Original subtitles

Stylized lighting can mean many different things, many different looks, let's make sense of it.

join me and we will explore some of these looks and techniques in Blender we will explore various

realistic stylized lighting techniques and we will use just like in the other tutorials from this

series the amazing Hjalti's chart to relate some of these concepts to. but first feel free to download

this .blend file from the resources to follow along. so here we have the Hjalti's chart that goes from

reality to stylized to abstract, it's a kind of gamut or the area where we can map

the various... uh... decisions related to lighting and how we're gonna style it. we can make things more

or less real, more or less abstract, that's a matter of gradation between those extremes.

so when we think about it the Workbench render engine, which is the same as using the solid

shading mode in Blender generally already gives us a stylized representation of some lighting ideal

which is let's say the physically correct lighting. Matcaps for example... matcaps are

meant to provide a very quick and very... preview-ish representation of lighting and materials. Matcaps

are nothing more than a sphere that is projecting the lighting and material properties onto all the

meshes in our scene. technically the concept, even though it can look slightly believable in practice...

the concept itself is very stylized in nature, very simplified. we can even go with a matcap

that shows a cartoonish gradation before we even started playing with lighting. so even a default

Blender viewport can be a decent starting point in our search for a particular lighting style.

so i think we have successfully landed somewhere over there or maybe there... okay so if we keep

moving to the right into this direction that makes us lose the elements of reality then we can go

flat :) that probably puts us into the right corner of this chart and makes the stylized person

really happy about our journey :) but that's also a completely viable alternative to going realistic

or semi-realistic, it doesn't make things look less beautiful or less cool. on the country,

it often makes it much more expressive, because you can play with pure colors and yes, it's a

completely different game comparing to what we are expected to deliver in the realistic setting,

but anyway we can maybe add a little bit of shadow to push it to the left, so you can see the game.

the name of the game is that we can freely navigate this landscape, it totally depends

on our conscious choices that we make. we can subtract and add the elements of reality

to push it to the left or to the right conversely. as soon as we go Eevee and add any light source, we

have already, like, moved ourselves way to the left. the basis of realism is the interaction between

lights and materials and once we rely on the light sources to sculpt the shape or rather sculpt the

3d form of our object, we're already moving there. you know, closer to to the real Ton. still we're

somewhere in the middle in terms of going full fat realistic, we can sprinkle it up with ambient

occlusion and other things that could possibly make it slightly more physically plausible,

we can enable soft shadows... you name it. and once again, it won't make it more or less beautiful

or cool, this isn't the point, it's a matter of style. all right, if we want to go full left, we

can choose Cycles as our render engine. Cycles is a physically correct rendering engine that uses path

tracing for lighting calculations, all the stuff that is closely associated with realism like light

bounces, global illumination, believable shadows and just the light transport algorithms. all of these

things that we get out of a sudden straight out of the box as soon as we enable Cycles allow us

to move further to the left towards reality of representation, especially if we use the bigger

light sources and high dynamic range environments and all that stuff that works best with Cycles,

that allows us to make a huge progress over to the left side of the chart.

okay we cannot move all the way to the end to the left side because lighting isn't everything,

you know, we have models, we have other things that contribute to this perception of reality

and yeah, i recommend you to watch the exaggeration tutorial that is included in this course, because

it's important how we treat the geometry, how we treat the proportions. lighting and shading is

just a part of the equation, there is for example perspective, it can also be more realistic or

more twisted, expressive... you name it. it's important to take these things into account as well.

right. but what should we do if we want to move to the top, towards the non-figurative side

of the chart where the Abstract Land lies? in other words how to make things abstracted in 3d?

that's a tricky question, really tricky. but just to give you an example, we can use the denoising.

neural networks based denoising when coupled with the low amount of samples produce

a smudgy quirky rendering effect which looks to me a little bit abstract... for my taste at least.

