Studio Lighting Setup + Patreon Tier Updates

Hello guys!

I've been knocked out with the cold, so I've done literally nothing for almost 2 weeks now. But yesterday I started feeling better, and explored some studio lighting ideas!

So here is a simple studio lighting setup that uses octagon shaped soft boxes. I tried replicating how actual photography lights look and feel. It was especially interesting to add a grid to control the direction of the soft light.

The results are some interesting and smooth looking lamps that gives a really smooth lighting in Cycles X!

Soft light with grid. Very soft shadows. There is no lamp object that is being softened with a translucent material, it's just a big emission plane with a gradient texture. This saves a ton of render time (as opposed to calculated translucency materials), and produces a very similar light.

Hard light with grid. The light in this one is much harder because the emission surface of the softbox has been removed. Inside the softbox there is a rather small area lamp, and the wall of the softbox are covered with a rough glossy material. This makes the light source a mix between soft and hard, creating some interesting shadows.

Pure soft box. Very soft and very bright. I honestly like this a lot. I also think that in cinematography we hide our lights too often. It's really cool to see the actual light source, I think it can help with realism.

Another benefit of using the grid on top of the softbox is the beautiful reflections in glossy materials. For me these reflections are worth this entire workflow!

So these are some experiments I did with studio lighting. Feel free to download the project file here: Octagon_Softbox_Studio_v3.0beta.blend 

Note: Please make sure you're using Blender version 3.0.0 Beta or later, so you can render with the new Cycles X engine.

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PATREON TIER UPDATE:

Important update for Solid View supporters: I have struggled to feel the difference between what's a simple project file/concept and what's an advanced project file for a while now. I thought this would be a good idea at first, but I've realised that it's a bit weird. It feels weird to upload unpolished and messy project files, becaure right now I often get the feeling I have to make one 'bad' version and one 'good', and it feels wrong to make the bad version.

So I have decided to make all types of future project files in the Material View tier from now on. I hope this will make it easier for me to share project files with you guys, because I often end up spending just as much time on the unpolished stuff as the advanced project files. This change should hopefully make it easier for me to turn more projects into useful patreon assets, withouth having to decide which category it must fit into.

TL;DR: No more Solid View project files because it feels weird to create unpolished project files.

Phew! Now that's out of the way, thanks so much for the support lately! I have some video ideas that I'm very excited to start working on.

- Asbjørn