Hey Robin, great tips! One thing i want to add is, although IES lights profiles are a pain to work with, they're necessary. The reason they exist is to allow lamp manufacturers and light designers that work in architecture\interior\etc to correctly assess how light works in a given space (the calculations were done by hand once, thank God they're not anymore), using light calculation programs like Dialux. Rendering softwares adopted the standard to conform to this, and using IES lights is necessary when dealing with clients that have already developed a specific project and chose which lights to implement. Source : I have a degree in Light Design
You are right about the industry related thing. I graduated in product design, but I did my master's dissertation thesis on light design. Unfortunately, Blender (Cycles actually) is nowhere close to accurately displaying light, especially commercial grade lighting, because it calculates light energy differently than other more accurate softwares. I had to switch to the Luxcore render to accurately calculate luminance values, since Luxcore directly allows you to set light power to units such as candela or lumens, making calculations for total illuminance waaay easier and reliable than with Cycles.
@@alexvith yeah on that I agree, for artistic purposes it's great, but the developers still have some work to do on some physical rendering elements (in version 4 they reworked the material calculation algorithm, so that it passes the furnace test, they're definitely going in the right direction). Personally if I have to submit a design project that includes lighting elements, the renders come as a secondary artistic component, the technical aspect is given by light calculations, false colors, reports, etc. Also, I remember seeing a candela/mq option in Blender, but now that I think about it it could be due to the photographer add-on.
@@alessandrolupi3242 Yeah as a final output from Luxcore I used an irradiance false color AOV. With a bit of code you could extract exact luminance values from the AOV if you save it as an open EXR image and process it with a python script. It was too much fuss for me, so I just settled on a more qualitative result than a quantitative one, I was mainly interested to see if enough light reaches certain sections of the interior space I designed the lighting system for. As for Blender, there have been attempts at creating a node setup that converts luminance or irradiance values to the strength units Blender uses, but to little success. Energy conservation in Cycles is weird and if I recall correctly all colors on the spectrum are basically treated equally, whereas from a photometric point of view there are wavelengths that stimulate the photoreceptors of the eyes better (it was somewhere between 570-600 nm if I remember correctly).
I was pretty much attacked by a Blender "influencer" for having the same opinion way back in 2015. We can, in fact, keep developing both photorealism and non-photorealism toward perfection in analog imitation. We, as a collective entity, will. There's always going to be that little bit more to pull out of the renderer if you want to create a little more realism or a little more cell-shading (or watercolor, or clay, etc). CG is going to be art's redheaded step-child until it really grabs and owns what only it can do, IMO. It's nice to see someone leaning into that.
I've developed a semi-irrational hatred of such people after learning some UE4. The way they openly tell you not to do something after you ask if a certain graphical effect is even possible... it's absurd. Example from the UE4 space: when a light hits a surface, the surface is "lit up" in such a way that causes a big, blurry splotch of vaguely yellowish colour to appear on the surface, when viewing it from a certain angle. Regardless of roughness. (This is one of the causes of the "Made in UE4" look.) This is because the "specular" value for that material is too high with respect to what that material is supposed to be (eg. wood, dirt, etc). This is barely ever mentioned in the UE4 documentation. At every step, the official docs (and certainly the forums too) parrot the bullshit that you should never touch the specular value for materials, because the defaults are already """physically correct""". Despite the fact that when, in Atomic Heart, you look down at an illuminated parquet floor inside an office room in a bunker, the DISGUSTING fucking specular reflections, despite the very high roughness of the parquet floor material, blur the texture of said floor into a nasty, flat yellow gradient, if you make the mistake of looking at it from the wrong direction. Yes, with the diffuse reflection completely covering the actual texture of the floor at certain angles. And the morons on the forums have had the nerve to argue back at anyone who isn't sucking Epic Games' dick as hard as they are, because Epic Games said that their shitty rendering pipeline is "physically accurate", so it must be true. I keep finding this kind of shit on UE's forums dating back from fucking 2014, and it keeps happening to this day. Boils my blood. And of course Epic Games themselves have only bolstered this "only one right way to do things: OUR WAY!!!" mentality, despite the plethora of ridiculous issues and internal contradictions that they refuse to address or acknowledge.
This is phenomenal. I have almost 6 years of experience in Blender, and I love coming across tricks like this every once in a while. You got a new sub! Please keep up the work man, I think you're going to go big in the future.
