the idea of doing a brief rundown at the start. I always have some fun figuring out how to do stuff like this myself, but this acts as a great starting point

Another quick way of getting the cone shape: -add cylinder -select one face -scale it to 0 -make the loop cuts -dissolve doubles

The way you explain things is very smooth and precise. Snooping through your channel now!

Hi Curtis, your tutorials are great and it’s a pleasure to listen to you and learn from you. Thank you so much. Have a fantastic weekend 😍

Thanks Curtis! I love these types of effects. Things like gobos and cookies are great in Cycles. It's usually not "highlighted" in the community, and you're getting some really nice results. Now, let's get the GPUs back into reality and go crazy! Great video.

I love your begining 2mins explaining everything in a fast way, which almost works like a catalogue of a book. It really helps for audience to understand!

Really appreciate the quick breakdown!

You are one of the best at relaying how to do amazing things with blender! Keep it up!

Love the procedural approach and the end results look fantastic 👌💯👀🌟 definitely a technique that I will be trying out... thank you for the detailed tutorial 💡😎💡

Great Video! I always used blackbody and IES but never tried to use the nodes in different ways. And as a side note you can also scale the vertices of the cylinder to zero, add the loops and then merge the vertices by distance. It's faster and easier but you get a linear and not the convex tunnel shape.

I love your content, always original and refreshing!

Super cool effect! I'm not sure why I haven't tried light nodes sooner. Also, the summary at the beginning is always appreciated 😉

This is brilliant, and I liked having the overall concept described at the beginning, before going through the details.

Light nodes are amazing! They do tend to fly under the radar, but are such a powerful part of Blender with some great results. The underwater tip is amazing and so simple!!

Very cool! Thanks for sharing

Honestly, your voice is just damn good.

Amazing video. I like how you started with the end result and then decomposed it by saying why for every part. I didn't know you can enter #frame as a value!

Wow, I never know about light nodes until now. Also, nice tutorial. I will definitely try this.

Very cool! I remember applying noise to lights in Maxon C4D way back when I was in middle school and it gave 3d volumetric noise lights, very fun to play around with. Can't wait to play around with this.

this can be used to make a pretty realistic video projector too, especially effective with volumetrics.

The W in 4D noise is the 4th dimension you can smoothly move a long to animate 3D slices of the noise. Useful for volumes. Because lights can only display 2D textures, you could just use 3D noise and animate the z axis in a mapping node. Useful when using more than one light as its way more performant in viewport playback. 4D can be expensive in larger scenes.

Nice video Curtis! I see you will hit 100k subs soon, congrats and keep up the good work 👍

I always forget about this! Good reminder! Thx.

Wizard! Thank you for sharing your time and energy. You inspire!

Great to have the condensed version at the top of the vid, makes it easier for future ref :)

Great video as always!

Beautiful,thank you.

Awesome!! Thank You!

Coming from a long use of 3DS Max, this takes me quite some effort to get my head around the workings of this all. But i GET why Blender is so powerful. It's a real beast. I'm gonna learn this.

just re the building the tunnel part-prob the easiest way to do this would be to collapse one end to a point like you do at 11:00, then take the knife tool, make a straight cut across the cylinder (with "cut through" turned on) down near the point. that'll allow you to add more loop cuts along the rest of the shape as normal.

Nice job. First time I've ever seen light nodes.

Well done Curtis!

Thanks for the share.🙏🏽

Wow totally wild effect !

First time I've ever seen light nodes. Tnx Bro

Great video! Setting the proportional editing to inverse square seems to give the best results for a nice conical tapering of the tunnel. Edit : Root, Sphere or Constant work well enough for this purpose also.

Great video!

You are a phenomenal resource, thanks for this Curtis. BTW I really like your Grunge node. I'll post an image on your Discord server.

11:20 you can scale the cylinder end down to 0 instead of merging vertices. It will still have quad geometry around the cylinder even though all of the vertices are in the same spot. You can add as many loop cuts as you want and then you can merge those tip vertices into one. That way you'll get a perfectly linear cone with extra loops.

Finally something im actually already familiar with. Feels like I actually kinda learned Blender!

OMG!! its cool!

