Blender 3D: Portrait Lighting Masterclass

1. Introduction: My name is Harry and I'm a professional 3D Artist with over a decade of experience. I've been making Blender beginner tutorials on Skillshare for a while now. In this class, we'll be mastering portrait lighting in Blender. The purpose of this class is to show you how to replicate the dynamic and moody portrait lighting you've seen in professional photography, while also giving you the knowledge to create your own unique lighting schemes. In this class, you can expect to learn the common light types. We'll explore the five main light types in Blender while also learning about their key parameters and how they affect our final image. Lighting terminology. During our five unique exercises, we'll discuss common lighting terms such as main, fill, and rim lighting. We'll focus on critical thinking and analysis. We'll analyze all five reference images to get an understanding of how each lighting scheme was created. This includes aspects like what type of light was used, where the light is within the scene, what color the light is, and more. Every lesson ends with recreating the reference. We'll take all that we've learned throughout our analysis to recreate the reference photo lighting as closely as possible using the pre-made starter file provided in the project resources. When you're done, you'll have all the skills you need to recreate reference lighting, as well as design your own. For our class project, you'll be tasked with finding your own unique reference image and then recreating the lighting as closely as possible. When you're done, share your reference photo as well as your re-creation to the project gallery. I personally review every project uploaded to the gallery and give you feedback on your render. This class is meant for intermediates, but that doesn't mean that you'll be hopelessly lost if you're a beginner. However, I will be moving through these lessons with the assumption that you're somewhat familiar with Blender already. If you're just getting into Blender, I'd highly recommend you look at my teacher profile for a beginner class of mine. These beginner classes will give you the best starting experience if you're brand new to Blender. I hope you'll join me on this journey through the fascinating world of portrait lighting in Blender. I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Light Types: In this lesson, we'll be going through all five main light types in Blender. We'll also explaining their key parameters. Let's begin. To start with, make sure you have the portal lighting_Start File Open. You can find it in the project resources for this class. I have this file preconfigured with all of the view ports you'll need for this class, as well as the render settings we'll be using. We won't really be discussing the render settings. But please note that this class is made specifically for the Cycles Render Engine and maybe difficult to follow if you want to use the Eevee render engine. The general concepts we talk about will transfer to Eevee. However, the render settings will differ significantly and will require some work around us to achieve a similar result. If you're fine with the Cycles Render Engine, you don't have anything to worry about. The file is already set up for you. Lastly, before we start, set your middle viewport to the rendered viewport mode. We can do that by going up here to the top center and clicking on this button here to switch it to the rendered viewport. Now, in this case you'll see black and that's fine. That's because we don't have any lights in the scene yet. If for some reason you don't see this button over here on the center viewport, you can click and hold your middle mouse button, the mouse wheel in on this top toolbar and you can pan it left and right. These buttons are all the way to the right side of this toolbar. This rendered viewport mode will ensure that we can actually see the rendered results of the lights we will be discussing. Now let's begin going through each type of light, as well as their key parameters. The most basic form of lighting is the ambient lighting produced by the World Properties tab. We can find that over here on the right side. It's this little red globe icon on this tab here. Once you click this, you'll see the surface category and then you'll see a color, as well as the strength. Right now I have our set to black, which means there is no lighting being produced. But the actual default for this value would be and normally it's about a middle gray. By setting this ambient light back to this medium gray that it was at, you can see in the central viewport here, we now have a soft ambient from all directions. Almost shadow lists, but not entirely gray light being produced across the entire scene. You can change the color of this light to pretty much anything you'd like. It will add that color into the ambient color for the light. The reason setting this to black and removing all of the ambient light is so important, is because we want to have full control over the lighting and the shadows and are seen. When we rely on this ambient lighting, we give up some of the control by essentially putting a cap on how dark areas of our scene can be. If you leave this at the default gray value that Blender starts with, you're seeing we will have this washed out low contrast look, but it's very difficult to overcome without turning this off. As an important note, this ambient light texture is also where you would set up an HDRI light as well. We won't be setting up HDRI lighting in this class as it differs pretty significantly from the other types of lighting. If you're unaware of what HDRI lighting is, it's lighting that's produced by importing a high dynamic range image in HDRI into Blender. Then allowing it to source all of its lighting information from that image. It produces a very realistic results with accurate reflections. However, you also have very little control over the lighting in general. You can basically just make the lighting a bit brighter, a bit dimmer, or change the z rotation of that HDRI image. You need to find the perfect HDRI for your lighting situation for it to produce the results you'd like. We'll be focusing on light types that allow for much more detailed control in this class. For now, let's set this color back to black for the ambient light. We can move on to our next slide type. We can set that color back to black by just grabbing this little dot here on the top right and pulling it down to black. Over in our right viewport, let's zoom out a bit. We're going to add a point light, which is our first slate. We can hit shift into A, go down to light and then choose point. Now let's grab this light and move it up to the top right of our statue. We will notice as we move this up, we can start seeing the elimination. We also noticed that gets brighter as we move it closer to the statue and dimmer as we move it further away. I'm sure this effect is something you're familiar with in real life. If you move the light closer to an object, the light will appear brighter and the further away that light is, the dimmer it will be. So let's begin discussing the particular aspects of what a point light is. A point light you'll see here is basically just like a little orb here in our viewport and it's an omni-directional light, which means it casts light in all directions, up, down, left, right, basically in every direction you can see here. The directionless nature of this light makes it particularly easy to use because you only really need to find the correct position for the light. The rotation doesn't matter at all. We can adjust the parameters of this slide by going down to the Object Properties tab, which is this little green light bulb icon. We click this. Now we see the different settings for this light. The three main components of this light and many of the other ones we'll talk about in a few moments are color, power, and radius. The color is exactly what it sounds like. It changes the color of our light. We can do that by clicking on this color block here and then using this color wheel here to switch the color of the light. We can also use this value slider to change how bright that color is. We'll notice that it also changes the brightness of the light because a darker color will emit less light. We can also manually change the color by typing in the exact hue, saturation and value that we like. We could just type in 0.7 for this hue, one for the saturation, and then maybe 0.5 for the value. I'm going to set the light back to white by bringing the value back up to one, saturation down to zero, then in this case the hue doesn't matter, but also just drop that down to zero as well. With an understanding of the color, let's move on to power now. Power is essentially the brightness slider for the light. It works on a Watts unit scale. However, it isn't a typical watts you might know in your daily life. It's actually