Another cool tip is to use the noise texture fac output > map range node. Set to min: 9000 and to max:1500. Then put the result into the blackbody node. This will make the hottest parts very warm and the dimmer parts very cool. Alternatively, you can take the color ouput of the noise texture and pump it directly into the color of the emission node for a pretty trippy light. Drop a hue/saturation node on the line to tweak to taste.
Really great technique, and thanks for sharing. One small thing,... you can actually avoid having to use the driver if you use the normal from the "Texture Coordinate" node instead of the "Geometry" node
After being thick in the weeds of Blender for a year. They gotta have a way to make this easier. The node trees are the biggest headache to ever exist. I like the flexibility to make the light yours, but if they had some settings or node trees by default for a quicker setup, it would save the hours of headache and CZcams watch time. But thank you, this was very informative.
Yeah and they wouldn't even take up much space if Blender shipped with some default node trees. Probably like 1mb for 10 node trees or something like that, so very small amount of space.
This type of tutorials are needed for profesional uses, you didnt showed me only how to adapt lights, you also teached me stuff with nodes and explained to me why you did the things in that way. Very usefull for the ones that wants to learn.
What really got me is that I had no idea you could do the color ramp like that. Never even thought to peak in that box. Possibilities are endless on this idea. Thanks for sharing it.
I loved this video! Even though I already knew light nodes existed, I kinda forgot, and this video reminded me again! You went in great detail and explained everything well. This deserves way more subs!
Because IES are textures I think you can use the Normal value from a Texture Coordinates node instead of a Geometry node; then invert the Z value before piping that into your color ramp; then there's no need for drivers to be able to rotate the light. You'll prob wanna turn the Blend down to 0 on the Spot's beam shape, though, since that's something you can control with your gradient.
Finally made this myself due to summer holiday and not great weather. So let's do some work I'm never gonna get paid for, lol. Though, can't see myself using this too often. Without the possibility to not cast shadow based on a ray length calculation (i.e. to clear the light fixture), this is hella fun but also somewhat limited in practice. Worth mentioning IES lights suffer the same problem; the definition effect goes away with increasing light size, and forcing tiny lights is not a quality of light I'm okay with. It sounded obvious Geometry Normal wouldn't work well for this, so I did Texture Coordinate Normal intuitively, with some additional modifications. Outputs for Effect Preview without adding previous lights. Added a control for direction that switches a multiplier (1 or -1) for the Normal.Z input. Allows a chain to go both up and down. Pingpong, multiply 2, and a custom (Perlin) fBias node for the float curve that looks like a power function (spike). Custom (Perlin) fGain node (uses two fBias nodes) for the float curve that looks like an S curve. Numeric control for the sharpness. Using 1D noise for the shimmer effect. Considering adding vector rotate nodes to control angle for faking multibulb setups with a single light. We'll see.
it did something like this on planes for eevee to simulate ies lights it worked GREAT! just had to do some backface magic to make it so you didn't see the plane but it was a great way to increase realism on eevee lighting so realistically if you use this setup but apply it to the plane it'll work for both eevee and then this way for cycles :)
I just found your profile and in my opinion you are the one person I needed. You manage to say what's on my mind in your subsequent material. It's nice to listen to the wise. As a professional 3D animator, I will be keenly watching for any further material
Excelent resource Mr. Squares! Thanks. Dont know if this has been pointed out but in my case I wanted to cast a light on the ground, so I used the x coordinate at the "separateXYZ" node. Also I needed to rotate the light so used the "Texture coordinate" node instead of the "Geometry" node.
Nice vid! Someone showing ho flexible light shaders can be, be sure to check out putting a gradient on the color using a light path node. Then you can change the color over distance.
I'll just stick with IES profiles but it's nice to know there's a way to build it from the ground-up if that sort of custom lighting pattern is required for one reason or another
I honestly hate using the IES profiles because getting the power to be accurate is frustrating. How do we have all this technology at our fingertips and I cant just say I want a 60watt lightbulb and it's there. Instead you plug in the IES and you get a Strength value with no unit of measurement. You also have the original power thing, which is in watts. Do you set the Strength to 1 and Power to 60 watts? Do you set the Strength to 60 and power to 1, or .00001 or whatever? It's really annoying and unintuitive.
@@FullHeart_Art I usually check pixel values and adjust light intensity accordingly but this is not physically accurate it's more of an artistic approach.
