Creating the basic lights

- [Instructor] In this chapter we will be creating the lights, materials and camera for our scene. The first thing I'll be doing is creating the lights, and the reason for that is because the materials are dependent on the lighting. When we make changes to the light, the materials also get some changes with that. So it's important that we create the light. Every time when you're doing a project, I would advise that once you're done with the modeling part, you should have at least some basic lighting in your scene, and then you should go towards creating materials. And once the materials are done, then you can make changes to material and lights side-by-side. So that's what we are going to do. To start off with the lighting, the first thing I'm going to do is press F10 on my keyboard, and I will change my render from Default Scanline Render to V-Ray Advance Render. And then I'm going to close my Render Setup dialogue box. I will go to the create panel, and I will choose lights. I will choose a V-Ray light, and in my left viewport I will zoom out and create a V-Ray light here. And just move that back here. Now what I'm trying to do at the moment is roughly place my light at some reasonable location, move that around, and later I can of course finalize the locations. So for the material, I will place one light here, and also I will go to the create panel, choose Plane, and create a plane or ground or a surface for my models, and move that to the right position. I can always adjust it later. I will also press M on my keyboard, choose a material, and give it a bit specular and gloss. That's just temporary material and will change the specular to something like blue, and increase the specular level. And now I will choose all these objects in my scene, and apply these materials, simple material to that. And then choose and angle, zoom in, and I'm going to take a quick and rough render over here by pressing Shift + Q. And this seems very hard at the moment, the light. I see that it's kind of hard and it basically merges these objects with the plane. So what I'm going to do is make a couple of changes to the light. First thing, I'll choose the light, move that slightly backward, and go to my Modify panel, and I'm going to set the multiplier from 30 to 15 and hit Enter. Also make sure that Cast Shadows is turned on, affect the views, affect specular and reflections. So these are the things I will be playing around with, are the lights, as well. With this, I'm going to render my scene out again, and give it a couple of seconds so it gets rendered. And I see that the light is soft now, and it has the proper direction here. One other thing I'm going to do is, the light is visible here in the render, so I'm going to make it invisible by checking this invisible option over here. Now I'm going to go again to Create panel and again to the lights, V-Ray. And this time I'm going to choose the V-Ray light again. Now if you can see this V-Ray tab, you have to expand this and choose the V-Ray light from here. And in my top viewport, I'm going to create the light again. Go to the Modify panel, and this time I'm going to change the light type from plain to a dome, and set the multiplier to eight here, and hit Enter. And I'm going to render my scene out here. And it's kind of very bright in here. It means that it's still very high, the multiplier, so I'm going to press Escape, close it down, and change that to one again, hit Enter. Also, making sure that the light is invisible. And I can later turn off the reflections and specular if I don't want this light to affect that. So for now, I will just render this out by pressing Shift + Q, and as we can see that we have kind of a soft light, outdoor daylight, and this would serve the purpose perfectly. So I'm happy with this lighting for the time being, and I'm going to cancel my rendering progress, which is on the other screen, as you can see, it's here, I will press Escape and I will also close this down. Now the basic lights are created. Like I said, we will start the material creation process and then we will basically be changing the materials and lights, side-by-side, and some of those changes will be, I will be assigning an hgri file, or an hgri map, to this dome light over here, and we'll also be setting up the shadows and the distance of the light and the direction of the light. In the next video we are going to understand the V-Ray material.