Ultimate Minecraft Lighting Tutorial – Blender 4.0

Welcome back to the Minecraft animation tutorial series using blender 4.0 this is the third chapter of this five-part series and if you didn’t watch the previous episodes be sure to check them out here or click the link in the description as well if you watch the previous Parts already well done and

Let’s continue with our Minecraft world and character imported into blender it’s time to add some lighting to make the scene go from this to this pretty cool right so this is pretty simple to do it’s not as hard as it’s SS so let’s Jump Right In so to add the lighting in

Blender there are two main ways you can do that there are more ways but two most common ways are using either the sky texture which is built inside blender or using an HDR Sky which basically wraps the sky around the world so first let’s open up the blender Sky texture and

Let’s do the first method I’m going to scroll out so that I can see my world and my sky and then go inside the material View and then enable these again again so scene lights and then scene world let’s enable them so if I click here which is the World Properties

I see this menu where we have like surface color and strength we want to use this color for now so we should use this button over here so if I click this I’m going to have different options right here underneath texture go down and then choose Sky

Texture and as you can see we have loaded like a sky texture our sing got a lot brighter and we have some lighting in the scene now the sky texture comes with the sun automatically so what we can do is we can play around with these different settings the main things we

Can do is adjust the strength so if I turn this up I’m going to have like a stronger Sun but this obviously too much so you can keep it at one or you can turn this up at like two or three but I recommend to keep this at one so that

It’s not like too bright and it gives our scene some lighting over here we have different settings that we can play around with so on the material view it’s pretty hard to see the Shadows so let’s go inside the rendered View and as you can see we have some

Shadows over here there are shadows of like grass the trees and even our character what we can do is play around with the sun’s parameters if I change the sun rotation as you can see the Shadows are changing the direction and now my sun is shining from here and then I have my

Shadows casted over here so if I want the sun to be shining like right in front of the character what I can do is change the rotation again so I can click and hold this and drag it up and then I have my Shadows like right behind a

Character and at the moment it’s like the only way to pre this because of if we switch to Eevee or if we switch to material view it’s like pretty hard to see the Shadows so let’s go back to cycles and another thing you can do is

Go to the r properties again click on sampling and then you can turn on the viewport d noiser and it’s basically going to show you the viewport in a much cleaner way and you can turn up the samples to something like 10 and then you’ll be able to see a

Viewport in like much cleaner way it’s going to take longer to load but this is the sacrifice basically so this is the sky texture this is a sky texture method again go to the World Properties play around with sound rotation I’m actually going to move this like somewhere here so that our

Character’s face is lit up and then the shadow is behind the you can keep the sky texture but let me show you another way another way to change the sky and basically import a lighting is let’s control Z multiple times let’s say we’re in a default view

So let’s control Z multiple times until we imported the sky texture so we’re back in this dark world with no lighting again if I click on color and underneath texture I choose Environ texture instead of the sky texture so if I choose environment texture everything turns pink but don’t

Worry about that what we need to do is click on open and then we want to locate our HDR sky so let’s talk about the HDR Skies I’m going to leave some HDR skies in the description but let me explain why what those are hdri stands for high

Dynamic range image so HDR skies are basically very high resolution Sky Images basically like 8K or above so you can find very good HDR skies on websites like Po Haven if I scroll down I can have like multiple HDR skies I recommend finding Skies which have like visible

Skies and not like everything covering them like this is covered by trees for example but you can find clean Skies like this like this and then you can download them and once you download them you can organize them in your Minecraft animations folder and the HDR Skies

Folder I already have some HDR Skies downloaded here as you can see we have like this reddish color bluish color and the night skies and I’m going to leave the link to those download links in the description but you can download your own HDR Skies as well so let’s go back

In blender let’s click on open and let’s locate our skies so go inside the Minecraft animations folder go inside HDR skies and then we can load the skies from here but we cannot see the previews we only see the names so if I click on

