I am writing an entire book about color and light and zou are the first Artist on UA-cam actually learned something from since my Masters Degree about 9 years ago...
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!
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 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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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 is a top-tier UA-cam video aside from the real information and totally useful design concepts. Great presenter too, exceptional really. Really solid, good job. And well lit :)
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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
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
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.
Nice I had already downloaded extra lights, I also noticed the lamps looked a bit dimm and ended up cranking the power, is it then just because of the default scale of blender?
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...
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?
Excellent Presentation. However the formula you provide at minute #6 cannot be right. According with it, lumens and power and at inverse proportion. Please, consider the following one: Power =lumens/(683*(0.2126R+0.7152G+0.0722B)).
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
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
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?
I am writing an entire book about color and light and zou are the first Artist on UA-cam actually learned something from since my Masters Degree about 9 years ago...
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!
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.
Wow, this should be in the Blender default addons!!!
This should be default
Of course...it's cool
1:10 The technical term for that soft shadow edge is the “penumbra”.
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.
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
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.
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!
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!!!
This video proved once and for all that you have to be a genius in order to work in 3D
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
I love the Photographer addon. It’s super useful.
I’ll definitely be getting stuck into some of these lighting setups.
This is mind blowing... A lot of this stuff needs to be integrated into blender as standard especially the default scene.
Dude you’re a genius. Love your enthusiasm and drive here
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!
This video is exceptional. Thank you so much for posting this!
Thank you, glad it was helpful!
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
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.
my dude, both your stuff and you are absolutely awesome. Thank you
Looking Forward to use this with ACES color management!
I like how you literally said "blip" and then bleeped it out instead of swearing :D
This is a top-tier UA-cam video aside from the real information and totally useful design concepts. Great presenter too, exceptional really. Really solid, good job. And well lit :)
You absolutely rock. I loved the technical depth in your content. Thank you for the plugin and keep rocking.
Thanks mate! Will do 🤘
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
This was amazingly informative! I'll probably rewatch a couple times. Very well done!
I'm looking forward to your digital light course. Thanks for the add-ons.
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’m definitely gonna download that ! Thank u so much helped me understand lighting more
Very helpful resource even for more seasoned lighting artists, thank you!
I've just purchased this, it's a fantastic plugin! Thanks.
I knew about the real world factors but I didn't know how to input them into Blender. Thanks.
Dude! This was wonderful. Thank you!
WWoooww like a short documentary about light. Thank you 👍👍👍👍👍
Great vid Johnathan! I'll be getting the addon
Thank you, glad you found it useful!
Always a very good teacher this guy- big thanks!!!
If the scene isn't world scale initially what would I use to figure out what the wattage should be?
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!
as someone who struggles a lot with lightning and coloring, this will help quite a bit.
Thank you for this wonderful and very informative video.
You are a true scholar sir. and thanks for the add-ons
i undertand the sumarry of this - but not all the technical details - SALUTE TO YOU MAN - been waiting for this kind of idea
You are a real light BLENDER Guru!
Thank you, this vid was so helpful, lightening is actually so important. Definitely gonna download it.
Glad it was helpful!
I like it when people are technical.
Brilliant! ...literally and figuratively...Thank you!
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.
Man that's incredibly cool, I reeeeaaally wanted an add-on like this one
Good add-ons.Thank you!
Wow very good tutorial! 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.
Please what theme of blender is that, I love it!
Minimal Dark!
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.
Finally some sense! Thank you!!!
Very very useful stuff. Thank you !!!
So many pieces of knowledge and information shared here, very impressive and very useful... thank you very much
Nice tutorial!!
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
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!
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.
Thank you so much for the video. I can't wait to put your advice is into practice
Very informative! Though I'd recommend using a "De-Esser" for the audio as they were a bit aggressive throughout the video.
Wow, this is very impressive. Great video, great work. Keep it up!
This is really a A++++ content
wow, I'm getting those!
Brilliant Tutorial
very *enlightening* video! :D
Came for the info, got an education instead. Love it!
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)
Extremely valuable informations. Thanks a lot.
Jonathan from CG Cookie: *Precisely Describing Light*
Bob from Despicable Me: "IlluminAtion, IlluminAAtion, IlluminAAAtion...."
can i get the blender theme that you use in this video
It's Minimal Dark, one of the Blender defaults
@@cg_cookie
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
Really cool stuff!
Awesome video.. Thanks mate!
Thank you. +Extra Cool Points for Peep Show clip :)
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
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
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.
Sold. Great work mate
Thank you!
you've made it great. Thanks a lot
I haven't watched Peep Show since it went off the air, and I started re-watching it yesterday. Now this. Kind of spooky!
👻👻
This is brilliant. Thank you.
Nice I had already downloaded extra lights, I also noticed the lamps looked a bit dimm and ended up cranking the power, is it then just because of the default scale of blender?
Yep, that's right!
Holy crap. Fantastic!
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.
JISUSCRAIST!!! Jonathan, I just can´t thank you enough for your amazing Add on , it is not only deliciously intuitive but also correct, congrats.....
Thank you! so useful and full of value.
You are a good man. Thank you.
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.
Thanks mate very useful
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!
Excellent Presentation. However the formula you provide at minute #6 cannot be right. According with it, lumens and power and at inverse proportion. Please, consider the following one: Power
=lumens/(683*(0.2126R+0.7152G+0.0722B)).
Yes! Thank you. I wrote that too quickly I guess. I'll add a note.
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
Thank you immensely!
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
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?
This addon should be part of blender!
Great job !!