@@FullHeart_Arti get my IES frem the ieslibrary which comes with the strenght and wattage you need to use for blender, but sometimes the IES dont point straight down which can be annoying having to adjust them
Rad video! Honestly, you are totally right about photorealism, I'm big into like vaporwave and retro 3D stuff because of how bizarre some of the stuff was. I could totally see an era of kind of stepping back into that, and combining it with newer tools.
DAWG UR VIDEOS ARE TOO HIGH QUALITY, I WITNESSED YOU GAIN LIKE A THOUSAND SUBS WITHIN TODAY KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I found it!!! I watched this tutorial when it first came out and have been using this setup ever since. I neglected to save or subscribe though, and it took me a long time to hunt down this vid again (so I can recommend it to others). I searched endlessly for "fake IES lights" and so forth but it did not come up. Maybe you could make your titles suited to both The Algorithm and search queries...
I'm in love with your tutorials!!! And especially how you film them, they not only are informative and helpful but also pleasing to watch! I'm surprised they still haven't made this an option by default in Blender :')
Hi there! Just downloaded your node group. I found a better way to solve the rotation problem. Just use the texture coordinate node normal output instead of geometry node normal output. That way you can rotate lights as you want. Thank you!
OMG , why didn't I know about your channel earlier? You're truly the light of my life. I really appreciate you for this incredibly helpful tutorial. 1 subscribe from Vietnam
Hi Robin!!! Keep making content, you put a looot of effort into it and have already given us so much valuable information. I hope you'll be able to monetize and create content full time soon (if you want it, of course)
Again, thank your for all your tutorials. This one got me working , I understand it although I, an old guy needed to rewatch when ever you made a group. I lost my way there. Maybe because that rather simple operation flew by to fast for me. Justa though. I'll use these light forever.
One thing I've used that breaks reality are lights with negative values. They suck light out of an area and can be very useful. If you color the negative light, it will remove the opposite color from its area of influence allowing for some interesting effects you can't see anywhere except maybe a black hole!
In production and photography we use "negative fill" which uses black foamcore boards to remove bounced light from a subject; not the same as a flag, which is used to to block light. Of course, a negative light in 3-D software can have a stronger effect, but the idea does originate from real world practice.
@@WaterShowsProd Do you have experience negging with negative lights in 3D? I've always been so afraid of artefacts that I just use black planes. But if it works, it's something I have to check out
good work! i too love taking the real, and perception with light and producing something that is visually interesting for my Visual arts practice, so i can empathise with your experimentation!
Super interesting! I'm most definitely going to try this out on a couple of projects. Tho I wonder how taxing using this node method it compared to using IES profiles ?
Hey Robin! First time viewer here. That was an amazing video, well explained and with great tips. You got a new subscriber. About your ending thoughts, I agree completely with you. In my research at college about light simulation and its artistic potential, I found an interesting article by Nick Lambert in which he says that the virtual simulated space of computer graphics has the power to work with what is physically impossible, but mathematically viable, feasible by the mathematical rules of the simulation. Computer graphics' real super power in art is not just replicating reality (which is a super cool super power, don't get me wrong) but being capable of distorting it -- building things that are impossible anywhere else. I hope this academic reference can bring up some ideas to the discussion. Thank you for the great video!
Me finding out about IES files: "And now truly, have I reached the pinnacle of lighting mastery" Robin Squares: "would you be able to hold my beer for a second?"
Hey Robin! Nifty technique, thanks for sharing! Re: Rotations, have you tried using the Normal from the Texture Coordinate node as input instead of the Geometry Normal? If not, give it a go - think it will save you a few steps with the drivers. Cheers!
10:04 the simpler solution in my opinion would be to simply just use a math node set to add in the first place instead of a mix RGB node if you don't care about carrying over color information
Yes, you're totally right! And that is how I did it in the downloadable file. For the tutorial, however, it's easier to explain with the factor slider that comes with the mixRGB. Thanks for watching.
Regarding the closing message, I feel like intentionally unrealistic shaders is something we used to have but lost when we started pushing the PBR standard everywhere.
I split one light with a projection image into direct / indirect light with different colors via the greater/smaler than nodes. The same with indirect light (indirect emission) on textures...for example for walpaper materials, producing some indirect lighting to help global illumination in indoor scenes. Don't use to much, otherwise...