This I’m going to be able to see the thumbnails of the sky if I import like blue Sky I’m going to get this like morning feeling if I import this I’m going to go for like Moody afternoon lighting and if I import this I’m going to go for like nightlight for example if

I want to go with like morning bluish Sky I can double click on this and as you can see we imported our sky and if I do shift and middle Mouse I go up and then I rotate around the scene I have just imported the HDR sky but the

Scene still looks pretty dark so if I go back inside the world I have the strength value over here if I drag this up as you can see the sky gets a lot brighter let’s choose something like 7.5 if I go inside the rendered view I’m

Going to see a better view of this it’s going to be closer to the final view so yeah we have our Sky basically this is how we import an HDR Sky you can also customize it and I’m going to show you how but when we imported the sky texture

It came with the Sun but the HDR Sky doesn’t come with the Sun sound lighting and we don’t have any Shadows but we can do that manually if I move my cursor somewhere over here like shift and right click I can click on shift a if you remember shift a is basically creating

New objects and I can click on light and then click on sun or I can search here and then type S if I click on sun lamp I just imported sunlab into blender so let’s move this up so that we can see it better so I

Just press on G and then move it up the location of the sun doesn’t matter so if I put this here or here it doesn’t change anything the main thing is the rotation so if I click on R and then move this line forward as you can see

The shadow of this tree is moving so if I move this forward I’m going to get the Shadows like right behind the character and behind this tree and my character’s face is going to be lit up if I go to rendered view I can see the Shadows way better so let’s click on

This and as you can see we have some lighting and we have some shadows as as well now if I click on this properties so this property only appears when once we have the sound selected if I select the tree it’s going to disappear so if I

Select the Sun and come down to this property I can play around with these settings if I increase my sun strength let’s go back to the render if I set the strength to something like five as you can see I have a lot brighter scene and I can even change the

Color of the sun if I want like a morning blue light I can choose this as if it’s like a small Moonlight I can make this a bit blue but don’t go too crazy with it because it’s going to look unrealistic if I want like an afternoon light I can

Go for like light yellow orangey light and it’s going to give the SC like a light orange light but for now I’m want to choose like this light blue option and I’m going to give the same like a light blue warning feeling and you can keep these options the same like and you

Can keep the angle the same because this is supposed to be the same as the sound’s actual real life size and when we import the sky texture we have the sound size the same as this angle over here so don’t change the settings for now keep the cast Shadow keep this and

You can play around the setting you can make this like dark you can make this like brighter and we can go with any setting you want now the way you customize an HDR sky is pretty easy so for that we’re going to need to split our screen and go into the

Different view so let’s keep this like bright no let’s turn this down to like five and and then let’s keep the strength to like 7.5 of the world so what you can do is if you come up here on this Edge and if you click on this

Edge we get these two arrows and then if I right click I’m going to get these two options for now I need vertical split and if I press on vertical split I’m going to get this line I’m going to move this line somewhere over here and

Then if I left click I will be able to split my screen so I have different views over here I’m going to change this view from 3D view port to this so click here and then come down to Shader editor if I click on Shader editor we get this

New window over here let’s move into our viewport and let’s place our view somewhere over here where we see our sky like nicely now let’s scroll out and let’s check our sky so basically once you’re initiated editor you want to click on n and then right here we’re in the object section

What we need to do is click on object and then go to world and we have different nodes so these things right here are called nodes and nodes work from left to right don’t worry if you don’t know what those are we’re not going to go into like Advanced node

Stuff we’re going to be using like basic nodes and basic node setups so if you remember we change the strength over here and this is basically the same as this so if I turn this up it’s going to be changing over here as well so basically the nodes are the settings

Which are provided here as well but using nodes are more versatile and you can see them better and you can customize them better so what we want to do now is click on this image texture this is basically the image we just imported so if I left click on this note

And if I actually hold in track I can move this around so if I left click if you remember in the first chapter of the series we enabled the node Wrangler atom if you haven’t done that then go to edit preferences add-ons and then search for node Wrangler and then enable the node