Very cool :) !

love the video quick comment though, around 11:50 you talk about how you made the mesh for your tunnel. a simpler way is (in my opinion) add a single loop cut, slide it to the mouth of the tunnel, then merge your verts at the other end, grab that loop again, g+g and slide it all the way to the other end. ta-da you can now add your loop cuts

I have monkey brain so the most I can glean from this video is how well edited it is.

You can add loopcuts, even if you collapse one end of the cylinder to a point: In edge select mode, select all the edges that make up the long side of the tube, and subdivide. As long as you're still in edge mode, you should be able to add as many loopcuts as you want.

you are very great person, i mean it, bro

I had no idea you could even use nodes with lights this is cray

Didn't know this feature - until now, good

WOW THANKS !!! :)

So when making the point/tip of the cylinder, my thought was select the edge like you did, then scale to 0. So they are all then in the middle. Then the loop cut still works as you just have all the points in the same place.

In stage/ photography lighting the "leaves" transparent PNG you're referring to is called a Gobo. Its a laser cut piece of metal "light stencil", if you will.

So many one line comments that hold massive value and knowledge in this video. As a new blender user…wow

Awesome

WOAH THERES LIGHT NODES!!!

One good way to get a dense cone with lots of loops is to scale the cylinders end until its super small, but don't merge them, then loopcut THEN merge the end.

Thanks, this is super useful! I was wondering if you cvould explain how yo manage to have a starry sky background with the camera looking inside the cone ? Thanks a lot !

1 person must have thought this was a tutorial on how to make a light saber in his kitchen appliance that is also known as a Blender. Poor guy. This was a fantastic tutorial Thank you 🙏.

yo man do more unreal content! i just found you and i'm so glad i did

Great video as always, one thing to note, the symbol # it's known as a hash not a hashtag

also why use hooks? Go to edit, select the ring where you want the light to be, do cursor to selection, create and empty and a light, parent the light to the empty, then select the empty, shift select the object, go to edit mode, pick any vertex of the ring where the empty is located (i chose the top, just incase selecting one of the side one causes an error), do ctrl p, vertex parent, the empty (and therefore the light) will follow perfectly

one other way of making the subdivided cone : after you collapse the vertices you can ctrl+b to add a small bevel and then you will have quads to add loop cuts

You can actually make the projection a rectangle using the mapping node (I’m referencing the cgmatter projector video btw)

Hi man, my whole cylinder is moving with the curve when i move the end point from the path. Do you know how to fix this?

Magic.

Instead of collapsing one end, you can scale them down a lot and then add the loop cuts. As long as all those vertices are still there you can add those loop cuts without any issue. Collapse them only after adding the loop cuts. So, here's how I did it: - Delete default cube and added a new cylinder - R X 90; S Y dragged a bit - Edit mode (vertex) and selected one side - S Y SHIFT+Z dragged in; repeat 2x - CRTL+R scroll up click - B select end vertices again (with X-RAY active) collapse at center - A flip normals. Done. You can scale on X axis more if you want the tube to be even longer but it's preferable to do it at the start of the process instead at the end. But at the end works too.

Light nodes is a concept that we know in frightening level. -Dr Strange 2021

I always knew light nodes existed and I’ve used them before, in the sense of me using an emission node with a lamp.

To get the lighting to work with an Area Light, you have to use the Object Coordinates instead of Normal. Then under Beam Shape turn the Spread down to 1.

With a bit of math, you can use the Normal from Texture Coordinates plus the Ray Length from Light Path, to calculate 3 dimensional coordinates, to give you a much more detailed control of the light; allowing for things like impossibly sharp laser/projected images, artificial caustics that realistically change based on distance etc. edit: Looks like getting the 3D coordinates is even simpler than I had assumed; no need to calculate spherical coordinates as an intermediary step, you can get plain XYZ just by dividing the Normal components by 1/RayLength

6:42 the W is the Depth in the forth dimension.. for eg... 2D coordinates are X and Y 3D coordinates are XYZ and 4D coordinates are WXYZ

I was confused as to why I didn't have a Nodes tab but then I figured out it only pops up in Cycles and not Eevee. hopefully Eevee gets it too because this is too cool!

does anyone know what blender version used? 2.93 or 3.0?