IES and other photometry files are not a nonsense, but necessity for accurate replication or simulating in advance results of using lighting fixtures that are actually available. Editable lights like that are surely useful, but bot have their place and uses, and it's neither mutually exclusive, nor overlapping that much. Btw, "cup" is stray reflection inside front glass, "spike" is stray reflection from reflector imperfections, "ambient" is diffusion caused by dirt/scratches/glass imperfection, what you called "hotspot" should be called spot, and you ignored actual hotspot.
ies is a pain for what it is. i was just playing with textures in light nodes about an hour ago. its easy to get lost projecting on stuff. your channel has a peripheral creep this morning as i work. its the 2nd relevant video in a row.
@@robinsquares Actually this week I tried subdivided planes with a type of refraction-centric glass materials placed in front of my camera as lenses. Adjust for ior, etc.. Worked well, used on 2 projects. So…
@@robinsquares Thank you. Also, you can still edit in 1080p if you want. I usually just edit in 1080p and scale up to 1440p on export. It forces YT to use a better bitrate.
Oh man, this was great until I tried to rotate the light or give it a radius ( which all lights require to get hard/soft shadows). Barely usable as it is, any way to avoid this?
i could not get the colour ramp to do that in 4.0.2. I had the same node setup as in the video but it didnt work. I have always had an issue with nodes not showing the output on lights properly, I do gobos on a transparent plane instead (with an alpha) as the lights messed up a bit
Fantastic! Is it possible with Python (which I don't know how to write) to write a script that would add this light on to to menu options (sun, point, area, spot). Like I said I don't know Python but if I know it's possible I will figure it out :)
I suppose you could have two separate lights, where one is light-linked to the wall, and one is light-linked to not affect the wall. But I think the reason it has to be small is because it would have to be small in real life. A big softbox would never make these shapes, know what I mean?
Hey Robin, great tips! One thing i want to add is, although IES lights profiles are a pain to work with, they're necessary. The reason they exist is to allow lamp manufacturers and light designers that work in architecture\interior\etc to correctly assess how light works in a given space (the calculations were done by hand once, thank God they're not anymore), using light calculation programs like Dialux. Rendering softwares adopted the standard to conform to this, and using IES lights is necessary when dealing with clients that have already developed a specific project and chose which lights to implement.
Source : I have a degree in Light Design
You are right about the industry related thing. I graduated in product design, but I did my master's dissertation thesis on light design. Unfortunately, Blender (Cycles actually) is nowhere close to accurately displaying light, especially commercial grade lighting, because it calculates light energy differently than other more accurate softwares. I had to switch to the Luxcore render to accurately calculate luminance values, since Luxcore directly allows you to set light power to units such as candela or lumens, making calculations for total illuminance waaay easier and reliable than with Cycles.
@@alexvith yeah on that I agree, for artistic purposes it's great, but the developers still have some work to do on some physical rendering elements (in version 4 they reworked the material calculation algorithm, so that it passes the furnace test, they're definitely going in the right direction).
Personally if I have to submit a design project that includes lighting elements, the renders come as a secondary artistic component, the technical aspect is given by light calculations, false colors, reports, etc.
Also, I remember seeing a candela/mq option in Blender, but now that I think about it it could be due to the photographer add-on.
@@alessandrolupi3242 Yeah as a final output from Luxcore I used an irradiance false color AOV. With a bit of code you could extract exact luminance values from the AOV if you save it as an open EXR image and process it with a python script. It was too much fuss for me, so I just settled on a more qualitative result than a quantitative one, I was mainly interested to see if enough light reaches certain sections of the interior space I designed the lighting system for. As for Blender, there have been attempts at creating a node setup that converts luminance or irradiance values to the strength units Blender uses, but to little success. Energy conservation in Cycles is weird and if I recall correctly all colors on the spectrum are basically treated equally, whereas from a photometric point of view there are wavelengths that stimulate the photoreceptors of the eyes better (it was somewhere between 570-600 nm if I remember correctly).
@@alessandrolupi3242 Yeah, I think it's possible to use candela with Blender, probably with Photographer add-on, like you said.
@@alessandrolupi3242 Furnace test is ok, but meaningless. There are dedicated tests to check accuracy of lighting simulation.
I was pretty much attacked by a Blender "influencer" for having the same opinion way back in 2015.
We can, in fact, keep developing both photorealism and non-photorealism toward perfection in analog imitation. We, as a collective entity, will. There's always going to be that little bit more to pull out of the renderer if you want to create a little more realism or a little more cell-shading (or watercolor, or clay, etc).
CG is going to be art's redheaded step-child until it really grabs and owns what only it can do, IMO.
It's nice to see someone leaning into that.