Wrangler if you haven’t so once we have our node Wrangler enabled what we can do is click here and then click on contrl T once you click on control T you get these two new nodes which are texture coordinates and mapping we’re going to use mapping to change the sky location

So for example if I want my son which is right here if I want my son to be right behind the character I can use the rotation parameters so in the mapping node we have location rotation and scale so we need to use the Z rotation to move

The sky so if I click and drag this so click and drag this you can see that I’m rotating my sky and then I want my sign to be somewhere over here and then I can place it over here don’t play around with like location because you’re going to get

Like crazy results don’t play with like scale the main thing you need to play around is the Z location so adjust the Z location to your willing and let’s place it somewhere here but since our sun is shining from here and since our sun is casting Shadow from here it makes sense

To move the sun over here so let’s move it right over here it might not be noticeable in the animation if you have like a sun here and then the sky sun over here but still if you want to keep it realistic then you can move

It over here and this is how you import like HDR skies and how to customize your scene how to light your scene and if you want to get rid of this panel what you can do is go to this Edge where we get the two arrows again right click then

Click on join areas and then here you’re going to have like these options you’re going to want the arrow to be facing on the left side and then left click click and then you’re going to be able to get rid of this panel so we have imported

Our Sky we have our sun and now we’re ready to basically do do first render and composite our scene so basically you can keep this HDR method and you can keep this HDR sky or you can use the sky texture if you liked it more so we

Imported the sky with like Sky texture with the buil in Sun and we imported the HDR sky and we adjusted it manually and we added some shadows as well you can use any method you want both method work really well so I’m going to click on my

Character click on F to zoom in again and what we want to do is basically move our camera in front of our character and we will be able to start like basic compositing and do the basic lighting now I I want to move my character slightly over here you can use like GX

Gy so first thing we need to do is place the camera in front of our character and the second thing we need to do is render the image so where is our c camera can you guess well we don’t have to know where the camera is cuz we can go inside the

Outliner and search for camera left click on the camera and we can like shift and right click move our cursor here so since we have our camera selected in the 3D viewport and in the outliner and in the viewport as well I can click on shift F

No shift s apologies and then selection to cursor and I just move my camera over here I can press G and grab it here and then if I press on npad zero I’m going to I’m going to be able to enter inside the camera view so if you remember if I

Press on shift F I’m going to enable the fly mode and also when you’re in the camera view you can use a scroll wheel to go in and out and I recommend to go somewhere over here where you see all the edges of the camera and let’s do

Shift F and place the camera like in front of the character where we will be able to see the character and the background as well now I can turn this off and also since we’re on the topic of like the outliner as you saw I search for the camera I use the selections

Cursor method but you can also just look through these collections click on camera and find the camera but searching it is a lot faster once you have like multiple collections enabled here let’s use shift F to like place the camera properly and now since we are here let’s

Talk about the camera settings and Camera properties so the way you select the camera inside the camera view is you select you click on this outline so if I left click and then go out as you can see I have my camera selected so let’s have our camera selected and once we

Have it selected we have this property popping up so if I click on this these are the camera properties right here we have focal length which we can change basically in focal length if you turn this down if you turn the values down you’re going to get like wider scene

With more depth and if you turn this up you’re going to get more like flat 2D look it’s not going to be 2D but it’s going to be like flat compared to the lower focal length so obviously this is like way too much so we want to find a

Sweet spot like blender’s default I believe is like 50 but for the scene we want to turn it down a little bit maybe somewhere like 45 yeah that looks pretty decent again I can use shift f move around and move up and down now let’s talk about other

Camera options as well right here we have the viewport displayed so if I extend the viewport display I can see that we have different options so the main option you want to use while working on animations that’s my recommendation you can skip this part as well but if you see we have this

Passive part part we have passed part out and if we turn this option all the way up we’re going to get dark edges around and we’re only going to see what’s inside the camera and this is useful while animating because you’re going to be animating everything like