displaying the Radian power or visible watts of the light, rather than the typical electrical watts you're familiar with. That means if you type in 40 watts for your power, this isn't the typical 40 watt light bulb you're used to. Essentially what this means to us as artists is don't get hung up on the number you see in this power slider. Focus on how the numbers relate to each other and how they affect your scene. We are concerned with the final product of our lights and less so with their technical values. If you would like to work in a more technical way, there are charts online that you can find that'll show you the exact Radian power conversion for Blender. If you wanted to make like an 800 lumen light bulb, you can find what the power exactly should be. That way it's accurate within your scene. Going with the more technical route, however, will result in you needing to use the exposure values to make a bright enough image. Otherwise, everything will be really dark. The last thing we'll talk about for this light, is the radius parameter. This dictates how large the light source is in your scene. By default, you won't actually see your light source even if it's in view of your camera. If we move this light down here directly in front of our statue, you can see here we don't actually see, say, glowing orb creating this light. You only see the light that is produced in your scene. Just because you don't see the light though, doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect on the scene. The larger your light source, the softer your shadows will be. So if we go down here to our radius slider, we make this much larger. You can see much softer this lighting is. There's less harsh shadows and it's more diffused across the scene. However, if we make it smaller, you'll see the lighting starts getting brighter and our shadows get more pronounced and sharper as well. We can take this down really small and we can see we get a really stylized, very hard edge shadow look now, and that's by making the radius tinier. With our larger light source, you'll have softer lighting and softer shadows. In basic terms, this is basically because the larger your light is, the less focus the beams emitting from it are. This is really useful if you want soft, pleasant lighting for a portrait. Conversely, the smaller your light source is, the harsher the light is and the sharper your shadows are. Harsh lighting and sharp shadows aren't necessarily a bad thing, but it's typically something you want to use with a purpose. One last thing you'll notice about the radius is it's directly tied to the brightness of your light. So the larger your light is, the dimmer the light is as well, which might seem a little bit odd. Typically, a larger light will be dimmer than a smaller light with the exact same power. You can visualize this as the power value needing to be spread thinner across a larger light, resulting in an overall dimmer output. Almost like applying a thin coat of paint across a large surface versus applying that same amount of paint across a much smaller surface, you get a much more solid coat of paint on the smaller surface because there's less area to cover. With this last parameter discussed, we're pretty much done with our point light. Now let's quickly explain a light we won't be using, but it's still worth knowing, the sunlight. You can convert this point light directly into a sunlight just by clicking this button here that says sun. You can see there's other ones over here and this works the exact same way for those as well. For now, we can just click the Sun button to convert this point light into a sunlight. The sunlight, like the rest of the lights we're going to discuss, is a directional light. That means we'll actually need to point the light at our object for it to receive the elimination. The easiest way to direct the light in Blender is to grab this little yellow dot and then drag it on top of the object you want it to point at. You'll notice that this little yellow dot actually sticks to the surface of the object that you're mallocing it over. You'll see it snaps to the surface back here. Then if I move it over top of the head, it will snap to the head then instead. The sunlight is a bit of a weird light overall, as it doesn't use the typical parameters we just went over with a point light. The color works the same, so I won't bother explaining that again. However, the strength and the power slider are a bit different. The strength slider on the sun is similar to the power slider on say the point light, except this is measured in watts per square meter rather than the radiant power that we were measuring before. As I mentioned before, we're not terribly concerned about the technical aspect of this value. But we will notice that this light will operate on a slightly different power scale. In general, it's a lot more sensitive, so the strength won't need to be as high as the power slider might get on the other lights. We can lower this down pretty low, and we'll notice that even a low value here still has a fair bit of illumination in our scene. Another interesting caveat of the sunlight is the brightness is not at all determined by how close it is to an object. If we move this light really close to this head here, basically sitting it directly on top of it, you'll notice the brightness of this light hasn't changed at all. It doesn't get any dimmer or brighter as we move it closer or further away. The only way to make this light brighter is to actually increase the strength. This is meant to simulate the sun being essentially an infinite distance from our objects. You'll also notice that the light doesn't actually originate from the little sun icon. It's just a visual guide. The light is coming from an infinite distance away at whatever angle we decide. If we move this past our statue, you'll see we're still getting illumination here on our statue even though the light is technically behind the statue. That's because this light is coming from an infinite distance all the way up here in the top right. The only thing we can really adjust here is just the angle of this light. The last parameter is the angle of the sun. This is actually pretty similar to the radius lighter on other lights. The higher the number, the softer the shadows, but also slightly dimmer the light is. With that last parameter explained, now let's convert this sunlight into a spotlight. Now I'm going to move this spotlight here up above our statue and then use this little yellow dot here to point it at the head. We'll notice the spotlight has many of the same parameters as the point light with a few additions. We'll notice that the spotlight has many of the same parameters as the point light did, except with a few additions. Let's start by increasing our power up to 200 so we can see it a little bit better in our scene. We can just type in 200 and then hit "Enter" for the power. The brightness of this value will depend on how close the spotlight is to your subject. If your light is really close, 200 might be too bright, or if it's really far away, 200 might be too dim. So either move your light to the correct position or adjust your value to match. Now let's discuss the main differences of the spotlight. The main difference is the illumination from a spotlight is cast in a directional cone. It starts at the light source and then fans out from there based on the beam shape. The cone is visualized by these orange lines here. We can change the size of this cone and how sharp the edges are by using these settings down here under beam shape. The spot size determines how wide this cone is. As we make this angle larger, you can see that cone grows and also the influence of this light spreads out further. We can now see it here on our background. However, if we make it smaller, it starts diminishing it on the background until it eventually it is gone entirely. Making the spot size larger won't change the brightness of the light. However, making it much smaller will make the light dimmer slightly. Now change your spot size and the angle of your light to cast some illumination here on your background. This will help explain the next setting. Now let's talk about the blend value. The blend of a spotlight effects how sharp the edges of your illumination are. If we change our blend value down to zero, the edges of our spotlight will be as harsh and as sharp as they possibly can be, given the distance the light is from the object. If we move it closer, you'll notice the edges gets sharper and sharper until it's eventually almost a completely solid line. Now if we move it back to the original position and we set our blend value all the way up to the max, which is one, we'll see that the edges of our spotlight are soft and as gridated as they possibly can be, given the distance it is from the object. If we again move this close to the background again, we'll see that the edges here remains softer than they were