I've developed a semi-irrational hatred of such people after learning some UE4. The way they openly tell you not to do something after you ask if a certain graphical effect is even possible... it's absurd.
Example from the UE4 space: when a light hits a surface, the surface is "lit up" in such a way that causes a big, blurry splotch of vaguely yellowish colour to appear on the surface, when viewing it from a certain angle. Regardless of roughness. (This is one of the causes of the "Made in UE4" look.)
This is because the "specular" value for that material is too high with respect to what that material is supposed to be (eg. wood, dirt, etc).
This is barely ever mentioned in the UE4 documentation. At every step, the official docs (and certainly the forums too) parrot the bullshit that you should never touch the specular value for materials, because the defaults are already """physically correct""".
Despite the fact that when, in Atomic Heart, you look down at an illuminated parquet floor inside an office room in a bunker, the DISGUSTING fucking specular reflections, despite the very high roughness of the parquet floor material, blur the texture of said floor into a nasty, flat yellow gradient, if you make the mistake of looking at it from the wrong direction. Yes, with the diffuse reflection completely covering the actual texture of the floor at certain angles.
And the morons on the forums have had the nerve to argue back at anyone who isn't sucking Epic Games' dick as hard as they are, because Epic Games said that their shitty rendering pipeline is "physically accurate", so it must be true.
I keep finding this kind of shit on UE's forums dating back from fucking 2014, and it keeps happening to this day. Boils my blood.
And of course Epic Games themselves have only bolstered this "only one right way to do things: OUR WAY!!!" mentality, despite the plethora of ridiculous issues and internal contradictions that they refuse to address or acknowledge.
This is phenomenal. I have almost 6 years of experience in Blender, and I love coming across tricks like this every once in a while. You got a new sub! Please keep up the work man, I think you're going to go big in the future.
== true
I support this. I'm 11 years in VFX working in London and this approach is new to me.
Another cool tip is to use the noise texture fac output > map range node. Set to min: 9000 and to max:1500. Then put the result into the blackbody node. This will make the hottest parts very warm and the dimmer parts very cool.
Alternatively, you can take the color ouput of the noise texture and pump it directly into the color of the emission node for a pretty trippy light. Drop a hue/saturation node on the line to tweak to taste.
Really great technique, and thanks for sharing. One small thing,... you can actually avoid having to use the driver if you use the normal from the "Texture Coordinate" node instead of the "Geometry" node
Thank you so much! That was the final touch to make this usable for me!
Brilliant! 8 Years in blender, I didn't expect that something surprise me! But you did it!! Very creative Idea and approach! Thank you!
After being thick in the weeds of Blender for a year. They gotta have a way to make this easier. The node trees are the biggest headache to ever exist. I like the flexibility to make the light yours, but if they had some settings or node trees by default for a quicker setup, it would save the hours of headache and CZcams watch time. But thank you, this was very informative.
Yeah and they wouldn't even take up much space if Blender shipped with some default node trees. Probably like 1mb for 10 node trees or something like that, so very small amount of space.
what a beautiful tutorial that also tests you and asks questions of "what can we do more"
Wow....Just wow...Awesome set up and extremely well explained. Thanks so much!
This type of tutorials are needed for profesional uses, you didnt showed me only how to adapt lights, you also teached me stuff with nodes and explained to me why you did the things in that way.
Very usefull for the ones that wants to learn.
What really got me is that I had no idea you could do the color ramp like that. Never even thought to peak in that box.
Possibilities are endless on this idea. Thanks for sharing it.
If youre on an older version of Blender you can plug in a color ramp factor to get the slider
I loved this video! Even though I already knew light nodes existed, I kinda forgot, and this video reminded me again!
You went in great detail and explained everything well. This deserves way more subs!
Because IES are textures I think you can use the Normal value from a Texture Coordinates node instead of a Geometry node; then invert the Z value before piping that into your color ramp; then there's no need for drivers to be able to rotate the light. You'll prob wanna turn the Blend down to 0 on the Spot's beam shape, though, since that's something you can control with your gradient.
Finally made this myself due to summer holiday and not great weather. So let's do some work I'm never gonna get paid for, lol. Though, can't see myself using this too often.
Without the possibility to not cast shadow based on a ray length calculation (i.e. to clear the light fixture), this is hella fun but also somewhat limited in practice.
Worth mentioning IES lights suffer the same problem; the definition effect goes away with increasing light size, and forcing tiny lights is not a quality of light I'm okay with.
