My 3D Workflow in 30 Minutes - Lighting and Rendering Tips (and More)

Here is my complete rendering workflow in Blender, jammed into a 30-minutes tutorial. I’ll reverse engineer the animation that I made for MasterXeon and walk you through all creative choices I made and Blender tools I used.

Blender tutorial timeline (“What will I learn?”):

0:00 - Introduction
1:25 - Object info
1:48 - Optimize the geometry
3:59 - Working with layers
4:50 - Set up a basic lighting
5:56 - Simplify the shaders
7:42 - Group Instances
9:06 - Group Pro add-on
10:08 - Navigate like a pro
10:54 - Camera focal length and type
13:22 - Set up mixed lighting
15:43 - Filmic color management
17:31 - Render settings and denoising
19:52 - Post-pro in Krita
21:52 - Post-pro in Gimp
22:56 - Animate a handheld camera
25:54 - Render it out efficiently

[GlebAlexandrov]

The timeline is here, if needed:
0:00 - Introduction
1:25 - Object info
1:48 - Optimize the geometry
3:59 - Working with layers
4:50 - Set up a basic lighting
5:56 - Simplify the shaders
7:42 - Group Instances
9:06 - Group Pro add-on
10:08 - Navigate like a pro
10:54 - Camera focal length and type
13:22 - Set up mixed lighting
15:43 - Filmic color management
17:31 - Render settings and denoising
19:52 - Post-pro in Krita
21:52 - Post-pro in Gimp
22:56 - Animate a handheld camera
25:54 - Render it out efficiently

[BlenderSecrets]

Very nice workflow video Gleb! If I may add my tip, sometimes it can be cool to keep some grain instead of denoising - in this case it can do wonders to click the little "clock" button next to the seed value under sampling. That way the noise pattern will be random and different for each frame, making it look more like film grain instead of just some weird non-moving noise texture on top of your video. Not for achitecture renders of course, but for some stuff it can be a good look. Love your channel!

[michaelkimber]

Just subscribed to the channel after listening to the blender guru podcast that you did in 2015. By the way, your stuff is awesome! keep up the amazing work!!!!

[ullaskunder]

Sir can you please make video on depth of field and lighting on 2.8

[totochandelier]

beautiful, impressive professional workflow, I feel like a little kid

[thedankatheist]

At 6:48 hod did you turn multiple nodes into 1?

[COLMVFAHY]

Do you know if there is a possibility in Eevee to limit the effect of a light to a single object or collection of objects (ie is there a way in Blender 2.8 to achieve what was the "this layer only" lighting control in blender 2.79 and previous? I have been trying to work it out and i cannot find a solution with the results that it seems to me there is no way to achieve realistic lighting in fact in Eevee as the light penetrates objects and lights element that should be in shade or unlit. Grateful for any suggestions or help

[mm-kg]

Great video and cool result! I'll have to try that camera setup. Thanks. And I agree about the entropy problem. Did you just read "12 Rules for Life?' haha

[Sandra-hcvo]

Thanks so much for sharing your process. Very generous of you. You're so talented, and it's great information!

[SerMattzio]

Thank you Gleb. Your tutorials are fantastic :)

[xitement]

What are those red lines inside your nodes? how do you do that.

[GB-krjp]

Looks amazing and there is a lot of knowledge that you have. Thanks for sharing.

[MotokoCie]

Exactly the tutorial i was waiting for, thnx!

[RomboutVersluijs]

Not sure why the decimate process came, you skipped the part where you brought back the hi res version or perhaps i missed that. You could also use simplify in scene settings. Applying all the mods just make things quite heavy and now you have 2 version of the model.

[NebraskaJimmy]

All shrimps from around the world need to anoint you KING of the SHRIMPS you rock my friend deep thanks for your work!!!

[CTRL_SMarcos]

Incredibly generous with your vast knowledge. Thank you so much.

[DiemenDesign]

Thanks for sharing this on Facebook just now, I've been meaning to watch this. So glad you use GIMP, if you have any great workflows towards Photo Editing we would love to have you share them and even your 3D tips in the Open Source Photography community in Google+ and Group on Facebook. We also wouldn't mind you sharing your tutorials to help promote you a little.

[cgbintang]

Great as always Gleb ! Keep doing it, I have one request, maybe you could try to talk about what kind of coffee you drink, I think your coffee is not come from somewhere around earth, because you can always makes a wonderful artwork with them ! Man ! XD

[SviatoslavPetrov]

Nice trick with camera settings! At begin I thinked: how Gleb morfed flat assets to sphere, & at the end I surprised :) Thanks!

[RobotFilmProductionsTMcom]

I finally figured out how the decimate Collapse works! Thank you so much!