before. Ultimately, the distance the light is from the object matters the most, but this blend value here can help change how soft or how hard those edges are. You also notice that with a smaller spot size, the blend value actually will dim your light. We can see the brightness of the light here. The higher the blend value is, the more dim your light will eventually be, and that's because it's trying to make these edges softer and it's actually pulling the light inward to the middle of that cone, thus darkening the edges. If you already have a smaller spotlight, it's going to make the whole light dimmer as effect. One last setting that you can turn on is the show cone option down here, and that's just the checkbox. We turn this on. You can now get a little bit more of a clear visual as to how large this cone is. Now, it won't really show your blend value here, but it does show a pretty good representation of the spot size. I don't find this checkbox super useful, but if you're having trouble visualizing where the light cone is hitting on your viewport, this might be useful to you. For now I'm going to turn this off, and now we're ready to move to our last light, which is the area light. We can switch to the area light by just clicking the area button here at the top. Area lights and spotlights share a lot of similarities. They are both directional lights that emit light from a specific source in just one direction. The main difference between a spot and an area light however, is the shape of that light source. Area lights are flat shapes, such as a square, rectangle, or circle, the projector light from that surface rather than a sphere that projects it's light in a cone like a spotlight. In the real-world, these would be very similar to lights like a soft box, which is very commonly used in photography and videography. We can change the shape of this light by using this drop-down here. By default, lets set the square, but you also have the option for a rectangle, disk, and ellipse. You can also change the size of the shape using the size sliders below. The ellipse and the rectangle will have independent X and Y sizes that you can change. You can make it a little bit more stretched out in one direction. If you switch it to either the circle or rather the disk or the square, then you're locked in because it's making it a uniform size. Another easy way to adjust the size of your light source is by hovering over the shape here in the viewport and then just grabbing one of these little yellow handles and then dragging it from there. This is an easy way to quickly adjust the light if you're not concerned with making an exact size. Just like the radius parameters on other lights, the larger we make this light shape, the softer and more diffuse the light will be. The last parameter unique to the area light is the spread value located down here under the beam shape options. Spread is similar to spot size on the spotlight, however, there isn't a visual representation of this in the viewport unfortunately. As we lower the spread, the angle at which the light is emitted from this shape is lessened. This is pretty similar to lowering the spot size angle on the spotlight. The main difference is that it has an opposite effect on the area light in terms of brightness. As you lower the spread, you drastically increase the brightness of the area light and make the shadows much sharper. It's really uncommon to use a spread value of one on [inaudible] unless you're looking for a very specific look. In this class, we won't really go below about 60 for the spread value. There'll be usually pretty specific reasons as to why we need to lower it this far. With our last light type explained, you should now have a pretty solid understanding of how each light type works and what their unique properties are. In our next lesson, we'll be starting our first of five lighting exercises where we put this knowledge to the test. I'll see you there. 3. Reference 01: In this lesson, we'll be working through our first of five lighting exercises by focusing on a main light and color background light setup. Let's begin. The first thing we'll want to do is load our reference image in the leftmost viewport. I've turned this into an image editor viewport for you that will basically be just using it as a place to view our reference image. To load your reference image, simply drag and drop the reference image directly into this leftmost viewport. You can find all of these reference images in the project resources you downloaded with this file. If you'd prefer to use the interface to open this image rather than dragging and dropping it, you can do that up here. If you go to your top toolbar up here, click in your middle mouse button to pan it over. You can go to Image and then Open, and then you can choose the correct reference image. In this case, we'll be using reference 01. You can use your mouse wheel and the middle mouse button to zoom in and move this image back-and-forth so we can see the whole thing in the viewport. I'd make it roughly the same size as the camera view in the middle viewport. Basically, this little gray box is the bounds of our camera. I'm going to make my image about that same size. Just like the first lesson, make sure that this middle viewport here is set to the rendered viewport mode. Again, you can use your middle mouse button here to pan this view at the top, so you can see this button and then choose the right-most button. Now, let's begin analyzing the lighting on this image. We have a better understanding of how they achieved this look. We'll be doing this by looking at four main things. The light position, the light brightness, the light size, and the light color. After we determine these four things, we can begin working through our lighting setup one light at a time. Let's start with the main light, also known as the key light. This is the brightest and most dominant lighting in our scene, which is probably I like to call it the main light. We can tell right away that the most dominant light in this scene is the light on the left side of his face. It's essentially the only light illuminating him. We can tell that this light to the left side of the image due to the direction of the shadows. The shadows are primarily on the right side of his face, which is in complete darkness. Now, let's determine the height and the position of this light. To do this, we're going to need to look at where the light is hitting him and where the shadows fall on his right side. Down here on his hand, we can see the light is illuminating the top of his fingers and most of the backside of his palm. The shadows don't start until his thumb starts bending towards his body, thus moving out of the beam of light. We can also see the shadow of his hand cast onto his shirt. The shadows to the right of his hand and appears to be casting the shape of his hand lower than it actually is. With these clues, we can assume the light is to the left and slightly in front of him and is higher than his head. The reason we can make these conclusions is due to the light hitting the top of his fingers, which means it's above them. The light is hitting the back of his palm, which means it's in front of it, and the light doesn't hit his hand as it turns towards him, which means the light is pretty far to his left and not very far forward. Let's double-check this hypothesis on another part of his body to make sure it holds up. The light hits the top of his head, which means it's higher than it. The light illuminates more than just the left side of his face, which means it's slightly in front of him, and the light quickly stops as the surface of his head goes backwards, which means the light isn't very far in front of him. Our conclusions hold up on another part of the image, so we can have some confidence that we're right about its position. Let's begin placing our first light in the scene collection over here on the right, make sure this little white folder is clicked and highlighted next to reference 01 folder. This will make sure that all of our lights go directly into the reference 01 folder. If you don't see either of these sections here, just click this little arrow here to open up this collection so you can see the rest of the collections inside of it. Same thing goes down here for the models. Over on our right viewport, we can zoom out now. We're going to add an area light. We can shift into A, go to light, and then we can make an area light. We're using an area light due to the softness of the shadows and the evenness of the light that we see in the photo. This could easily be done with a spotlight as well. However, I think the area light will be a bit easier in this case. Let's start by adjusting some of the initial parameters of this light. We can do that by going down here to the Object data properties tab, this little green light bulb. We're going to start by just setting the power of this light to 150, so we