I could be wrong but I cant seem to find light nodes in the latest version of 3.0 release.

Is there anyway to enable light nodes in evee?

For the wormhole effect, rather than a cylinder couldn't you use a bezier curve with a bezier circle as a taper object to create the cone?

nice

Stupid question - I've made one of these lighting setups, but whenever I go to duplicate the lights or copy the nodes to other lights, the lighting doesn't work in the new light?

I'm trying to learn how to do thing like you did, but I get immediately stuck at 5:00 because for some reason, my light stays completely white. Can't see the texture at all and cannot make it be able to be seen. I am in Cycles. I really don't understand what is going on.

I don't know if its my players but on different devices my videos dont have sound for the first half second or so and It sounds like I'm coming in after the video has started. Its probably me. Sorry, random but just mentioning. im not into long intros but maybe a one second buffer of sorts would keep me from rewinding, thinking I missed something. Just like I missed light nodes in general. Blender is so vast. I think what you made is cool and will give me a starting point, so I bought it. Thanks Curtis!

Great Tutorial but include the step that you must change to the Cycles rendering in order to see the Nodes Option. Nodes option is not visible in Eevee.

👑

11:07 actually what i would do is that before i added the loops, i would use the scale down method on the end vertices to get the shape I want. Then I'll add the loops, and then once the loops are added ill collapse them. Although I wonder if we scale the end points down quite alot, say almost till there merging will the collapsing really make a difference, its not really adding that much to the geometry. also one more method of deforming the geometry, albeit a bit tedious, but will make parenting the light alot easier and more predictable, create a chain of bones, then select the first bone, shift select the 2nd bone, ctrl+shift+c copy rotation, make sure both, under copy rotation options, are set to local, do this for each successive bone, parenting the first to the next, then when you rotate the last bone, the enire thing will rotate like a linked chain, itll curl up and everything, then you can set the light (or first parent it to an empty and then parent that instead) to be a child of last or second last bone.

Damn, thanks for showing this Curtis! The faked water refraction effect can come in handy, especially since cycles is not the greatest a rendering caustings👍

Building a tunnel: As usual, there's a billion ways to do things in CG. I would propose that using a curve with a taper object would be more efficient for making this sort of tunnel object. No need for tedious and lengthy vertex pushing. This way you also wouldn't need to create a curve and add a modifier, as the object itself is already made from a curve that can be smoothly animated. This would also allow animation of the profile of the tunnel which could lead to very interesting effects.

Awesome tutorial! I just can't make it loop, any ideas what's wrong?

Hi Curtis, I am new to light nodes :) and found this refreshing and new approach of using Blender with lights. In trying to follow your tutorial, when render in cycles, it seems to always give a black circles near to the end of the visible tunnel. Have you come across this and how do you resolve this ? I tried to add more geometry and even apply object smooth but can't get right of this single black circle problem. Appreciate advise.

how do i enable light nodes? I dont have the button

What is the name of the ui theme, can you download it somewhere, i like it better than the standard theme!

Aren't light nodes barely used because of their bad performance? With the archviz example you mentioned, I wonder if it would render in the same amount of time when using light nodes vs a plane with a transparent noise texture in front of the light to create the shadows.

I cant wait for light nodes to work with eevee.

Here's an alternative method for setting up the wormhole. add a Bezier curve. Call it tube. Give it a bevel. Add a second Bezier curve. Call it taper. Set the taper object of tube to taper. Add a point lamp at the origin. Give it a follow path constraint and set the path to tube. Give it a high value, like 85 to put it at the end of the tube. Hook an empty to that end of tube. Now you've got complete control over the size and taper of the tube, you can position the lamp anywhere along the tube.

Has experimental Blender version 3.0 Now 3.1 done away with the 'use nodes' option?

why cant i see the linear light, mix, and multiply nodes?

Anyone know if this is doable in 3.0? I haven't followed the tutorial yet, but plan to once I have more free time later in the week

For 3.1beta normal texture coordinate space generates yellowish tint. On 3.0 i get the same results as in video.

Can someone just explain to me why light nodes don't work for area lights? I've tried numerous settings and they all work for point and spotlight, but not for area?

Great video! What music do you use in this one btw?