Take a look at the sequential images below. But experimenting with saturated lights can give your renders a whole new dimension, depth and dynamics. Sure, if you’re working on a mid-century Danish interior design scene, desaturated colors will be your go-to. There’s nothing wrong with a subtle warm key light and a subtle cool fill light.

If not, don’t avoid colors in your lighting. Let’s keep in mind that this is a real clinical condition and if you suspect you might have it, consult a medical professional. Finally, the background is not a plane but a cylinder which produces a natural, appealing vignette around the character.īottom line: There’s a reason why, spelled backwards, “gradient” reads “fabulous.” Use them.Ĭhromophobia = fear of color. Enabled GI is realistically creating small color-bleeding gradients all over the place. Remember GI? ( Let’s hope so, we literally talked about it one paragraph ago.) The right render has GI enabled, the left one doesn’t. See how the scene is washed in a contrasting purple-orange gradient? The upper-left key light is yellowish, the far-right fill light is purple. It guides your gaze towards it, then rapidly falls off, making the feet barely lit for a dramatic effect. The key light is close to the goblin’s head.

The right image is straight up sexy – and it’s all because of a good use of gradients. The left one is lifeless and flat, with little variation in values both on the character and the background. Limited & Bland versus Absolute Awesome use of Gradients Yes, some scenes benefit from GI more than others: characters and objects, for instance, need it less than ArchViz, where GI is essential. With Cycles, there’s no more tedious lighting with an ungodly number of lamps as GI does all the super-realistic light bouncing out of the box. So when Global Illumination entered the picture, it was like a light bulb going off. That’s, basically, exactly not at all how the real world works, which made realistic render lighting an incredible pain. In the dark ages of computer graphics (like, 5 years ago) all light calculations assumed that light bounces off an object. Global Illumination saves you from eternal damnation

High Dynamic Range Imaging is a technique that “photographs” the real world including hyper-detailed information about light which is impossible to replicate manually.īottom line: It’s a must to develop a collection of HDRI images that you can easily apply to your Blender project. HDRIs have become the industry standard for realistic environment lighting. An image lit with a lamp, versus an image lit with HDRI

Blender interior lighting