If you're like me, as you scour the internet for inspirational 3D art, you run into some amazing CG lighting setups. You know, the ones that make you want to be better! Well why should we let them have all the fun? Why can't we give it a go?
Therefore, the challenge here is to select one of your favorite lighting examples and do your best to match it in Blender. If you don't keep a collection of your favorites, feel free to use mine. Analyze light colors, number of lights, position, etc and recreate. Use either lamps or HDRi's or both - whatever you need to get the result.
Once you select your favorite, open up one of your models (or download this posed Baker model), do your best to match the lighting and materials, and post it here. Here's my attempts:
Original by Julien Kaspar
Source render by Bruno Ortolland
Image Credit: "Lüfor"by Alexandre Aroul
Image Credit: "Super Mario" by Mark Henriksen
Image Credit: "Sci Fi Pilot" by binqi chen
Image Credit: "Female sculpting session 01" by Daniel Crossland
Image Credit: "Tribal Frog" by Paul Braddock
Image Credit: "Danbo in Autumn" by tomatoes
Image Credit: "The Mad Professor's Ride" by Ruairidh MacNeill
Oh!! I'm doing a 30-day lighting challenge, Kent, and I think I want to try that cube idea you said a little while ago! I have nothing I want to model, so why not some lighting? XD I'm...so bad at lighting still, so I wanna complete this challenge for myself!
I had no idea you used so many lights for one of the character models--I'd been afraid to use more than three!
@theluthier I loved the stream, and you know I like lighting, and all the techniques on the procedural sparks and the bloom and the light bouncing and everything naturally inspired me to try and quickly do some experimenting of my own.
@theluthier Oh I wish I had something fancy to show, but it was just serendipity really. I didn't know you could get all creative with the emission socket until I saw you do it on the livestream. I wanted to try it for myself and I tested it on the ground which was already being displaced and the texture plugged into the emission wrapped around the displacement. In the end I used the ground as a background and left Bob floating. The stream might have been short but it was packed with cool stuff.
dostovel That's really clever, dude. Definitely an effective background. I'll have to remember that one 🤘
First attempt. The volume box won't work in Blender 2.9 so I just used the plan.
Goal
Result
My latest attempt using this striking poster from Arcane featuring Vi & Powder:
New shot: The soundtrack poster for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning.
I loved the stronger focus on silhouette lighting with this one -- and I also put a bit of Blender’s new light linking functionality to use to control the key light on the subject and glows in the background 🖇️
CypherPoet fantastic match! What a fun target too. Man, this makes me want to do more lighting matches again.
New shot: The poster for Come And See, the 1985 film about Belarusian partisans fighting Nazi occupation in World War 2 -- perhaps one of the most horrifying -- yet profound and enduringly relevant -- anti-war films ever made.
A big challenge here was recreating the bold, bright, ultra-colorful hue lights around the head while keeping the front of the subject appropriately dark -- all against a backdrop that, itself, is considerably light.
The eyes were also a tricky spot since the model doesn’t have any sort of geometry for the iris or pupil. I used it as a an opportunity to take some neat artistic liberties and point two different red-ish area-light disks at the eyes -- and linking their light to each eye mesh exclusively.
Overall, after adding some finishing touches with Blender’s Compositor pipeline, I really like the way this turned out.
Thanks, Omar! And I feel you... this kind of format is such a lovely culmination of lighting experimentation and learning ✨
New Shot: My take on this amazing Zelda poster -- “Link and the Sword of Courage: Twilight Showdown” by PixelatedPlayground on Etsy.
From highly-targeted rim lighting to super-moody fill lighting, from volumetric fog to procedural floating embers, this was a really neat exercise in capturing the colorful, dynamic spirit of a broader image and dialing it in to a single head bust -- and then finishing it off in the Blender Compositor with some subtle vignetting ✨
