A solution for far better lighting in Blender

I wanted to drop this helpful link from Blender Guru on YouTube. This video explains why the default Blender system of lighting is very very bad, and how to get movie quality lighting instead.

It all has to do with the old system of lighting developed for the original types of computer monitors. There’s a free plugin for Blender called Flimic that will give you far better results than what a professional movie camera is able to capture.

Here’s an example of my chess scene rendered with the default blender lighting vs. the Filmic.

Default:

Filmic:

The difference here is subtle, especially because this is a simple scene to begin with, but you can see that the Filmic version’s lighting is natural and more realistic.

I know it might not be as useful to us beginners at this point, but still, my first thought after watching was “I’m glad I’m learning about this now as a beginner so i can get it correct, right from the start.”

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Filmic looks terrific. Sort of the missing ingredient we’ve been looking for in 3D renderers. Lighting is so important. Installed it the same day Blender Guru sent his email & YouTube video link and so far it looks like it is a good thing, but don’t know Blender well enough to show it off as nicely as you! :wink:

This would be a great addition for the udemy course. It’s crazy how big of an update that Filmic does to the dynamic range of blender. It’s so awesome.

Installation is trivial, but I’m sure using it is much more involved. I’m focusing on the basics for now, but the Blender Guru video is a great intro to how to use it (including interpretation of false color maps to evaluate illumination in real time Render mode (IIRC)).

I installed the filmic color management as well, immediately after seeing the Blender Guru tutorial. The results are great!

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I am not sure this could be added to the Blender course as such as the content is pretty packed in.
I wonder though if a seperate course much like the blender to unity import course being released soon.
If there was to be a course on this i cant see it being done any time soon as the instructors are pretty invested in the RPG course at the moment.

Feel free though to post your experiences and problems and maybe as students we can work on this as community instead for now

@Michael_Bridges

Another wonderful example of the openness of the Blender community.

@Marc_Carlyon has a point. Shoe horning concepts in can make a section unfocused and unwieldy so where it goes in and the why is critical.

We do like approaching thing like this from the why and understanding what is really going on under the hood.

The next major version of Blender is around the corner and it might be something they embrace and absorb into the main trunk of the program…

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Dude, I use the blender PBR, help me so much to see the end result.
Take a look.

cheers

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Yeah, from what I have heard real time PBR is on its why in the next major release- I think incorporating the bits from UE4

Just a note for anyone using filmic.

I stumbled upon this while using filmic color management the other day. I have it set automatically in my startup file because I kept forgetting to turn it on. I rendered out an image sequence and it looked great and was exactly what I wanted, but when I went to put the animation together in video form all the colors washed out. I scoured the internet for why this was, but couldn’t find a solution. Then it hit me. Try turning filmic off. I did and the animation rendered out the image sequence with its proper colors.

TL;DR Filmic color management is great for image renders. Turn it off for video renders using image sequences made with filmic color management.