Inside the camera you’re not going to have everything outside if you have this all the way down you might get confused you might be thinking that you have a character inside the camera but it’s actually here so if it turns all the way up it’s pretty easy and it gives you a

Lot of helping hand and another thing we need to know is the depto field but we’re going to enable that in towards like the final chapters it’s not necessary to enable it so far but depto field is basically like a focus it basically allows you to focus on the

Character and blur out the background and give it more like realism and so on but for now let’s leave it off turn up this if you want to improve your workflow and again inside the viewport display if I go to composition guides and if I extend this I have the option

To check like these third Center diagonal but the main thing you want to check that’s not required but it’s recommended if you left click and chel like if you left click and select thirds as you can see we have these guiding lines and these lines are basically telling us the rule of thirds

So the rule of thirds is one of the most famous and most important composition guides basically you want to have your subjects and objects on these lines so on the left line if I have my Minecraft character for example aligned here somewhere over here that can be considered like a good composition

Obviously that’s not the only thing helping a good composition but it’s one of the ways I don’t want to get too technical in this series it’s like a beginner tutorial so if you want to find out more about rule of thirds I’m going to leave the link to the glender guru’s

Video where he talks about composition I highly recommend to check that out obviously I can keep my character centered as well uh if it’s too complicated you can just turn it off and then just place the camera wherever you want I’m just going to have this have

This turn on but for the animation I want my character to be the main focus so I’m going to rotate the camera and then make my character like in the center of the camera basically in the center of the attention let’s keep our camera this way now once we have a

Camera placed in front of the character and once we have these options turn off what we can do is render the image rendering the image is basically like taking a picture of what’s inside the scene and it’s going to remove all the axes like we don’t need to see the bones

In the final render we don’t need to see the outlines so if I press on render and then render image it’s going to start rendering the image but the shortcut for this is F12 so let’s click on F12 and then you can see that my image starts rendering it’s going to show me

How much time it takes it’s going to show me how much time is remaining it’s going to show me which frame it’s on and so on and it’s it’s counting up the samples if you remember we left it at 20 samples and now it’s at sample 17 and

Now it finished rendering for me this basic took like 16 seconds for you it might be longer or shorter depending on your computer speed now we rendered our image we have a sky background and so on but as you can see we have a problem here our grass looks horrible some of

The grass in the background is like not visible so what we we can do is if we want to go out of the rendered view I can press on f11 and f11 to go back or I can just press on Escape I want to select my crass because as we saw when

We render the image and this is how the final render will look so far by the way so we want we don’t want this to look like this in the final render so if I click on grass what we can do is if we go inside render and if we go inside

Light paths we can turn up the transparent so it’s at 8 right now but if I type something like 16 and by the way I want to render the image again and I want to compare it to the previous image so what I can do is basically

Don’t render G image yet click on f11 and then if you go up here you can see that we have slots we have eight slots in total we rendered our image in slot one but I want to render another image and compare to this image so if I

Click on slot two and I click on F12 I can render a new image this took about 1564 seconds now if I go back to the previous slot before we had like our transparency low as you can see we had these issues with the grass but

If I go into slot two as you can see the issue is now fixed and our grass looks a lot better now if you want to compare slots like quickly you can use shortcuts which are basically the numbers on your keyboard so if I press on one I go on

Slot one if I press on two I go on slot two and three four and so on you’re going to compare eight slots in total so let’s go back to slot two as you can see we fixed the issue with the Shadows now since this is the beginner tutorial I

Won’t show you too much stuff in terms of lighting we want to keep the things basic and vanilla but we can still add a few effects so let’s click on escape to go back to the 3D View and what you can do is if you want to add some effects to

Your scene you can go to compositing in part one I showed you that we’re going to be using this tab in the future so click on compositing and then you’re going to going to be cre to with this new area so this is the compositor over

Here what you need to do is enable use notes and if you remember notes these are basically working from left to right and then we can use them to enhance our scene so just click on this composite node and move it like on the right so