have a bright light to start with, and then we can leave our size here set to one meter. We'll also be using the default square shape for this light. Now, let's begin moving this light. We're going to start by moving it up above their head, then we're going to move it off to the left side. We also need to angle it towards the head of the statue. We can do that just by clicking on this little yellow icon down here to angle it towards the statue. We can just choose a location anywhere here on the head. The lighting is already looking pretty similar to our reference photo. However, we'll notice that we're missing this light here on the cheek in the front and that's because we haven't actually moved our light forward at all. Let's move our light forward in this y-direction. We can see as we move it forward slightly, we start seeing this elimination here on the cheek, just like the reference photo. Now that we have the general placement of the light sorted, we can start making some fine adjustments to the light position to better match the shadows of this image. I think right now I actually got lucky and pretty much placed it almost exactly where it needed to be. But the area is where I'm looking at to get an idea of whether or not this light is in the right spot or the shadows coming off the nose here. We can see our shadows here match very similarly. Both coming off at that 45-degree angle and the nose is casting a shadow downward onto the lips and the chin. We can also look at the shadows cast onto the neck by the head itself. We could see here that our shadows here resemble pretty much what the reference image has. Now, don't get caught up on all of the exact specifics of this exact reference image versus ours because obviously, the face shapes are different, two totally different people, so the light is going to hit them differently. Also, the angle of the head isn't an exact match so there will be some slight differences. But overall, we can look at this image and then look at ours and say that they are really close. If you're curious of the exact position of my light, if I hit the N key over here on my right side and then switch to my Item tab, you can see here these are the exact positions that I have for the location of my light, as well as its rotation. If you'd like to type in these values exactly, go ahead or type in something close. You can pause the video here to see those values. I can now hit N, tie the side menu because I won't need it. Our light angle now looks correct. However, we'll notice that the light is hitting the background pretty heavily. Our goal is to match the dark background or the reference, so we'll need to adjust the spread value to accomplish this. If we go down here to the beam shape and change our spread value down to 90, hopefully, that's enough to limit the spread here onto the background while still providing a nice elimination on the face. Depending on the exact position of your light, if you didn't follow along exactly with mine, then you might need to adjust your spread value to make sure that it doesn't show up say, down here at the bottom where I'm getting a little bit of light, if I have it set to 93. In my case, it looks like 90 or possibly even slightly below, is what we're looking for. By lowering this value, we did make our light brighter but that's okay because this is a relatively bright light over here on this reference photo. Our shadows got a little bit sharper but again, that's also okay because this has a relatively sharp shadows as well. We won't need to change the color of our light here and blender because on our reference photo, this is also using a white light. The only other light to create is the background light. We can mimic this dark halo behind the subject in the photo reference. Over here on our right viewport, we're going to create a point light. We can hit Shift and day, go to light, and then choose point. We're going to lower the power of this light down to five watts. Let's make it a bit dimmer because this is a relatively dim background. We're going to leave our radius here at 0.25. Now, let's begin moving this light. We're going to move it behind the statue and then up behind its head. Now, in this case, we're going to need to move it actually slightly above its head. We can see over here on our camera angle, our camera is slightly lower than the statue. In order to mimic this look of being directly behind the head, it will actually be slightly above it. We can move it here and we don't need to move it left or right at all, just up and down on the z-axis is fine. Then for our distance in the y direction, if I hit my N key to bring up my side menu, I'm going to want this relatively close to the background itself, so that this five-watt power is brighter on the background. I'm going to set it to 2.8 and then hit Enter. It's much closer to the background, which means it'll be a much brighter illumination on the background as well. It also means that this light now is pretty much not casting any light on the back of our statue, which is what we want. If the light moved closer to the background, we might need to move this up a little bit. I'm going to center it right about where her eyebrow is. We have the illumination on our background pretty similar to the amount of illumination on the back of the reference image. However, the colors aren't quite right. Let's change the color of our light to match this pale blue, purple color on the reference image. We can do that by going over here to our color block. Then click on here. This is primarily a process of trial and error to find the perfect color. But I found that these values match the color relatively well. We can go to the hue, I can type in 0.71, hit Enter. Then for the saturation, type in 0.42, and then hit Enter. If you'd like to make any adjustments to this color, feel free to. You can adjust the saturation if you think it's too saturated or you can change the color entirely if you just prefer to see a different color behind our statue but the values that I gave you here are relatively close. We can set these back. With that last slide placed, I think we've done a pretty good job of matching the look and feel of this reference photo. There are obviously some differences between them if you look at them side-by-side like this but that's inevitable due to having a different face to light. Each face shape is unique and will affect the placement of your shadows on your model accordingly. We also need to take into account that our statue has essentially no skin tone due to the neutral gray material we have applied. We lose the complexity of real skin colors, reflectivity, and subsurface scattering due to this simplified example. In the next lesson, we'll be tackling a lighting exercise which revolves around focus-up lighting. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 4. Reference 02: In this lesson, we'll be tackling a lighting exercise which revolves around focused up lighting. Let's begin. We'll start just like the last exercise, by loading our reference image. This time you can load Reference 02. I'm going to click and drag this directly into this left viewport. Let's zoom out so I can see the whole image. You'll notice the angle and head position of this reference photo is pretty different than the last one. We won't be adjusting our camera angle, but I did make a modified version of our statue to better match this reference's head position. Under the models collection over here on the right side, you can uncheck Bust Left 01, to turn that off, and then you can turn on, Bust Right 02 and 04 by checking on this little checkbox here. I made a unique bust for each reference to help us match the lighting better. I also renamed them, so it's obvious which reference they match. In this case, this bust would be used for Reference 2 and also Reference 4. Lastly, go up to your lights and uncheck Reference 01, to turn those lights off, and then turn on Reference 02, which is currently empty, and then click this little white folder icon here to make the Reference 02 the default folder so any lights we create will go directly into this folder. Now, let's jump right into evaluating this reference image. Our first job is to figure out the position of this main light. In this case, it's pretty obvious our light is from below the face, and not very far forward at all. We know this due to the shadows on the top of the nose and the light hitting the bottom of the nose. Over in our right viewport, let's create a new light. We'll hit Shift and A, go to "Light", then we're going to make a point light. We'll increase the power a little bit here, we'll set it to 15, for the power. Then our radius, we're going to make it a bit smaller, we'll set that to 0.1 for the radius. We're going with a relatively low power because the light on our reference image is pretty dim. We've also used the small radius to match the sharp shadows and concentrated lights that we're