Mastering Lighting

In this tutorial you will discover:

The core fundamentals of good lighting
Some common lighting mistakes
Why shadows are equally as important as light

Ever find yourself placing lamps randomly in the hopes your scene will look good? You’re not alone.

Lighting is a pretty daunting topic if you don’t understand the theory. Most people can differentiate between a good lighting system and a bad one, but few people know why.

To understand lighting you need to know the theory. If you’re against theory then you should probably skip along to another tutorial. Because when it comes to lighting, knowing the theory is vital.

Finished Result

Discover how to create the lighting system for this scene

Discover how to create the lighting for this scene

Download the Starting .blend file

Text Summary

Don’t like long videos? Here’s a summary…

Which image is easier to read? Shadows play a huge role in helping your mind tell the geometry of a 3d scene.

Which image is easier to read? Shadows play a huge role in helping your mind see geometry.

The Three-Point Lighting System

Combined 3-Point Lighting System. Model by Ben Dansie.

Combined 3-Point Lighting System. Modified model from Ben Dansie.

Quote from Universal Principles of Design

Other lighting systems

Quote from Jeremy Vickery of Pixar, from Efficient Cinematic Lighting.

More examples of lighting applications

Back lighting and Non Key lighting used together

Silhouette and 3-Point lighting used together.

Back lighting used effectively in a snowy outdoors scene

Silhouette lighting plus reflections for added contrast

Hands on demo of the Three-Point Lighting System:

Add a Plane at a 45 degree angle from camera. Give emission value of 30.

Add a Plane at a 45 degree angle from camera. Give emission value at 30.

Add another plane, 90 degrees opposite Key light. Give emission value of 3.5

Add another plane, 90 degrees opposite Key light. Give emission value at 3.5

Add Spotlamp to rear of scene and point at subject. Set strength value of 100.

Add Spotlamp to rear of scene and point at subject. Set strength value at 100.

Finished!

Feel free to use the fruit bowl scene to explore other lighting methods

Lighting Tips from the Masters – Blender artist Ben Simonds, shows how lighting is used in movies and how to use similar techniques in blender
Digital Lighting and Rendering – An invaluable book that should be on every artists bookshelf. Just buy it.
Three-Point Lighting Wikipedia entry - More information on the popular lighting system

Make something cool based off this tutorial? Post it in the comments below!

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)

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Yayel

Hello, thank you for this amazing tutorial !

I have the same color artifact than wyslij with the cut orange. Do you have an idea to correct it ?

Madone

It’s a missing texture, missing texture are remplaced by a purple mask I believe. He wrote something in an attached text file saying that it was for license purpose.

simon

how it work in” blender render” rather than cycle render??
wyslij

Here is my attempt to render the scene. I am not big fan of 3 point lighting so I go different direction.

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/280/orange23.jpg

Sorry for pink artefact, really can’t figure out why I get this strange colour in cut piece of orange.
Dani

hi. great tutorial.

i have a little problem, i am using blender 2.66. and your materials property seems to be different than mine. i don’t have that surface type and whatsoever.

Im a newB, can you please help me?
http://www.facebook.com/Abhi.CA Abhinav Yadav

blender 2.65 has some problems, I get all purple ambient lighting. This was also the issue with sparks tutorial.
Noah

Hey Andrew, cgcookie has a great tutorial on invisible mesh lights in cycles. Might help you out for the rim light.
Tom Daigon

Using Blender version 2.65 when I go into Cycles after setting the key light the
color gets screwed up. The apples are all purple and the oranges are
day glo. The light strength is only 30. It looks awful The fruits
looks correct in Texture and Material modes.
bclovely

