Original subtitles

The next super exciting thing on our menu would be to throw the accent light or some pool of

light somewhere, so it adds visual interest to the scene. I see no reason not to use our trusty

Blender sun lamp for that. but first let's right click in the outliner and create a new

collection called sun_01 then Shift A, light and add in the sun lamp. it doesn't really

matter where we position the sun lamp within the scene, because it shines from the infinitely far

away point, so I'm just moving it around, so... so it's conveniently placed in the viewport.

what matters though is rotation, R to rotate...

R and Z to rotate it along the Z axis which is probably the most useful thing to do, it

could be useful to temporarily disable all other light sources to concentrate purely

on the rotation of the sun lamp, yes, indeed, I'm sure you noticed that it is also placed

in such way to drop the shadows towards the camera, because why not, it just works :)

what we can do right away is warm up the color ever so slightly so it's closer to the

yellowish and reddish portion of the color wheel to simulate the evening sun or something like that,

with our key light obviously imitating the window in this case... okay... what about the strength? by

default the slider goes all the way to 10 and no further, what we can do to circumvent it is just

click and type in any value we like, for example 50 or 25... or 55 for that matter... or 100, obviously the

sun can be a very bright light source indeed, how far we can push it depends on our creative goals

in the end, but I want it to pack a punch, so I will keep it in the higher range of strength.

and without even noticing it, we have approached the topics of dynamic range, exposure, light ratios

and color management. woo-hoo! :) buckle up, it will be a five minute detour, I promise not to bore you too much

just a little bit :) so a quick experiment, for you imagine that our sun lamp would

be a terrifyingly powerful light source indeed, peaking at a whopping thousand Watts [uu-huu]

it's a huge ball of fire after all. alright, so what? so now it's an enormously powerful light source

that would overpower all other light sources within the scene, but it got blown out. what we

can do though to offset its brightness is to go down to the color management tab, find the exposure

slider and offset this slider by a few stops, by quite a lot of stops actually. so something like -6,

it's like setting the iso much lower in the camera, or playing with a shutter speed for that matter,

so the sun is no longer as nuclear as it was before, but we have practically lost

all other light sources by killing the overall exposure of our virtual camera.

so this is the basic Blender relationship between the lighting intensity and the exposure.

but there is also the view transform to keep in mind. switch over to the Standard

one and these highlights will be completely gone off the charts, clipped at white and the

higher you push this slider the worse it gets. it is the way it is. it's how

the Standard view transform in Blender treats the highlights that are about to get clipped,

so they get clipped. the Filmic view transform preserves much more detail especially in

the highlights, it is much more sophisticated if you transform, thanks to Troy Sobotka who

has developed this view transform and the AgX, even newer view transform as well, check it out.

let's do a quick exposure sweep using Standard and Filmic look, how the Standard treats really

intense pixels and how with Filmic we can still see some definition within the higher range

and the loss of data within the Standard view transform gets even more prominent at -2 and

when we climb all the way to zero notice how the weird yellow coloring appears within the Standard

view transform, especially in the higher intensity areas, it is just weird. it's not how it should be.

the Filmic on the other hand holds very well even at the extreme exposures such as five. the Standard

is officially wasted by now while we still can see some detail within the Filmic transform.

that's the difference between those two models, the Filmic is just better, it preserves more highlights

it is more versatile, it is more cinematic in that sense, more... well... filmic because its compression of

the scene referred light values and the color gamut roughly emulates a photographic film

aesthetic and matches our expectations from film emultion-like media. it was a quick detour into

the color management settings and the relationship between exposure and the light source intensity.

allow me to roll it back to exposure 0, the view transform set to Filmic (that's important)

and within the sun settings the strength should be set back to... what it was... 55 for example which

is still a lot of brightness, don't get me wrong, it still extends the dynamic range by quite a bit

and I forgot to mention we... we still keep this light source very sharp, like it probably should

be, it is this sneaky ray of light that passes through the blinds or something like that

or through the leaves and in just a moment we will tailor it to look just like that.