Refining Lighting Settings for Realistic Scenes with Intensity, Shadows, Color and Reflections

Welcome back. Alright, the final step in lighting is refining all the specific lighting settings. There's intensity, there's attenuation, cone angle, color, shadows, and reflections.

We're going to go through each of those settings in detail and explain exactly what each one does. This is where your scene really starts to feel natural and we can make any final adjustments. We do need to understand the balance between artificial and natural light.

If daylight is flooding the space, artificial lights should be secondary. For example, there's a lot of daylight on this corner, you probably don't need this light here. Right? If we don't want a light on, we can easily just hover over that light,  click the little gizmo here and turn it off.

Make sure we click our scene first so it's in our right camera view,  and then we go click that light, turn that little eyeball off, turn it off,  and then sync it and it will turn that off. I may want it on just for a little bit ambient light as needed. So let's begin by selecting one of these downlight spotlights.

Let's begin with intensity. Too often renders suffer because lights are either way too bright or too dim. Let's think about like real-world equivalents,  like a bedside lamp shouldn't illuminate an entire room while a ceiling fixture should provide general brightness.

We want to adjust each of these lights, how they kind of act in real life to make them believable. You need to have some general knowledge, but you don't need any really lighting knowledge. We can click the slider and we can drag the intensity and we can see as we drag it, it creates this kind of general lighting and all these are attached to each other.

So I see each one. Oh, not everyone is like that. So there may have been a few where I did not copy as an instance.

Let's double check that again. So I see that these two did not get copied as an instance because I see that my intensity isn't updating. I'm going to delete those two and just to make sure that I get them in right.

I want to copy like this right here because I know that I adjusted the intensity. So I'm going to do a CTRL C, CTRL V as an instance. I will drag this over here.

Now I'll do CTRL C, CTRL V again as an instance and we'll do that. Now if I was to adjust the slider here, it will adjust all those. So I want to go through each of these just to make sure that they're all linked together.

They all have that same intensity. This one right here is not. So I'm going to delete this one.

I will copy this one because I see this one is high. CTRL C, CTRL V. There's always a little bit of troubleshooting that has to happen every time we do anything like this. Sometimes the program won't work perfect every single time.

So understanding some of these challenges really will kind of help you, you know, do it right. So again, I deleted that one. I'm going to copy and paste this.

Make sure it's on instance and not copy. Move it over. I may have done that in the previous video.

We'll take a look and we'll see. So I'm clicking on each of these things to see where. So it looks like I'm going to move this one over because this is three.

It looks like it's just this one, two and three. These three are not all linked together. Well, all of these are OK, which is so that means these three,  which is these three in the very beginning, which is very interesting.

We're just going to delete, you know, this one, this one, this one. And then we're going to click this and we're going to copy CTRL C, CTRL V instance. I'm going to do CTRL C, CTRL V as an instance.

And I believe that there is. We'll just go highlight all of them to see if we have all lights accounted for. We are just missing.

I think that is all of them. All of these have a light on it. So, yeah.

Now if we were to adjust these all again, you can see that they are all laying together. I can turn them all off and they will all be off and turn them all on. They're all on.

All right. So that's great. So let's click back here again and let's go start adjusting these lights.

We'll click this light here. And this is our slider for our intensity. So, you know, I want to stick right kind of in the 500 range of this.

We may want to adjust this later as if we need to increase our brightness. This is kind of a good starting point. Our attenuation.

This is our spread distance of our light. The highest and higher go, the higher it spreads. The lower it's more kind of focused.

We want to keep it kind of more focused. So I'll do it at 15 feet. And then our cone angle.

This is kind of our shape of the light. The tighter the cone angle, the more spotlight this is going to be versus a larger cone angle. The more wider this will spread out into our scene.

I like this kind of around 100 for these little cam lights. And then obviously for every manufacturer, they have their own specific lights. So you could actually, if you know exactly what light you're using,  you could check the manufacturer's recommendations and actually add those to it.

I can turn these lights on and off just to see the difference that it's making,  which is interesting. I'm getting some general brightness through it, but still there's still some work to do. What I am losing is some shadows and some depth, right? So that is something that I will be adding on later.

So the next thing is color temperature. So warm tones are around 2700 to 3500. These are more kind of residential, cozy, warmer lights.

Cooler tones between,000,,000,,000. More modern, clinical, a little more bluish light. You know, we want to match these lights based off of our project's design intent.

You know, mixing colors between lights can work,  but we want to do it sparingly and with intention. So I'm going to set these lights to 3500. So make it a little bit warmer.

That kind of nice cozy interior. Just to demonstrate, I could drag this over here and you can kind of see that it's it's very like bright. It's making that kind of a blue light.

I already have a general kind of golden light from the sun. So this would kind of complement that at 3500. Going down, this is what I was talking about.

Shadows are extremely important. We always want to make sure that we click and enable the shadows. We want to enable.

Now all of a sudden we can see that these lights are now casting shadows. The radius on this is how crisp and detailed the shadows are versus how kind of soft and glowing how like kind of soft these shadows. I can move this light around.

I kind of can see the general softness and the general kind of harshness of it. I like this kind of in the 5060 range. So I'll kind of set it at like 55 and right around there.

The other settings on here are haze. You know, this is if you want like a hazy light. You don't want that.

Maybe if you're doing something out outdoor, like a spotlight or something,  that could be interesting. But for the interior, we wanted to disable that. And then we go down into our reflections.

This is where these lights are specifically reflecting off of surfaces. You can kind of can see here on this chair. If I zoom in on this chair and I bring down the reflection, you can see that there is the light is reflecting off of the surface.

So I do like the lights. I don't like it super heavy, kind of right in the like the 0.7 range gives us a kind of a good balance between the two. So here we are with a general scene with those light fixtures.

I think it's coming along nicely. Let's make some minor adjustments to this accent lighting. So let's go click on this.

IES light and we'll turn it on. Here, you know, I want to maybe adjust the color temperature to be a little bit warmer. Maybe the intensity will go down.

Maybe it doesn't need to be crazy bright. Maybe like in the 200 range, 300 range, a little bit more of a wider spread of light. And maybe the cone angle can be, you know, maybe a little bit wider the spread.

Intensity can even drop down. Kind of want to kind of work our way just so it has a little bit of light,  but nothing too crazy. I do want to enable my shadows.

So it is casting more shadows underneath my chair. I'll make that kind of radius kind of be around the 65. Reflections.

Do I want this light to be reflecting or not? I'll kind of have it in that 0.7 range. Just like that. So I can, you know, I can turn this on and off and I can see that it's making a little bit of a change, but nothing too crazy.

So I'll just keep it on and I will, I will click this, turn it on and then sync. Um, one thing that I wanted to know is if I am able to edit this light source. So I'm going to click my eyedropper tool and I'm going to see this.

This is a bulb glass. So that is its own independent light material. So I can actually drag in a, an emissive material over that.

Go to neons, neon one, and I'll drag that onto there. And then here I can increase my glow. You know, I can maybe even make this to be a little bit more of a kind of a warmer,  warmer light.

And go back. And now I kind of have that light source there. All right.

I'll see you in the next video.