我很喜欢！支持你！
cjtblender

Hi Andrew. Can you explain to me why my comments/questions are being removed from your thread before being answered?
cjtblender

err, no response to post…
cjtblender

Hi. I like you’re site, have gained a lot from your previous videos, and your approach to teaching, but I’m surprised you’ve suddenly taken the leap into ‘how to light a blender scene’. I’m fairly new to 3D modelling, but I am a professional user of Photoshop and Illustrator, and have extensive knowledge of photography/artists/illustration/lighting techniques. Please don’t dismiss the techniques painters have used in the past, I’m sure they would never have said “It’s now at five degrees to my fruit bowl, let’s take a real time look ay my white chart…” Let’s hit shift D
Foufhs

Amazing job once again Andrew i just have one question since i am new to all this. I am using two screens with blender (once again thanks to you) and on my secondary one i just have a 3D window with cycles rendered mode so i can check my results on the fly. Is there any way that i can hide the light objects in the primary 3d editing window without that affecting the rendered result in the second one? Thanks in advance to anyone that could offer me a reply
Lars Madsen

Another tutorial of very high quality from you Andrew. You make some very nice explanations on the three point lighting. Your tip on using spot lamps for back lighting as very much appreciated!
adrian

Hi. Well, just great!! I got a simple question, but important, I guess you must use a powerful computer. So can you tell me, more or less, the configurations of your PC to make blender run easily whit high .blend files resolutions?
Matt

I agree. That cloth looks amazing. Suggestion for next tutorial?

Guardian

Look up how to do a simple cloth simulation, it can actually be done in less than a minute.

Zorrobus

Great Teaching! Great tutorial.
dahray

Good. Tonal range has just gotten clearer to me. Thanks to you.
sharky

Man, you love to talk into historicals so the video is always long. You are good but keep it simple without too much details which become confusing
http://www.alexastock.webs.com Sanford Hall

lovely,very interesting.
phuong danh

this is my result
http://www.facebook.com/EvenTarash Even Tarash Tudu

Another gr8 tutorial
http://www.facebook.com/wizofwonders Jared Harper

umm for your next tutorial if you do one? could you do a tutorial on creating on how to model a motorcycle?
Husam

Thank you Andrew I have a lot of troubles to set up the lights.
RandomUsername

Hello! This is off topic, but I need help. I’m making a first-person maze game in BGE, I use a cube for theplayer for collision detection and have a light and camera parented to it. The actual maze structure is a “static” object, but to be able to have collision detection my cube has to be “dynamic”. However, I want the layer to be able to move in all 3 dimensions, so I need to disable gravity, but if I use a static cube it won’t collide with the maze. DX. HELP!!

Calzaath

Hello. If you go under the world settings, under physics there the the gravity, turn that down to 0.

Gabriel

Very good, THX man
zzero101

Great tutorial, as ever, and with a good result. One question – where did you get the texture images, esp the floral bump ones? I take it you blurred them yourself. I always struggle to find high quality, large resolution texturing images.
mike

Great images. Can they be used in a website for free?
Robert

I’m coming to this a few weeks late, but I wanted to chime in and also say what a useful and well-made tutorial it is.

On the issue of 75% key light coming from upper left, it struck me that this is pretty close to the proportion of right to left handedness, and that if you are right handed and want to clearly see your work, the light needs to come more from your left (I’m left handed, so that advice is reversed in my case). It would be interesting if in the study you mentioned they also tracked the handedness of the painters/artists in question.

Later in the tutorial you briefly mentioned the role of reflections in lighting a scene, using the example of puddles on a dirt road. A nice modern example of this (which I’m sure you’re aware of) is how in movies they wet down roads or sidewalks to kick up those useful reflections. Until I learned about why they did that I wondered why so many movies were shot “just after a rain storm.”

Keep up the good work!
CG

By the way Andrew, you can actually make a light emitting object (like your plane) invisible to the camera.
I have made a short tutorial on how to do this.See link below.

https://vimeo.com/49532675

I hope that is helpful to people.
Akif

Hello Andrew have you e mail ? you are very good and professional ! I like blender , how can I learn this software ?
吳

非常真實的光線和質感，希然我以後也可以有這樣子的水準^^，我需要好好的學習了。謝謝提供這麼好的影片。

http://derek1906.site50.net/ Derek Leung

幹嘛在這打中文…

Matthias

First of all, thanks for the great tutorial video!