just to show a general direction in which we can keep thinking about lighting and how we can

stylize it in terms of making it more abstract, it's a little bit tricky to do in 3d because

the perspective is a little bit rigid, you know, you cannot do much with it without

mangling the application itself and all the lenses. cameras and so on follows certain algorithms. it's

not the same as smudging it with a smudge brush and Krita, you know. but we can try something like

that. for example we can add the volume shader, make it less dense so we can see through, then we can

hope that the denoising algorithms will mangle it enough to make it look slightly abstract in terms

of lighting. that's not a particular technique that i would use in production, again, this is just

to demonstrate a certain way of thinking, where we can try to move things up on the chart. if we

would really like to climb up higher, we would need to bring things into the image editing software...

hello, Krita! :) to demonstrate the concept let's save this render and open it up in Krita.

what does it even mean when we say abstract lighting in 3d? what do we mean? it could mean many

things but basically the way that the lens system works within the virtual camera, the way that the

lighting is spread in the scene, the light bounces all that stuff, it needs to be altered somehow

using our artistic vision of how the space works in... in our imaginary world that we're setting up,

maybe to make it a bit more abstract we can imagine to put it into words that the air in our

scene has strange density that makes the light follow swirly patterns... i don't know... something

along these lines. maybe maybe it's an artistic lensing effect if we think about it in terms of

the light transport. such things as the light bounces, the... the scattering of light

or dispersion can behave just like we want, we can add the colors from different parts of the color

wheel as if the light is scattered in some crazy crazy way and talking about the depth of field,

it can also be abstracted, so the edges will go haywire, so that's probably what i mean

when i say abstracted in terms of how lighting works. if you want to practice this abstraction,

feel free to do it in 2d because it's much easier this way to understand the concept.

alright, so we have mapped the lighting somewhere to this region of the chart by doing quick paint

over. we have made it much more abstract. perhaps not to the point of total disintegration of

lighting and form, because it's pretty hard to go beyond a certain limit towards non-figurative art,

we are still constrained by the underlying geometry in this case.

actually if you want to learn more about infusing your color and your lighting with

some abstract quality, watch the Marco Bucci's videos on his Youtube channel by all means.

you can start with the one called Using Color in Your Paintings. essentially Marco explains in this

video how he treats the color in his paintings.. starting by setting up the value structure, the

drawing itself, he goes into the abstract qualities of brush strokes and colors imposed over the... this

structure of values. the key point that Marco makes is that there is always an abstract dimension to

pretty much every piece of art, there is always a place for the abstract expression of your artistic

thought. but let's dial down the abstract qualities for for the time being and concentrate

on the stylistic qualities, which is... uh... the simplified properties of the shaders for example.

we can use shader to rgb node to start off by setting up lighting and then moving on to

the territory of the cartoonish representation of this kind of lighting. imagine a comic book

posterization technique, something like that... we will be talking about that extensively throughout

the course. but to give you a taste of how this approach to shading works basically we're using

the shader to rgb node plugged into the color ramp and then we colorize the ramp however we like.

here i'm using the Constant interpolation mode to create the non-graduated transitions, the

sharp transitions between the various stops on the color ramp. so by following this technique

we are positioning ourselves roughly in the middle of the chart in terms of real versus

simplified ending points. we are neither fully expressively flat nor fully physically plausible

we're somewhere in between. we still use the information provided by Eevee, the position

of lights, how the light hit the object, but then we apply the artistic transformation on top of it.

that's one of those hybrid approaches to lighting that are super useful to know and

to practice. all right, awesome! to sum it up, there are no right or wrong choices when it

comes to styling the lighting in Blender or other applications for that matter.

the choices that we make affect... um... how far to the left or to the right or to the top we are on this

triangular chart. this is a territory, but we still need to over impose our artistic map on top of it.

from my experience you can map this territory only by practicing these things, only by trial

and error like any other things related to 3d art and especially to expressive stylized three art,

it's super subjective and super intuitive. what you will choose it's totally up to you, you're

free to explore this land this, Triangular Land of All Possible Stylistic Combinations™

and if you want to further practice these concepts to really nail it down and to find something that

you would love and that you would want to share with us of course on social media, feel free to

download the project files, they go alongside the tutorial and then just give yourself some time,

have fun with exploring different combinations of realistic and not so realistic elements

of lighting in particular, because that's the lighting exercise after all,

but also don't hesitate to tinker around with the colors, because that's something that we have

already discussed in the previous tutorial, that's also something that you can totally play with.