seeing in this photo. Let's figure out the position for our light. We know it's slightly in front of, and below our face, so let's move the light there first. We can do that by moving it on the z and the y-axis. We're going to move it up here, roughly where the break in this statue platform is. When placing our light, we should be mainly paying attention to the shadow on the top of the nose, as it's our best indicator of the light's position. In this case, our light is pretty close right now but I'm going to move it forward a little bit on the y-axis. Then I'm going to move it up slightly. If you'd like to know the exact positions I'll be using for this light, we can hit the N key to bring up our side menu, and then I'm going to type in negative 0.25, so it's a little bit closer, and then one for the Z height, to make it a little bit taller. I can now hide the side menu. The last thing we need to do with this light is move it very slightly to the right side of the statue. We want the shadows being cast by this nose to be perfectly parallel with the nose, just like it is here in the reference photo. That requires us shifting this in the x-direction to the right, very slightly, so it's more in line with the point of the nose here. I'm going to move mine here, and I'm paying attention to the shadows here on the center. As I move it, I can see the shadows shifting left and right. I'm going to move it so that it pretty much centers at right in the middle, so right about there. This was a very small movement, in this case, about 0.15. Again, it's really subtle, but it just helps make this look a little bit more like the reference. With our main light placed, we're about 90% done already. Let's add one last point light to our scene to serve as a fill light. Over here, on our right viewport, we can hit Shift and A, go to "Light", and then we're going to add another point light. This light is going to be very dim and large, so it has really soft shadows. Let's start by switching our power all the way down to one, and then we're going to leave our radius here set to 0.25 meters, so it's a bit bigger than the main light was. A fill light is a secondary light to the main light and it's meant to fill in the shadows of our scene. It is typically much dimmer than the main light, and it's only there to support the main light. Let's move this light well above the head, roughly about here. We're just going to move this up in just the z and the y-axis. We're going to place it right around here. The position of this light is a lot less important than the main light because this is casting hardly any shadows in the scene, it's just there to illuminate these pure black shadows. We can see if we turn this light off by clicking this little icon here, the little eyeball to hide it, we can see how much darker these shadows are in our scene. When we turn it on, and helps fill those shadows in, and mimics this very slight illumination we're seeing within the shadows on the reference image. With the fill light added, we're done replicating the light setup of this reference photo. Just like the last reference, we'll notice some difference in our render versus the photo due to differences in our model. Most notable, our model has sharper features that cast more shadows than the woman in the reference photo. The overall intent of our lighting matches the look and feel of the reference photo though. In the next lesson, we'll continue our journey through the third lighting exercise that focuses on rim lighting and silhouettes. I'll see you there. 5. Reference 03: In this lesson, we'll continue our journey through the third lighting exercise that focuses on rim lighting and silhouettes. Let's begin. As usual, let's get our file prepared for the exercise. We'll be using Reference 03 for this exercise. We can just click and drag this into our left viewport. Now let's zoom in here on this image. There is a lot of dead space up here in the top, so I'm going to zoom mine in a little bit closer so I don't need to see the full image. Right about there is good. I'm going to make my head about the same size as my actual model. Over here in our scene collection, we can turn off Reference 02 for the lights, turn on Reference 03, click the little white folder icon to make that the default folder, and then go down here to the models. Turn off the right 02 and 04 busts, and instead turn on the profile 03 bust. Now let's start analyzing the reference image. The first thing we'll notice is that the light comes almost exclusively from behind the model. It also doesn't seem to have a clear left or right bias. It's just as bright on the right side as it is over here on the left side. The shadow side of the head that faces the camera is almost entirely in shadow and shows very little detail aside from these headphones. The background also has a soft dark blue gradient from the bottom up to the top. We can conclude from this reference image that we basically have two perfectly balanced main lights. We have a main light over here on the left side and then also basically a duplicate of that light over here on the right side. Let's start with the first main light. We can go over here to our right-viewport. I can hit "Shift" and "A" to add a new light. We're going to add an area light. The only thing we're going to change is setting the power to 25 and then hit "Enter". A power of 25 watts should match the intensity of the lights from the photo reference, and the one meter size should make sure our shadows are pretty soft as well. Let's start by rotating this light negative 90 on the x-axis so that it faces the backside of our statue. We can do that simply by hitting "R", then "X" to bind it to the x-axis, and then type in negative 90, and then Enter. We can also rotate this slide about 25 degrees on the z-axis so that it's facing towards the right side of our frame. Again, we can do that easily just by hitting "R" to start rotating, then "Z" to bind it to the z-axis, and type in 25, and then hit "Enter". With the rotation correct, let's start moving it behind our statue. We can first move it up and to the left. Now we need to move it behind the statue so that all the light pretty much focus here on the backside of it. Let's move it back here. We want to achieve the strong high lighting we're seeing here on the front side of the face, while still making sure that the rest of the head stays pretty much entirely in shadow. You want to pay attention to the areas like the ridge of the nose as well as this closest cheek. I'm going to slide my light just back a little bit, see how that affects the light. I think about here is okay. I'm seeing about the same amount of illumination here on our cheek. Again, the face shape is a bit different, so we're getting a little bit more elimination on ours than theirs. We might be able to fix that by moving it a little bit closer to the statue in just the x-direction, so around here. I'm pretty happy with that. Then the ridge of our nose here, we're getting this harsh high light here right along the ridge of the nose, which looks pretty accurate for the reference. One key difference I'm noticing here though, is the bottom of his chin doesn't match the bottom of ours. We're getting quite a bit of light on the bottom of our chin. We're also not getting very much light on the top of the head, unlike the reference. That means our light is a little bit too low. I'm going to lift my light up. I'm starting to see approximately the same amount of high lighting on the top and I'm also getting a lot less light here on the bottom of the chin. Let's make sure that we can have any improvement made by moving it backwards on the z-axis. We can see here as we move it further behind the statue, we are lessening the amount of light that's peeking through and hitting the shadow area, which in this case actually helps. Let's move our light back a little bit further. Right around here, it looks pretty good. We can see here the lighting on the cheek is pretty similar to our reference. If you'd like to match your light position to mine, the values I'm using are here. The one thing I will change though, is I'm actually going to manually type in a little bit nicer of a number here for the X value. Instead of 0.53 and a bunch of numbers, I'm just going to make this 0.54 and then hit "Enter". This will be important in a moment. Otherwise, the rest of these values you can just make relatively close to mine. Now with our first slate placed, we're now going to make the duplicate. We're just going to go over here on the right side. To make our duplicate, just make sure you have your light selected. Hit "Shift" and "D" to start duplicating, and then you can hit the "X" button to bind it just to the x-axis. That way it doesn't move all over the place, it's only going to move to left or right. Just move it over here, some arbitrary position to the right side. The first thing we want to do is change the Z rotation to the