How to Add Lighting in Blender? Easy Blender 3D Tutorial

Hey Guys, In this tutorial, I will be discussing Lighting and its effect on Blender modeling.

To sum up, in general terms, these are a few of the ways that you may have seen how to light a scene:

Chapter 5: Blender Lighting

Check out Other Chapters:
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Blender: Introduction
Chapter 2: Things to Avoid When Starting Out
Chapter 3: 3D Blender Step-By-Step Tutorial: How to Create a Simple Vase in Blender?
Chapter 4: Understanding Spline Modeling in Blender

1. World Properties:

The red box marks the menu needed to access World Properties.

World properties affect lighting across the entire “world” and aren’t targeting a specific area. By changing the Color and Strength properties, you can essentially change the light color and brightness of the lighting of the entire 3d scene you are working in.

The “Volume” tab also creates lighting. By choosing Volume Scatter (pressing the green dot next to Volume), you can create a type of foggy effect, which if used correctly, can brighten up a scene with luminescent fog.

Remember, this is a beginner teaching other beginners so don’t expect any technical jargon on why these things light up the scene the way they do. I’m merely presenting the guidelines for you all.

2. HDRIs: High Dynamic Range Imaging

Think of HDRIs as high-resolution images of backgrounds that generate lighting to the entire 3d world in a way that matches the image. If we have a forest HDRI for example, we would expect lighting similar to that of a forest (with patches of light coming through the trees and dimmer lighting in other areas where the trees block out the sunlight). There are two ways to access HDRIs (see below).

The first is by accessing the menu to the right of the “Viewport Shading” tab on the top right of the viewport. By turning off Scene Lights and Scene World, and turning up the “World Opacity” to the max, you can the HDRI image which generates the lighting information to the scene as well as see the changes to the lighting itself by clicking each of the orbs with images of backgrounds contained within it.

The second method of accessing HDRI is in “World Properties” again, but this time changing the “Color” to “Environment Texture” and choosing an HDRI file. To access this, click the yellow dot next to “Color”.

3. Light Object: Point Light

Most people get the default “Point” light in every Blender file that they start with. This is your standard lightbulb-esque light which can be turned up and down and affects the area around it in a spherical manner. It’s basically a circular light that emits lights in all directions. To access this light, you can just generate a new Object with Shift + A and select Light >> Point. The properties here include:

• Color: This affects the color of the light.
• Power: This affects how strong/bright the light is.
• Diffuse: This affects how scattered the light is, creating softer shadows (and also has an effect of darkening the overall lighting when lowered).
• Specular: Affects the brightness of the light that reflects off of surfaces.
• Volume: Affects the brightness of the light within the volumetrics of the light. It’s a bit tricky. Think of using World properties to set up the foggy lighting effect I mentioned earlier. By increasing the volume for the point light in this “fog”, you are creating a stronger fog lighting near the point light then towards the surrounding area. See pictures below for examples.

The left has the volume turned up to max, and the right does not. Both have lighting, but the left has more “volume” of light.

• Radius: Radius affects how far the light reaches (think of an expanding sphere with the light represented by the sphere). The higher it is, the more likely it is that shadows will begin to soften (similar to diffuse but it doesn’t get darker in the process).
• Shadow: Kind of self explanatory.
• Contact Shadows: Shadows on the object itself that help highlight the object better. Think of a face with a light shining on it. The contact shadows will be the shadows that show up on the inside of a human ear, between the eyes and eyebrows, close to the nose, etc., which help highlight the ear, eyes, nose, etc.

4. Light Object: Sun

Sun has similar properties to point except that it affects the entire scene, rather than just the area around the light. Think of the actual sun and how it lights things.

5. Light Object: Spot

Spot creates a spotlight. The properties are similar to the others but there is a “Spot Shape” Tab that allows you to change the size of the spotlight and the softness of the shadows around the spotlight (AKA how well the edges of the spotlight blend together with the shadow).

6. Light Object: Area

Similar to a point light, an area light is a light that produces light from a surface but does not emit light in all directions the way a point light does. You can choose what kind of shape the area light will generate from, which include square, rectangle, disk, ellipse. You can also change the size of the object generating light by using Size X and Size Y (affecting the x and y-axis of the object).

7. Emission Lighting:

Without going into the technical details, you can turn an object into a light source by first turning on the bloom effect in Render Properties.

Without bloom, you will not see the lights emitted through the emission shader on an object. After turning on Bloom, click the object and go to the materials tab at the bottom right, add a new material by clicking the “+   New” icon and scroll down until see “Surface” >> Emission. Change the color to whatever color you want the light source to be and then turn up the emission strength. This is only one way to turn up the emission and there are other methods, which we will not cover here.  

This is just a general outline of the many ways you can add lighting to your scene. You can find more online tutorials on each of these methods in order to better refine the lighting that you use for a particular scene. Have fun blending!

Check out other Blender Related Articles:

• 3D Blender Step-By-Step Tutorial: How to Create a Simple Vase in Blender?
• Easy Blender 3D Tutorial: Understanding Spline Modeling in Blender
• Getting Started with Blender: Introduction | Easy Tutorials For Beginners
• Easy Blender Tutorials: Things to Avoid when Starting out as a Beginner
• How to Add Lighting in Blender? Easy Blender 3D Tutorial
• How to Add Lighting in Blender Part 2?