It sounded obvious Geometry Normal wouldn't work well for this, so I did Texture Coordinate Normal intuitively, with some additional modifications.
Outputs for Effect Preview without adding previous lights.
Added a control for direction that switches a multiplier (1 or -1) for the Normal.Z input. Allows a chain to go both up and down.
Pingpong, multiply 2, and a custom (Perlin) fBias node for the float curve that looks like a power function (spike).
Custom (Perlin) fGain node (uses two fBias nodes) for the float curve that looks like an S curve. Numeric control for the sharpness.
Using 1D noise for the shimmer effect.
Considering adding vector rotate nodes to control angle for faking multibulb setups with a single light. We'll see.
Watching a few of your tutorials and i can see your channel blowing up this month, ive just subscribed, great work
it did something like this on planes for eevee to simulate ies lights it worked GREAT! just had to do some backface magic to make it so you didn't see the plane but it was a great way to increase realism on eevee lighting so realistically if you use this setup but apply it to the plane it'll work for both eevee and then this way for cycles :)
I just found your profile and in my opinion you are the one person I needed. You manage to say what's on my mind in your subsequent material. It's nice to listen to the wise. As a professional 3D animator, I will be keenly watching for any further material
what a great modular replacement to ies lights. appreciate you making this video dude! learned a lot!
Excelent resource Mr. Squares! Thanks. Dont know if this has been pointed out but in my case I wanted to cast a light on the ground, so I used the x coordinate at the "separateXYZ" node. Also I needed to rotate the light so used the "Texture coordinate" node instead of the "Geometry" node.
Magistral congratulations
:-0 this is amazing thank you and thanks youtube for suggesting it. I need this all the time and IES profiles and other plugins are a pain
Duuude you're cool, you didnt let us stay with the "This works", also explained the "how this works".
Nice vid!
Someone showing ho flexible light shaders can be,
be sure to check out putting a gradient on the color using a light path node.
Then you can change the color over distance.
I'll just stick with IES profiles but it's nice to know there's a way to build it from the ground-up if that sort of custom lighting pattern is required for one reason or another
I honestly hate using the IES profiles because getting the power to be accurate is frustrating. How do we have all this technology at our fingertips and I cant just say I want a 60watt lightbulb and it's there. Instead you plug in the IES and you get a Strength value with no unit of measurement. You also have the original power thing, which is in watts. Do you set the Strength to 1 and Power to 60 watts? Do you set the Strength to 60 and power to 1, or .00001 or whatever? It's really annoying and unintuitive.
@@FullHeart_Art I usually check pixel values and adjust light intensity accordingly but this is not physically accurate it's more of an artistic approach.
@@FullHeart_Arti get my IES frem the ieslibrary which comes with the strenght and wattage you need to use for blender, but sometimes the IES dont point straight down which can be annoying having to adjust them
@@FullHeart_Art 60W incandescent is different than 60W LED
@@FullHeart_Art The strength is just a multiplier for the "Power" value of the light itself. The power input exists to do things like this.
Rad video! Honestly, you are totally right about photorealism, I'm big into like vaporwave and retro 3D stuff because of how bizarre some of the stuff was. I could totally see an era of kind of stepping back into that, and combining it with newer tools.
DAWG UR VIDEOS ARE TOO HIGH QUALITY, I WITNESSED YOU GAIN LIKE A THOUSAND SUBS WITHIN TODAY KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
thank god i found your channel 👍
that intro made me laugh! love it!
Loving your videos! Can't believe you dropped two bangers same day
This is so cool - and flexible. Definitely one for the toolkit. Thanks for this.
I found it!!! I watched this tutorial when it first came out and have been using this setup ever since. I neglected to save or subscribe though, and it took me a long time to hunt down this vid again (so I can recommend it to others). I searched endlessly for "fake IES lights" and so forth but it did not come up. Maybe you could make your titles suited to both The Algorithm and search queries...
Oh, you're absolutely right. Thanks for the feedback.
I'm in love with your tutorials!!! And especially how you film them, they not only are informative and helpful but also pleasing to watch!
I'm surprised they still haven't made this an option by default in Blender :')
Hi there! Just downloaded your node group. I found a better way to solve the rotation problem. Just use the texture coordinate node normal output instead of geometry node normal output. That way you can rotate lights as you want. Thank you!
this is great content ! thanks for sharing these great tips and making the tutorial so engaging and entertaining
OMG , why didn't I know about your channel earlier? You're truly the light of my life. I really appreciate you for this incredibly helpful tutorial. 1 subscribe from Vietnam
This is phenomenal. I've only recently realized how awesome nodes are, and to have this video follw it up is awesome!