negative version of what it currently is. That way it's facing exactly the opposite direction that the first light was. In this case, we can just type in a negative symbol in front of the 25 and that'll rotate it exactly opposite of the other side. Then the last thing we need to change is, if we select our original light here, we can see that I made the X value a nice number here. I did negative 0.54. On the right side, I'm going to select this light and instead of negative 0.54, I'm going to type in just 0.54. That way it's exactly the same distance on the right side as the left light was to the left side. I'm making them essentially mirror each other. We can see now here on our camera that our lighting here matches pretty well to the reference photo. To the difference in our hair shape here, the backside of the head is a little bit different and also our model isn't wearing a big puffy jacket with a hood. We're actually seeing the backside of our neck, but otherwise, the overall intent of this lighting is carried over to our image. With the main lights done, now let's work on the background light. We'll start by going over to our right viewport, hitting "Shift" and "A" and then adding a new point light. Let's start out by making this light a little bit brighter. We're going to set this to 18 watts for the power and we can leave the radius at 0.25. Setting the power to 18 watts by keeping it pretty far from the background will make sure that this light remains pretty dim. It'll also produce somewhat soft shadows as it moves up the background plane. Now we can move this light basically directly behind this bust statue base. We're just going to move it right pretty much down here at the bottom of the floor. I would just move it until it's not clipping into the floor or the base of the statue. We can see by placing our light here that we're getting slightly brighter lighting on the background here at the very bottom of the frame, and then as it moves up, it gets slightly darker, so it gives it a subtle gradient. The position for this light here isn't too strict. Basically, it does make sure it's down here near the bottom of the base of the statue. Lastly, let's change the colors so that it matches this dark blue we see in the reference photo. Much like the first exercise we did, finding the correct color for the background would normally be a bit of a trial and error, but if you'd like to follow along with me, I found that these values work pretty well to match the color. For our hue, we can type in 0.6 and then hit "Enter", and then the saturation, 0.65 and hit "Enter". We now have a nice dark blue background that does a pretty good job of mimicking the photo reference. With the background light finished, we've completed the final look for this exercise. I think this light setup looks great and has a really dark and moody feel to it. The reference photo uses a fourth light in their scene, set off to the front right side to specifically highlight these headphones. However, that light would serve no purpose in our statue example as we don't have headphones on, so we won't bother with it. In our next lesson, we're going to be working on our first of two exercises focusing on colorful accent lighting. I'll see you there. 6. Reference 04: In this lesson, we'll be working on our first of two exercises focusing on colorful accent lighting. Let's begin. As usual let's get our file setup for the exercise. We'll be using Reference 04 for this exercise. So we can grab this image and then just drag it over here on the left. We can now zoom out a little bit on this image and then move it down so it roughly matches the head height of our actual camera. Somewhere around here is probably fine. Now let's go over to our collections and turn off Reference 03 for the lights, turn on Reference 04, click the little white folder icon and then turn off Bust-Profile-03, and then turn back on Bust-Right-02 and 04 in this case. With the setup done, let's start analyzing our reference image. This will be our most complicated lighting setup yet. There's actually two lights present in this reference photo. But due to the significantly different setup of our scene versus the reference photo, we need to use four lights instead to get the same look. The first thing we'll notice is the vibrant red accent light in our reference photo. Let's start with that. The color of this light is obviously no mystery as it's the most dominant thing about it. We can also tell that this light is to the right of our camera frame. We know this due to the harsh red lighting on the right side of the face. We also know that this light is actually below his face as well. We can tell this due to the shadows on the wall behind him. The shadows go up on the wall from where the model is at, meaning that the light must be lower than the person casting these shadows. Now that we have a rough idea of where this red accent light is, let's try to place it in our scene. On our right viewport, let's make a brand new area light, "Shift" "A", Light and then Area light. Go down here to your object properties tab this little green light bulb icon. Now let's increase the power for this light up to 100 watts. The red light and the reference photo is pretty bright. So we're going to start with 100 watts to reflect that. We'll also notice that it has relatively sharp shadows. So let's decrease the size of our light to mimic that. We can set this down to 0.5 meters. Before we change the color of this light, let's quickly move it above the statue just so we can get an idea of what the color looks like. Now we can go over here to change our color. We're going to set the saturation all the way up to 100%. We can see here the default value of zero for the hue is pure red. I find this 100% pure red value to be a little bit off-putting, so I usually include just a tiny bit of orange in this light. For your hue if you type in 0.001 and then hit "Enter", you'll notice your light takes on just a very small level of orange in it. I think this is a little bit more pleasing of a red. The lighting over all fills a little bit less flat when there's that tiny bit of an orange highlight. Now that the light parameters are set up, let's position the light in the scene. As we discussed a moment ago, we want this light to be on the lower right side of our model's face. Let's start over here on the right viewport. We'll start by moving it roughly about where the chin level is, so just below the chin. Now let's rotate it towards our model. We can do that just by quickly hitting "R". Now it matters that I'm actually looking at it from the front view here. Otherwise, you might want to bind it to the y-axis as you're rotating it. Now let's move this slightly a little bit in front of the head. Then we're actually going to be rotating it past the head, so we're going to rotate it so it's pointing more to the left over here. I can do that just by hitting "R" and then "Z" and then rotating it. Now let's start sliding this light around to finetune the adjustment of where this light actually lands. We need to pay attention to areas like the chin and the forehead to make sure that we have about half of them illuminated while the rest of the face remains in darkness. So let's start sliding this light around and I'm just going to do it on the x and the y-axis, so I won't be moving it up or down at all. I need to move my light a little bit backwards and I might need to also move it out further away from the model in the x-direction. I'm basically just sliding this around and paying attention to the reference as I'm moving this. It's almost there. I might need to just slide it backwards just a little bit, so right about here. Now I have pretty much half of my chain illuminated as well as half the forehead. I also have almost no red light at all on the left side of his face. If you'd like to follow along with the rough position of my light, these are the settings here that I'm currently using. Now there's still one last thing we need to change, and that's the beam shape and the spread value down here. Let's start by lowering this down to about 60. This is probably the lowest we'll take it. I'm going to type in 60 and then hit "Enter". By lowering the spread value, it improved our image in a few different ways. First, it increased the brightness of this light by making the intensity of the red a bit more. It made our shadows a bit more sharp like the reference image and it also removed all of the red light off the background here. With our red light placed, let's focus on the bright white light filling the rest of the scene. We can tell by the shadows on the bottom of his arm that this white light is above him. We can also tell by the reflections on his face that this light is slightly to the right side of the image. We know this because the left side of his face is receiving very little lighting or reflections. Over on our right viewport, let's make a new area light, "Shift" "A", Light