Original subtitles

Right now our key light is mainly represented by a pretty large and

soft source, but that doesn't mean that we cannot throw in some directionality into

it by making use of a much smaller pinpoint light source for extra glints and highlights.

so again this is our nice soft and big light source that is responsible for 90% of the image

for all the shapes and forms that we see and I will move it to its own collection by pressing the

M key, the collection will be called light_01 now I will right click and duplicate this light

source, hit S and make it much smaller, M to move it to its own collection called light_02,

this will be the extra component of our key light. thinking about it, it will also serve

the function of the hair light simultaneously using the three-point lighting terminology,

we will talk about three point lighting later on, let's just mention that three-point lighting is a

fairly popular method for Illuminating a subject with light sources from three distinct positions,

the three types of lights are key, fill and backlight, the key light is usually the brightest

light placed slightly off to the side to provide most important part of the lighting to our subject

revealing its form and dimension, the fill light to illuminate the shadow side and the backlight,

it's also called the hair light or the rim light, is used to pop the subject out of the background

for a slightly more three-dimensional look. as we've said this scheme is fairly popular in cinema

photography and CG lighting so we'll be referring to it from time to time throughout this course.

so getting back to the second light we have just added, it's the secondary key light, but at the

same time it's the backlight that adds some extra separation to the objects in our 3D scene, so it

kind of fulfills both of these functions, I mean its main purpose will be to highlight the finer

details in the silhouette as well as the... glossier parts of the material. to add some extra separation

with the main light it can be slightly warmer and by all means it shouldn't be stronger than our

main, think of it as a supplementary touch, as just a little bit of glint on top of our main softness.

so something like that... it can be slightly more focused in terms of the beam shape spread,

something like 70 degrees looks good to me

what I love about the smaller and harsher light sources that they are good at capturing detail,

something that the bigger and softer light sources don't necessarily achieve.

and now as a quick detour, let's quickly visit the Cycles render settings

untick the noise threshold and just input some value into the samples, like

128 samples in both render and viewport and also let's activate the denoiser. if there is

one feature that was a total game changer in Cycles rendering that's the denoising.

a quick reminder that the options found here in the denoise settings will be dependent on the graphics

card and that while they give slightly different results, any option is better than none, so don't

worry, just select whatever you like. now that's a fantastic advice :)) like, select anything you want (!) but

really, OptiX is just as good as Open Image denoise, it is insane how smooth the rendering process gets

with the use of denoising, I'm not even talking about the viewport, in my opinion that just brings

the dream of the real... real-time light transport and real-time path tracing much much closer.

so let's keep it activated, denoising I mean.

it has its own minor performance price though, without denoising it's generally a little bit more

responsive, the viewport I mean, with denoising the overall effect is smoother but the lag is still

there. all right, so here we created the compound light source. we can think about it as just one

big key light with just a little nuance, a little hint created by this smaller, sharper... sharper

source embedded into it. the smaller light in this context is just complementary to... to the main one

I think it's the most productive way of thinking about it.

now here's how we can do quick comparisons to track our progress. what I'll do is set up two

renders, with and without that second light. so let's toggle it off in the outliner temporarily,

okay before gaming is a quick render allow me to visit the Blender settings, the preferences

I mean and in the user interface let's make sure that within the temporary editors tab

the render in drop down menu, the image editor is selected, it is a matter of personal preference

obviously, but personally I prefer to see the results in the Blender user interface

when I hit the render button, without 3DSmaxing it with a bunch of new windows ;)

all right so we have rendered the 1080p image, now we can make a quick comparison.

I'm switching to the second slot in the image editor and activating the second

light component and hitting F12. that's a nice way of comparing before and after by switching

back and forth between the slots, we can do it with using the number keys, one, two, one

two... see the glossy highlights popped out and being extracted by the secondary light source. good job!

let's check a quick before and after.

this is our extra light added into the mix so it's worth recapping a few crucial points. first of all

our light hits the object from behind so to speak, this seemingly innocent creative choice makes all

the shadows fall in our direction so effectively we now shoot in... into shadows, in other words the

camera is always standing on the shadow side, this is called the reverse key lighting or the

upstage lighting. the other thing definitely worth mentioning is that our light source is brought in

very close to the subject, to the scene and so we can marvel at the light falloff effect. that

is simply put aesthetically pleasing. well, we could have placed our light to the right or to

the left as long as it's on the opposite side from the camera, it would still be the reverse

key lighting and we would still have some kind of a fill coming in from the camera side.

so far it is a really balanced, really three-dimensional light setup, I love it!