Hi Robin!!! Keep making content, you put a looot of effort into it and have already given us so much valuable information. I hope you'll be able to monetize and create content full time soon (if you want it, of course)
You have by far become one of my favorite channels
Again, thank your for all your tutorials. This one got me working , I understand it although I, an old guy needed to rewatch when ever you made a group. I lost my way there. Maybe because that rather simple operation flew by to fast for me. Justa though. I'll use these light forever.
Thank you for the feedback. I hope you get a better overview with the downloadable file.
Thanks for sharing this 'forbidden' knowledge with us!
One thing I've used that breaks reality are lights with negative values. They suck light out of an area and can be very useful. If you color the negative light, it will remove the opposite color from its area of influence allowing for some interesting effects you can't see anywhere except maybe a black hole!
Yes! That's fantastic. Like, what the hell would a negative flashlight look like in broad daylight? Or a flickering negative candle.
In production and photography we use "negative fill" which uses black foamcore boards to remove bounced light from a subject; not the same as a flag, which is used to to block light. Of course, a negative light in 3-D software can have a stronger effect, but the idea does originate from real world practice.
@@WaterShowsProd I love this, thanks for sharing! How does one do negative fill in the real world?
@@WaterShowsProd Do you have experience negging with negative lights in 3D? I've always been so afraid of artefacts that I just use black planes. But if it works, it's something I have to check out
You’re my next favourite blender artist in the list. 😅
good work! i too love taking the real, and perception with light and producing something that is visually interesting for my Visual arts practice, so i can empathise with your experimentation!
THANK YOU!
Super interesting! I'm most definitely going to try this out on a couple of projects. Tho I wonder how taxing using this node method it compared to using IES profiles ?
really nice, thanks! p.s. I didnt know pewdiepie started doing blender tutorials?! neat!
Hey Robin! First time viewer here. That was an amazing video, well explained and with great tips. You got a new subscriber. About your ending thoughts, I agree completely with you. In my research at college about light simulation and its artistic potential, I found an interesting article by Nick Lambert in which he says that the virtual simulated space of computer graphics has the power to work with what is physically impossible, but mathematically viable, feasible by the mathematical rules of the simulation. Computer graphics' real super power in art is not just replicating reality (which is a super cool super power, don't get me wrong) but being capable of distorting it -- building things that are impossible anywhere else.
I hope this academic reference can bring up some ideas to the discussion.
Thank you for the great video!
Bravo! A great explanation and an inspiring technique. Thanks!
Awesome!
awesome channel, congratulations
Very cool thank you.
COOLEST tutorial EVER 👁️👃👁️🙏
Light and magic, this is really interesting, have to try it! Thanks for sharing :)
Wow! Rhis is so cool.
Hahaha, great intro! Liked and subscribed. Thanks for the info and the node!
I found your channel today and gotta say, I love your stuff!
(altho I dont think we have nailed photorealism^^)
Me finding out about IES files: "And now truly, have I reached the pinnacle of lighting mastery"
Robin Squares: "would you be able to hold my beer for a second?"
awesome and engaging tutorial. liked and sub’d
Good video. Did something similar a while ago but never to this extent.
Haha serving tiktokers or short viewers in the beginning was a nice touch lol.
Hey Robin! Nifty technique, thanks for sharing!
Re: Rotations, have you tried using the Normal from the Texture Coordinate node as input instead of the Geometry Normal? If not, give it a go - think it will save you a few steps with the drivers. Cheers!
10:04
the simpler solution in my opinion would be to simply just use a math node set to add in the first place instead of a mix RGB node if you don't care about carrying over color information
Yes, you're totally right! And that is how I did it in the downloadable file. For the tutorial, however, it's easier to explain with the factor slider that comes with the mixRGB. Thanks for watching.
Regarding the closing message, I feel like intentionally unrealistic shaders is something we used to have but lost when we started pushing the PBR standard everywhere.
This is brilliant! Thank you for this!
I split one light with a projection image into direct / indirect light with different colors via the greater/smaler than nodes.
The same with indirect light (indirect emission) on textures...for example for walpaper materials, producing some indirect lighting to help global illumination in indoor scenes. Don't use to much, otherwise...