and then Area light. We're going to be setting the power of this light pretty low. We're going to set it down to three watts. We'll be keeping the power pretty low in this light because the small size and low spread values will drastically increase its brightness. Now let's change the shape to rectangle instead of square. We'll be using a rectangle to better focus the light on only the areas that we want. Now let's change the size of this rectangle. We're going to set the size for the x down to 0.13 meters and then the y, we'll set that to 0.3 meters. Before we change the spread value, let's get the light in a better position so we know how low make this value. As we found out earlier, this light is slightly to the right of the model and above his head. So let's start by lifting the light up. We're going to lift it up to maybe right around where the hairline starts. Now let's move it in front of the model. We also need to move it off to the right side. Right around here is probably fine. We can finetune it later. Now let's zoom in on the light so we can see it a little bit better. Then we're going to rotate it on the x-axis. So we can just hit "R" "X" and then rotate it. We're rotating it a little bit more towards the face. It doesn't need to be completely vertical. We want to have a little bit of a rotation to it, it's maybe a little bit further. Now let's rotate it towards the left side so it's not facing past the model. We can do "R" and then "Z", we're going to rotate it over here just to the left side of the face. Now the key to this lighting setup is keeping these red and white lights from overlapping too much. To do this, we're going to need to lower the spread value pretty significantly. Let's start with a really low value here. We're going to type in 35 degrees, and then hit "Enter". We can see right away the light covers less of the scene and it's also significantly brighter. Now our job now is to move this light to avoid the overlapping of the red and the white light on the face. Let's start moving this light around to see where it needs to be to make that happen. We need to pay attention to the areas like the left cheek and the shadow cast by the nose when placing your light. Now let's start finetuning the placement. I'm going to start by sliding it a little bit to the left here because there's too much overlap between the white and the red. We'll start sliding it left and we can see as we slide it further and further left, that becomes less and less overlap and that's mainly thanks to this low spread value that we gave it. So we're making this light very focused. So it's really very touchy in terms of its movement as to where the light hits the model. We can see here after moving the light slightly to the left to avoid the overlap, we now have a nice crispy break between the white light on the left side and then the red light on the right side. If you've been following along exactly with my numbers, you can see up here, this is where the x value is now. We can see now that we have the bulk of the light setup created. However, there are still two more lights to add. We're going to add a very subtle fill light to the left side that fills in these really dark shadows that we've created. In the reference photo, the model's left cheek is in shadow, but it's not completely in darkness. We're still able to see the details like the beard and the jaw line. Let's add a new light over here in our right viewport, "Shift" "A", Light and we're going to create an Area light. The only thing we're going to change on this area light is just setting the power down to two watts. So it's going to be really dim. We're only looking for a subtle fill light to keep these shadows from being too dark. Now let's move this light over to the far left side of the model and then we can rotate it towards the head by hitting "R" "Y" and then negative 90, then hit "Enter". We can see now on the left side of our model that we've removed pretty much all of those pure black shadows that we had before. If it seems like your lighting is a little bit too bright, you can either lower the power or just simply move the light further away from the model. I'm going to move mine out to about here. I'd like these to remain pretty dark, but I still like to see some of these details such as the ear. The position of this light can be pretty imprecise but if you'd like to follow along exactly, this is roughly where my light is at. Our last light to handle is going to be the background illumination for our scene. The background and the reference photo has a gradient of light across it with the right side being the darkest part of the image. We're going to mimic this effect with our backlight by turning it away from the right side of the background. This background light will be almost identical to this fill light we have on the left side so we can just duplicate this light. With our fill light selected, just hit "Shift" and "D" to start duplicating and then we hit "Y" to make sure that it binds it just to the y-axis. I can move it down to just about here. Doesn't really matter exactly where you place it. Now let's significantly increase the brightness of this because it's going to be illuminating something much further away. We're going to set the power up to 300 watts and then hit "Enter". This light needs to be positioned behind the statue on its left side. Let's move it over here for now. Now we need to rotate it towards the background and away from the statue. We can just hit "R" and then "Z", and then rotate it away from the statue. We can see as we start rotating it past the center point and towards the left, the right side of our image actually starts getting darker, which is how we're going to create that gradient. Just rotate it until you enjoy the amount of darkness that you have on the right side. It doesn't need to match this exactly because we're doing a different effect here. We're just matching this intent but get it to the darkness level that you like on the right side and then the brightness you like on the left side. You might also find that the lighting looks a little bit better if you move it closer or further away from the background plane. As you move it closer, you're going to get a more stark line here and a harsher gradient. If you don't like that, you can just move it away from the background to avoid that harsh line. With the last light placed, we've officially replicated this lighting scheme. This is by far the most complicated lighting scheme we'll be covering in this class. If you felt comfortable during this process, you can give yourself a pat on the back. In the next lesson, we'll complete our final exercise by tackling visible light sources and volumetric lighting. I'll see you there. 7. Reference 05: In this lesson, we'll complete our final exercise by tackling visible light sources and volumetric lighting. Let's begin. For the final time this class, let's get our file setup. We'll be using reference 5 for this exercise. We can just click and drag this into the left viewport. Zoom in on this image. It's about the same size as our camera. Now we can turn off reference 04 and the lights category and then turn on reference 05. We can also turn off bust right 02 and 04 and then turn on bust front 05. In this exercise, we're going to be a little bit less focused on directly replicating the look of the reference photo. And instead, we'll be learning some new lighting tricks that aren't directly related to light objects. The most obvious feature of this reference is the light tube that the model is posing with. It casts a really interesting laid across their face, as well as providing a secondary focal point. It's also the first visible light source that we've seen in any of these examples, meaning the light isn't off-camera. We can directly see the object casting light on their face. We'll also notice that this photo features a slight glow or fog around this bright light tube. Lastly, the scene has a dim blue light filling in all the shadows. Let's start with making this glowing tube as it's the main light in the scene. You will have noticed by now that I've already included the cylinder in the starter file for you, we won't be concerning ourselves with placing it in the scene, only generating light from it. We'll be doing this by applying an emissive material to it. Emissive materials are very simple materials that emit light. They work on a simple color and strength parameter to create their glow. It's also important to note that emissive materials will only cast light and the cycles render engine by default. If you plan on using Eevee to do this effect, you'll need to find workarounds to achieve the same look. Let's start by selecting the cylinder here to the left. Then we can go down here to our materials property tab to adjust the material on this cylinder. We can click the new button here to add a brand new material and then we need to scroll all the way down to