That we have our space here so if I press on control shift and then left click on my render layers Noe I’m going to get the viewer node let’s move the viewer node somewhere over here and then what viewer nodes is basically basically we’re going to be able to see the

Changes we make here to our image so if I want to zoom in and out on this background image I cannot do that because if I use my scroll wheel it’s going to be zooming in and out on the nodes so if I press on V multiple times it’s going to zoom out

Of the image if I press on alt V it’s going to zoom in so let’s press on V and keep it somewhere over here also I can go to view and then zoom in with this slider my ually so I can drag it up or

Down but what I can do is click on fit and this is going to basically show me the whole image not zoomed in and not zoomed out also I can use this move tool to click here and if I click and release my mouse and drag around I can basically

Move the image but let’s click on like fit so that we will be able to see the whole image now there are multiple effects you can do in the compositor but for this we’re going to be using only one let’s click on shift a and so search for

Glare and then left click to create a node now what you need to do is drag this node somewhere in between those two noes so between render layers and between composite as you can see if I move this node down this line becomes a lot brighter so when this line becomes

Brighter once we’re here just do left click to release the note and then I just dropped my note here but I cannot see any changes because our viewer node is connected to the the rendom layers note so once again if I click on control shift and then left click on the glare

Note I can be able to see the changes made by the glare node and as you can see it made our eyes a lot brighter but this is set to the streaks and the streaks are basically like starlow we can add like starlow to different things but it’s not suitable for this moment

And for Minecraft so what I can do basically is change this from streaks to fog glow and then I can play around with the threshold so if I turn down the thresh the cleare is going to be stronger and every bright part in the scene is going

To become a lot brighter like this eyes are going to become brighter the bright images like the sky and the grass is going to become brighter and if I turn it all the way down you can see the scene becomes like a lot brighter but we

Want to keep this somewhere over like 05 probably so that it’s not too bright and we can even turn this down even more let’s try this as well so yeah we can do that and another thing thing we can do is we can leave the composite noes over

Here you can add more noes and more effects and you can check more tutorials but for this one we want to keep this simple since this is a beginner tutorial so let’s keep our glare node at like. 3 or4 and then what we can do as well if

You want to enhance our image go to the render layers and then scroll all the way down and then you should see the color management over here if we go down we should see that we have ax and rgp if you’re using an older version of blender

Like 3.5 or 2.8 then you should be able to see filmic here but after blender 4.0 is release the main color management system is basically a GX which makes things look like more realistic so if you’re using like B the versions and you’re using filmic that’s fine as well

For Minecraft animation but we’re going to be using agx but under color management and under agx we have look so right now the look is set to none but if I click and go down and choose something like medium high contrast so if I click medium high contrast as you can see it’s

Going to give me a lot more contrast in the scene it’s going to have like more depth to the scene and I can go even higher I can choose like very high contrast and as you can see the scene is becoming more high contrasty so what we

Can do is keep this at 7 and then we can choose something like medium high contrast and as you can see from here you want to like play around with the settings there’s like no perfect setting you can follow along exactly what I’m doing but you can give it your own twist

And you can give it like your own States and you can play around with like exposure as well so if you click on click and drag exposure down as you can see my SC becomes a lot darker if I move it up it’s going to become brighter and

Less contrasty so let’s turn this down a little bit not too much we want to keep our glare and effects and we can have our scene like this let’s run on the threshold again to like 05 let’s see how it looks maybe like

6 or 7 yeah let’s keep it at 7 and yeah we have this pretty vanilla looking scene and we can keep this scat we can keep this to medium high contrast and you can play around with different settings as well another cool thing which you can do in blender is a real

Time compositor so right here we have the dop sheet which we will be using in the future for animations but let’s change this to 3D view so click here and then changes to 3D view port and then as you can see we’re vieing everything from

The top so if I press on numpad zero I’m going to go inside the camera view I can scroll in and out as you remember and what I can do here is turn off the overlay so if you don’t want to see any bones or any camera lines I can click on

