How Ian Hubert Hacked VFX (and you can too!)

When Ian Hubert shared the “de-lighting” technique in Blender, I was awestruck. De-lighting allows VFX artists to visualize 3D VFX elements integrated with live-action footage right in the 3D viewport, without the need to render and composite. It’s an incredibly fun and powerful technique to add to your VFX toolbag. In this video, I explain what de-lighting is, how it works, and how to use Ian’s “Compify” plugin to automate the de-lighting setup - all inside of Blender. Enjoy!

Special thanks to Nathan Vegdahl for being the brains behind de-lighting and Compify, and for providing feedback on this video.

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[zarblitz]

Subbed for showing the process without the plugin first. Using plugins to simplify repetitive workflows is great, but even greater is understanding what it's doing it.

[SophiaWoessner]

I am de-lighted with this video, and I've only just started it!

[geoz]

as much as I love Huberts super fast tutorials, this made me understand what I was missing in his tutorials, thanks!

[andrewdileo]

This is some legendary deep technical work man. One of those tuts 100, 000 people will watch and maybe only 100 will try. Advice to everyone who CARES about VFX...follow this tutorial, and join the course. This guys workflow is legit, and I can vouch that this is effectively the workflow all legit VFX artists will continue to adopt.

[Kareem_Essam]

You can't imagine how much I'm thankful and happy that you explained that. I've been asking the community and experimenting a lot with how to do it since Ian explained it in one of his conferences, but I couldn't figure it out. Hats off to you, man. Thank you for the video. ♥

[Alphain]

bro finally remembered his youtube password

[orcanimal]

Honestly, nobody has done more to promote VFX for the public than Ian Hubert. It's not even close. The Blender team would be the closest after that, but they're a whole company

[OnMarsD]

This is exciting, what a cool workflow! I was thinking recently "why cant we delight entire scenes for integrating CG?" And now I have the answer thanks to you, Ian, and Nathan!

[zizouhani]

Bro the music you made for the intro had no business going that hard 🔥🔥 I need a longer version 😂😂 I'll be jamming that all day long while working on my projects, aside from the music I'm so glad I discovered you're channel bro the quality of ur videos are as stunningly even more informative I really hope you keep up 🙌

[harshithpotaraju]

Amazing video but just wanna point it out, we can reduce the samples to 1 while baking and it doesnt affect it at all and will bake instantly

[slebetman]

YES. We need more videos like this that do deep dives on Ian's tips and tricks. Ian has lots of really good videos online showing how he does things but is usually too fast for a newbie to follow. Thank you

[JaredTheStrange]

This was very well presented and I'm really glad you mentioned that this primarily works for diffuse materials/lighting in the original footage. Many people these days would have left that out and people trying this at home would quickly run into issues if their footage contains anything shiny/refractive/reflective etc.

[RenderRides]

Superb technique, and brilliant explanations all throughout the video. It's crazy that we're getting this info for free, and that too being spoon-fed to us. Thank you so much for this, Jacob!

[varunsuresh]

@ 0:36 Bro did you just compose that fire track for an intro?!

[bhp]

ONE OF THE BEST TUTORIALS OUT THERE!!! hats off for going up the standards to teach us something dope!!

[MbahMu]

Superb work bro. I honestly feel a bit smarter after watching your videos even though i have a very vague idea about 3d nodeling/rendering and SFX

[ericpowell]

The man, the myth, the composer. He does it again. Nice work, Jacob!

[MrMackB]

This is what i call a breakthrough! Great Approach to explaining and blowing minds in one video.

[franknunez]

Our company, back in the early 2000's, invented delighting on ultra high fidelity stills in Photoshop, by hand, for major fashion and advertising campaigns. Dozens of retouchers do some form of delighting in NYC on higher end campaigns without realizing it by locally attenuating dynamic range in an effort to manage visual distraction. It's been around for a while in still at least, but manually relighting without 3 dimensional rendering requires extreme amounts of skill and artistry in photorealism, hence why our company was pretty much unique in "delighting for relighting (in post). I knew there would be a day that it was easy to do in 3 dimensions and that's not an area that was of interest to our photography sector clients, so eventually we shifted off of it given its high cost".

[AcruxD]

Respect to Ian Hubert—he’s done more for public VFX education than anyone out there, hands down. The Blender team comes close, but they’re an entire organization. I’m also planning to break down some of his techniques soon and show how you can apply them yourself.