A lighting exercise

A friend of mine, Boxcat, commissioned Pulcharmsolis to make an armor. I saw in my previous renders that lighting wasn’t my strong suit. At the time I had followed the Blender Guru’s tutorial on lighting. Most of my scenes used HDRI without extra lighting. This render would be a good training

Look mom, I’m a 3D artist

Group activity

We went on a Discord call with Boxcat and started streaming both of our screens. He was struggling a lot and quite impressed with my renders

No you’re not

Getting some help

At this point another friend, W-W joined the Discord stream and decided to get a hand at it too

Self critique

You followed the tutorial

Safe is to say that W-W’s renders look infinitely better than mine. It’s weird, I followed Blender' Guru’s advices. Obviously the Blender Guru knows what he’s doing and I don’t, so I must have wrongly applied the advices in the tutorial. But which one ?

I had my three points lighting setup with my spot light, my fill light and my rim light. I colored them in green and red as they are opposite colors, applying his advices in the explanation about colors in art. I added extras to put highlights on the mouth. I checked the light balance in an alternate view mode to make sure it wasn’t over or underexposed

But you forgot the essential

W-W’s main criticism was the presence of way too many light sources and lack of reference. He mentionned just taking a picture that already looks appealing, and trying to replicate its lighting. These are the first fundamental advices the Blender Guru gave too, but I didn’t follow those. The final render has two light sources against 5 or 6 for mine

Follow the tutorial, all the tutorial

I focused way too much on the technical aspects of the video, rather than understanding the underlying concepts, and what those techniques were really used for. It reached the point where, they were actively undermining the final result; and I couldn’t even notice it. Need a lot of practice !