the very bottom of this list. We're looking for the emission in the emission strength parameters. Let's start with the color. We can change the color by clicking on this black bar here and then changing the color with either the wheel or these sliders down here at the bottom. Let's start by increasing the saturation. We're going to set this up to one and then we'll set the value here to one as well. By changing the color of the emission from black we'll immediately start seeing light project from the cylinder. Now let's try to match the orange color from the reference photo. We'll change the hue to 0.03 to make it slightly orange and then we can lower the saturation down to 0.9, so it's a little bit less saturated. This orange color matches the reference photo relatively well. Now we need to increase the strength of this light by increasing the emission strength. We can do that here. We're going to set ours up to 100, so we're making it significantly brighter than it is now. So we'll type in 100 for emission strength and then hit enter. The emission strength slider doesn't reference Watts like the other lights. So you need to just play with the number until it seems correct. With the light tube finished, let's create a volume in our scene to make a foggy glow around it. Volumes allow lights in our scene to illuminate the air or the fog around the lighting objects. It's a great way to make your lights feel a little bit more moody and dynamic within your scenes. We'll start by creating a cube in our scene. Make sure you have this little white folder. Clicked next to the reference 05 under camera and lights so that the cube populates into that collection first. Now we can zoom out here on the right viewport. It shift and a then this time we're going to go up to mesh and then choose cube. The size of this cube doesn't matter as will just be scaling it up. It's now we can hit S on our keyboard here to start scaling the cube and we're going to scale it up. So it's about the same size as the background plane that we have behind the statue. So we can move it to about here. With it scaled up, now move it so that it is below the actual background plane. So we want it to completely encompass this background. Right about there is fine. Now our entire scene is encompassed with inside this cube. With the cube still selected, go over here to your object properties tab. It's this little orange box icon and then scroll down here to viewport display. Then we're going to change this display as we're going to switch it from textured to wire instead. By switching it to wire, the cube still exists. We're just in the viewport displaying it as a wireframe instead of that solid cube so we can actually see through this object. Now let's actually add the volume to this cube. We're going to do that in the material properties tab down here. Click on the new button to add a new material and then the first thing we need to do is actually delete this part of the material. We're just going to click on the principled BSDF right here and then we want to remove this. We can do that by scrolling up to the very top of this list and then choosing remove. Now that the material is empty, we can go down here to volume, which is what we are actually concerned with right here where it says none we'll click on that and then choose principled volume. You should now notice that your camera view here has a thick fog in it. If it didn't update right away with the fog, simply just move your cube and then hit Control Z to undo the movement and it should update this view port here in the middle. With our volume created, let's go over the two main parameters you'll be adjusting most of the time. The first one is density, and it's exactly what it sounds like. It changes the density of the fog. So if it's a lower number, the fog will be thinner until it's essentially invisible. The higher the number, the thicker the fog. We don't need a whole lot of fog in our scene, so we're going to set this value pretty low. We'll type in 0.1 for the density and then hit enter. The next most common parameter to adjust is the anisotropy. This one's a little bit less obvious than the last one. Anisotropy will essentially focus your fog around light sources. So the higher values will cause your fog to be tightly focused around the bright lights will not doing much to the areas around them. So if we increase this value here, we can see our fog starts pulling in and it's a lot tighter, basically just around the light source itself and it's not doing much to these darker areas. A lower value, like zero will basically leave the fog completely even across your scene. We want our fog to be pretty close to this light tube so we're going to be using a relatively high value. In your anisotropy, we can type in 0.95 and then hit Enter. With this value, it does a pretty good job of mimicking this soft glow that's basically just surrounding the light tube in the reference. There's just one last thing to add to our scene, and that's the subtle blue light from the reference photo. This process will be basically the same as all of the other exercises. Let's go over here to our right viewport. We can hit shift and a. Then we're going to go down here to light and we can add a new area light will. We'll set this power to 20. The size, we'll make it a bit bigger and we'll set it to two so it's nice and soft. Now let's move it off to the far right side of our model and also just above it so we can rotate it down towards the statue. The position of this light doesn't matter a ton, basically just needs to be above and to the right side of your statue. The reason we know this light is higher in our statue in the reference model is because of the shadows on the bottom side of the chin here and also on the bottom side of this cheek. The last thing we need to do is just change the color to a nice soft blue. We can do that over here. Click the color bar and then for our hue, we're going to type in 0.63, hit enter and then our saturation we'll take that up to 0.9. So not entirely saturated. The color looks pretty good. But if it feels like it's too dim in your model, you can just move the light closer to make the light feel a little bit brighter as well. Right around here, I think that brightness looks fine. With this last light placed, we're finished with our final exercise. Hopefully, this lesson showed you that there's more ways to light your scene other than just placing area lights around the model. In the next and final lesson, we'll be discussing our class project. I'll see you there. 8. Class Project: You've made it to the end of the class, congratulations. I want to thank you all so much for taking my class. It really means a lot to me. I hope you found this experience valuable in learning the basics of Lighting in Blender. We're also making you more comfortable with the process of analyzing photo references. For our class project, I'd like you to take all of the knowledge you've gained through this class and put it towards re-creating a unique lighting scheme of your own. Feel free to source your reference from whatever place you'd like. This could include places like a scene from your favorite movie, an awesome video game screenshot, or your favorite photographer's work. Your goal should be to find an interesting lighting scheme and then recreate it using the methods of lighting and analysis we discussed. When you're done, post your render and your reference image you based it on to the project gallery. I'll personally review every project uploaded and give you feedback on your render. If you want to try letting a different statue, you can go to 3dscans.com and download a free statue model to work with. Many of these statues are STL or OBJ file types. You'll need to use the Import menu when you add them in to your blenders scene. You might also need to enable these file formats in the add-on section within Blender as well. For my class project, I recreated the scene from the movie, The Pale Blue Eye. The main properties of this lighting scheme were diffused blue lighting and thick fog. If you liked this class, let other students know by leaving a review. Your feedback really helps me understand what you found most valuable in the class. You can easily leave a review by going to the Reviews tab, just below this video and clicking the Leave a Review button. I really appreciate the support. After leaving a review, you might just want to follow me here on Skillshare as well. You can follow me anytime by clicking the Follow button above this video, or by going to my teacher profile and clicking the Follow button there. Following me is the best way to get notified when I release a new class or make an important announcement. Lastly, I want to thank you all again so much for taking my class and supporting me by participating in the class project. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. Farewell, and I hope to see you again in another class soon.