But i don’t understand the difference between an emission plane and an area lamp.
Alain

Thank you Andrew for that great tutorial !

It’s very important that 3D artists understand how to lit scene.

Kind regards
Alain
Xone

Thank you very much for the tutorial, Andrew. The topic is very important, but unfortunately it’s kinda rare CG artists talked about it. I’m interested particularly about 3 point lighting system.
Just in case you haven’t read yet, here is several pages of good lighting theory i found few years ago.
http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/tutorials/light01.htm

The author seems to dislike three point lighting system, and personally, i think he made some good points there. It’s a good read for artists, imho.
Anyway, thanks again for the tutorial and i’ll looking forward for more of good (and unique) tutorial from you in the future.
Happy blending to us all.
Lolitha Ratnayake

Thanks for tutorial. Couldn’t watch the the whole video. Will watch later. I’m just curious. How did you made the engravings in metallic bowl? Is the method included in video ? Can you please give me link oh how to do that kind of thing?

Zaffa

the method is not included, but it’s not hard, i think it’s simply a displace texture black and white
Matt

He made a tutorial that covers this and a whole range of other texturing topics in this video: bit.ly/ReS48V

Merijn

Thank you once again Andrew; I learn from you with each tutorial!
Just like Zaffa, how did you create the cloth? Was it handcrafted?
Also a tutorial on the materials settings for that would be great; you added a few layers of magical noise and it looks quite convincing
http://entrerealidaes.com Angel Ardon

Thank You for remind me about the classic artwork, and how much we can learn from it. You are a good teacher in my humble opinion. Thanks. Now, lets used this information.
Zaffa

I would love to know how to use the cloth simulator to create a silk like yours, How did you do Andrew?
http://www.pick-art.cz Pavel

Thank you Andrew! Wery much – great summarizing
JUST

http://vimeo.com/m/38180924
… you should at least mention this.

http://anuga.se/ Anuga

LOL So this was a almost complete ripoff… sad…

pkisme

well, the difference is the platform used.. and any lighting lessons are based on the same source: traditional mediums.

unless.. someone patents all lessons on lighting

btw way here another good one, dealng with portraits
http://bensimonds.com/2010/06/03/lighting-tips-from-the-masters/

pkisme

*based on the same source: traditional art/past masters

greg p

Don’t be disrespecting the Guru man!
The other tutorial is NOTHING like this one ! Go away.
Underseer

Let’s see your amazing Blender tutorials that you do for free, ‘Anuga’. I won’t hold my breath.

Sadly I’ve seen your posts on a few Blender sites. Do you ever have anything nice to say? Has your jealousy soured you so much? Or do you troll for fun?

http://www.jpbouza.com.ar jpbouza

Nice! Very interesting! Thanks a lot!
Travis Bare

Great Video. I teach a lighting class and this is great for beginning cg artists. Your work is truly high quality. Thanks for an extremely valuable resource for aspiring artists. Concept focused tutorials add another level of usefulness to your videos and are really needed for the Blender community. Although we primarily use 3DS Max and Maya at our school, I am trying to incorporate Blender in my classrooms and I try to direct a lot of traffic your way. Btw, are there some node based tools to adjust the histograms? Thanks.
http://anuga.se/ Anuga

High Tonal Range = Over Exposed

Sil

@Anuga
High Tonal Range = Good range of values.
Overexposed = Blown out highlights.

http://anuga.se/ Anuga

If the tonal range is peaking, the images becomes to bright, that ain’t good…
That’s a over exposed picture…

Sil

“High Tonal RANGE” is in terms of breadth.
A “High Tonal VALUE” might be closer to what you’re thinking.
Kroon

Please stay quiet, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Maybe go make some sammiches instead?

And no, not in blender.

Frans

Hahha – I don’t know much about Blender or 3d Modeling, but this is funny when considering photography – of which I know lots

Finished Result