EDIT: Unfortunately due to a misunderstanding with licensing regarding some of the HDRIs content, I had to take the product down. I will in the future remake the problem HDRIs from scratch and re-upload the pack in a way that is not in violation of any agreements. In the meantime, I am still here to answer any questions regarding lighting for different types of shots and am here to help however I can.
Hey everyone. I really want to post here about this just because I have been with blender artists for so long now and I think that with the creativity that shows up on this forum that it would be a great platform to share this with all of you.
Anyone on here who works with me or has helped me or maybe I have helped knows I love my case studies and I am constantly growing my library. I spent the last week working on an image based lighting pack which I am now selling on gumroad. My main reason for wanting to sell this is because despite the many free studio style environment lights I see available online, many of them seem pretty arbitrary. Perhaps there was a motivation for the lighting but I am not sure what it was and that leaves me as an artist at a loss given the time it takes to load a new HDRI and trying to dig through tens of them and pick one for a scene based on how the light looks on a sphere. Instead I built all of these around actual scenes where I used common scene staging and camera placement with lighting motivated by actual real world lighting. I did each setup in real life first or observed the lighting from friends of mine who are professional photographers. In some ways I think that makes these more user friendly and you have a clear example render of what type of scene each of these works for. On the flip side, they are also in some ways more specialized so for a scene unrelated to any of these the lighting may come across no less arbitrary than any of the others I find online which seem to have been made by simply lighting suzanne or a tea pot. One way or the other, I hope these can benefit to your artwork and add value to your workflow in some way or another.
I spent days working on these lights given the additional scene setup required but I also want to make sure I am not offering these at a price which seems unfair in a day and age where we can get so many great alternatives for free. I set the base price at $3 but you are free to offer more if you like
In addition to this, if you purchase the pack and would like a light slightly modified for your specific scene you are free to shoot me a private message with proof of purchase and how you need it modified and if it is a simple enough adjustment I would be happy to make adjustments for you. Additionally I know for some people spending money at all right now is hard. If there is a specific HDRI you want and you can let me know your circumstances then I can make this a sliding scale a bit and work with you to figure out something fair.
Thank you so much if you made it all the way to the bottom and if you have any questions I am here.
I am still taking small baby steps with Blender so I haven’t even started looking at the proper lighting of scenes yet and I am currently adding point light sources randomly around the place. And I have not even considered using HDRI files for lighting purposes. I did use an image for a background, just as s test, and realised then that the lighter parts of that image do indeed help to light up a scene but nothing more than that.
I am curious about this so I downloaded your free offering (thanks for that ) just to see what it is all about. And it is an EXR file, which is yet another new thing for me. I had to google it and I had a read of this wikipedia page:-
I am not so sure that something like this would work for me but probably only because I don’t fully know how to use it. And my main output from Blender is animations, not still images and in my quick experiment the HDRI image is visible in the scene. I am now looking at the help files to see if it is possible to use the lighting from the EXR image, but not actually see the image.
@ThorntonStrolia Great work! I love them. I am buying it now. It comes in a great moment, soon finishing the jeep wrangler tutorial and these setups look gorgeous. Are you planning to keep adding over time? As Industrial Designer I highly appreciate these thorough and more specific materials.
I love the one for the Lamborhini with the subtle light coming from above.
Definitively paying more than 3 dollars for this
keep on!
hahha I asked the same thing when i started with Blender…then you learn to search in the forum…and comes up …since it was asked many many times! But it is not a problem I been there then I am glad to help.
Hey there Andy, yeah EXR is just another 32 bit file format. Fancy way of saying there are a LOT more colors than 8bit jpg. This allows blender to recognize the dark areas a truly producing little to no light and the white areas to define and much wider range of brightness. In face the white value can be so much whiter than an 8 bit white that 8 bit white is read a bit like a little LED light while a 32 bit file can read as bright as the sun.
They are pretty much needed for photo realism, even if it’s just light through a window. There really isn’t a fool proof alternative yet. Not to talk myself out of future sales but since you’re new and a specific one type of environment is not worth more or less than another to you right now, check out HDRI haven. They have hundreds (probably thousands) of free CC0 real world HDRI maps that they take from photographing different locations with bracketed photos. https://hdrihaven.com/hdris/ Like I said, these are different than studio HDRIs where the purpose is to look near perfect for commercial purposes, but HDRI haven is awesome. I literally have downloaded every single HDRI they have and use them daily.
And thanks also for the hdri Haven link. I think I remember Andy Price (Blender Guru) mentioned that site on one of his videos but I’ve not had a chance to check it out yet.
I guess that seeing as I am probably going to struggle with photo realistic stuff, certainly at this stage, this is something I may be able to ignore. Having said that, though, even abstract stuff needs proper lighting sometimes so… I need to get my finger out haha!
You might be surprised. I have a degree in computer animation and specialized in shading and lighting, and have been doing this for around 11 or 12 years now (2020 is a mess, I lost track of time). Lighting is about 40% of photo realism. Good lighting can turn a mad scene into a decent cartoon scene and a good scene into a naturalistic scene and a great scene into a photo real one. The most realistic shaders and models will fall apart like a jenga tower with improper lighting. Setup is very simple and I suspect you would benefit from it. It will also give you a better idea of where you are at skill wise because you will be able to actually see what your doing in a more final lighting scenario vs hypotheticals where no matter what you do your model will not look as good.
Okay, I will take that to heart and have a think about when, and how I introduce some proper lighting into my abstract scenes.
Well, skill wise I am still very much in kindergarten, especially when it comes to Blender.
About twenty years ago I was asked to create an animation of a Lucite production plant. Nothing massive, in production plant terms. It was the one and only time I was tasked with such a project and at the time I was already picking up 3DS Max because we used that for walk through’s. But that’s it. I’ve done 3D work for nearly thirty years and 2D design before that. I’m 60 now.
But none of that is really helping that much when it comes to working with Blender and all the marvellous things it can do. In my profession, no one is interested in photorealism and lighting. So although I may be fitting right in with some of the modelling aspect, and even a little bit into the animation side of things, lighting is totally new.
Haha. That’s fair. I would argue it is still probably one of the first things you should get in the habit of doing in every scene. I almost always grab an interior scene from HDRI haven that is similar to my final goal look and build with that. HDRIs, or as they are commonly known in some other applications like max or maya (long time maya user as well and occasional max user) IBL. Image based lighting has been a standard in almost all 3D media, cartoon, stylized, naturalistic, photo real, hyper real, etc, for I would say at least a solid decade and a half now. It is not really all that new per se. But anyway. If we want to continue this chat, if you want to open a thread for it I would be happy to give you tons of information that might be useful but I don’t want to end up drifting off topic here in this thread.
Don’t worry about it. Leave them there. I think it’s good for people to see. This is all google searchable in case anyone ever needs it. I will turn on notificaitons from you so if you start a thread on it ill know
Unfortunately due to a misunderstanding with licensing regarding some of the HDRIs content, I had to take the product down. I will in the future remake the problem HDRIs from scratch and re-upload the pack in a way that is not in violation of any agreements. In the meantime, I am still here to answer any questions regarding lighting for different types of shots and am here to help however I can.
@ThorntonStrolia I love the renders you have. I wish these items were still available for sale. Are you available for custom job? I need a clean scene for car rendering from all around the vehicle. If you are interested let me know! Thanks
) just to see what it is all about. And it is an EXR file, which is yet another new thing for me. I had to google it and I had a read of this wikipedia page:-
