We’ll start off in Cycles and talk about all the main properties of light objects and environment lights and how to tweak them to get the results you want. Along the way, you’ll learn important concepts about path tracing and how light works in general, which will help you create any lighting effect on your own.
From there we’ll switch over to Eevee and demystify what’s going on with shadows, environments, and bounce lighting during rasterization, so you can get as close to Cycles quality as possible without the extra headache.
Lastly, we’ll look at how to take your lighting from good to great by talking about best practices and a few tricks that can instantly transform a render from “ok but kinda boring” to jumping right out of the screen.
We won't be jumping into compositing, or doing any mesh modeling on this one, our main focus is lighting in blender. Whether you’re brand new to Blender or a pro that just needs a refresher to up your lighting game, I made this course for you. Head over to the first lesson to get started!
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Just finished this course and this is another one that stands the test of time (and the speed of Blender's devs team lol). I took the class with Blender 4.1 alpha and while there were a few features that didn't translate step by step, the concepts and principles are not tied to the tool (honestly the biggest value of CG Cookie as a whole).
I feel like while I come from a filmmaking background with real word lights, shadowboxes, and studios, I still learned a lot. In the CG world (in which I'm just getting started), this course was invaluable and I have no doubt I'll come back to it time and time again.
Yes, there are a few new features (like light linking) that weren't covered in the lessons, but if you make sure you read all comments/questions under the lessons you should have no issues translating it all to the newest versions.
10/10 recommended!
Halfway through this course and I already feel what I always feel when checking a fundamentals cookie course: how tf did I think I already knew the basics from playing around with this in Blender?
Very thorough course, watch slowly :)
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Now completed. 10/10