Great trick!
God damn I've taken so much physics for granted
Keep this up and im gonna Keep Watching xD
Wish you can use an addon to show the keys u're pressing, great video keep it up
I'll do it next time! Couldn't quite get it to work while recording. Thanks for watching
I love this! Thanks!!
we probaably don't know how to make them because in Blender we can just use IES profiles to do the job faster and better.
This is the first time I have ever seen the 3d viewpoint on the right and the shader editor on the left and it scares me
Why everytime he says "cup" my brain flashes the famous video with the two ladies?!!! 😖
Great work !
You have an amazing mind!
Fantastic, IES creator in blender;)) 🎉🎉🎉 Tx Sir
That is AMAZING!
I just recently learned this cuz I was making flame and I realised we can use nodes on lights
Incredible!
IES are great when your render finishes too quickly or you want to use your system for heating.
Now that's interesting
You are genius
Beautifull, tank you very mutch.
You should title it CYCLES ONLY, because in EEVEE there is no NODE editor for lightings.
Great video, but i hate that you used drivers for rotation fix. I will fiddle around and try to find an alternative to your fix
Another commenter said that you can use the texture coordinates node instead of the geometry node, and that'll fix it.
So easy to follow and so in depth! My fav tutor🫶
IES and other photometry files are not a nonsense, but necessity for accurate replication or simulating in advance results of using lighting fixtures that are actually available.
Editable lights like that are surely useful, but bot have their place and uses, and it's neither mutually exclusive, nor overlapping that much.
Btw, "cup" is stray reflection inside front glass, "spike" is stray reflection from reflector imperfections, "ambient" is diffusion caused by dirt/scratches/glass imperfection, what you called "hotspot" should be called spot, and you ignored actual hotspot.
Thanks for clearing that up!
So awesome. You just earned a sub
ies is a pain for what it is. i was just playing with textures in light nodes about an hour ago. its easy to get lost projecting on stuff. your channel has a peripheral creep this morning as i work. its the 2nd relevant video in a row.
I'll try to keep the streak going with the next one (Hope you're looking into lens flares)
@@robinsquares Actually this week I tried subdivided planes with a type of refraction-centric glass materials placed in front of my camera as lenses. Adjust for ior, etc.. Worked well, used on 2 projects. So…
Ah ah! Now that we got rid of the Tik Tok generation! Very good! Like the clip, very nice, Thanks!
Hell's Kitchen is the embodiment of "Too many cooks spoil the broth"
Can you upload in 1440p? The "enhanced bitrate" feature makes the normal 1080p look way worse than normal, nearly to the point of being unwatchable.
I had no idea. Thank you. I'll do that from now on.
@@robinsquares Thank you. Also, you can still edit in 1080p if you want. I usually just edit in 1080p and scale up to 1440p on export. It forces YT to use a better bitrate.
Oh man, this was great until I tried to rotate the light or give it a radius ( which all lights require to get hard/soft shadows). Barely usable as it is, any way to avoid this?
How did you get your blend file to render in cycles with no delay? After copying your settings it's still slower.
I'm glad you asked. My next five videos are all about that! Stay tuned.
i could not get the colour ramp to do that in 4.0.2. I had the same node setup as in the video but it didnt work. I have always had an issue with nodes not showing the output on lights properly, I do gobos on a transparent plane instead (with an alpha) as the lights messed up a bit
Are you in Eevee? Light nodes only works in Cycles.
@@robinsquares yes I was in cycles
Fantastic! Is it possible with Python (which I don't know how to write) to write a script that would add this light on to to menu options (sun, point, area, spot). Like I said I don't know Python but if I know it's possible I will figure it out :)
Add it to your asset library!
@@robinsquares Definitely did that!
At the beginning when I try to direct the light to go only up on the Z axis, it doesn’t do anything. Do you have any ways to help with that?
Make sure you're in Cycles.
14:25 There is no point in using 3D noise instead of a 1D noise if your input is'nt a vector like here right now.
Absolutely. Unneeded calculations. Well spotted.
CGthoughts makes similar lights in some of his tutorials.
Unfortunately, this only works if the Light Radius is set to 0. Found any workaround?
I suppose you could have two separate lights, where one is light-linked to the wall, and one is light-linked to not affect the wall. But I think the reason it has to be small is because it would have to be small in real life. A big softbox would never make these shapes, know what I mean?
What blemder version is this because my light object can't be added any shader?
Try switching to Cycles render engine