This button which is called show overlays and if I disable this all the overlays are going to disappear and then I can click on material preview or actually let’s click on rendered preview because we want to view the changes made in the compositor uh basically what we did

Previous obiously is we first render the whole image and then we check the compositing changes using the viewer node but in the new blender updates we can basically see these changes in real time so let’s go out of the camera view and let’s place my camera somewhere

Over here not my camera but let’s place our view somewhere over here and then if I come down here and I change this to always what this means is that compositor right now is disabled but if I choose this to always I’m going to be able to see the changes made in the

Compositor to the viewport in real time so if I turn the threshold all the way down as you can see the scene becomes a lot brighter here and then here as well if I go inside the camera uh I can basically view these changes over here

As well but obviously we don’t want the threshold that low so let’s keep it at 7 so this is another cool way to preview basically everything in like real time obviously this is not as accurate as this I still recommend to render your image and check to noes and check

Everything with the viewer Noe but if you want to quickly view everything without rendering your image in real time you can do that as well by basically going to rendered View and then checking this to always now let’s go back to solid view here and let’s go back to the

Layout so here’s one thing I want to mention as well while you’re working on animations and you’re making the lighting and setting up your scene you might find out that you like some changes more than the other changes so for example I showed you how to import

HDR Skies how to set up the sky manually but I first showed you the method of importing the sky texture along with like buil in Sun so I think for this tutorial I want to keep this Sky texture so you can follow along or you can keep

This HDR Sky you imported but what we can do is we can go into the world properties and basically we can just delete this whole world and it’s going to turn everything into like dark seat and what I can do is also go back to solid view select my my

Son and then delete that as well because we won’t need it so go back to the rendered View and then you can click on new and then do the same thing we did in the first method so click here and then choose Sky texture and then rotate the Sun so that

It’s like back to the character so Sun rotation increase it until we have the Shadows like behind the character and if I click on my camera and if I click on f11 I can go inside slot three so left click on the image and then click on

Three on your keyboard and then let’s render the image again now obviously the scene is a lot brighter than we need so first thing we can do is turn the threshold to one then go to layout and then let’s play around with these settings as well so let’s turn down the sound strength

To something like 3 or0 2 as well and then go back to the render layers or the render properties scroll down go inside the color management again and set this to something like medium contrast or base contrast now let’s render the image again and as you can see we have this

Like cinematic lighting with a lot of Shadows obviously the glare is still a too much so we can go to compositing turn it up turn it up even more and we get this slow also you can play around with the contrast look again you can play around with the

Exposure let’s set it back to zero played around with the settings and I think this Punchy settings fits really well with the scene can zoom in and out also you want to play around with these settings you don’t want to settle down for like one setting go to the world

View obviously you can still play around strength the play around with the sound rotation and what you can do is another thing I forgot to show you is you can play around the Sun elevation so if I move this up this is going to give me like this

Bright afternoon light but if I move this down this is going to give me more like a night sky feeling so everything turns all the way dark so this is a very very good way if you want to change the time of the day if you want to do like a

Time lapse animation you can do that as well and as you can see we’re we’re into this like evening lighting with not much Shadows but let’s turn this up until we get this like bright afternoon lighting and then let’s try to render the scene again let’s go to f11 go into slot

Four and then grender with F12 and I think the sun is a lot brighter so I’m going to turn down the sun elevation and I’m going to turn on the strength as well all the way to like 0.1 maybe to point 2 and then I’m going to rerender

This so this is the scene we get this is like the bright Rudy afternoon lighting if we go to slot one this is what we got from H lighting and we fix this but I overr it on the slot too so we don’t see the other changes here so you can keep

The HDR lighting which basically looks like this and you can keep this cinematic lighting which looks like this it’s up to you I’m going to keep the sky texture over here so let’s keep this lighting so I can play around with these settings but I recommend don’t play

Around like too much cuz you might get like too pey C too much in detail after all this is like the animation tutorial so we just want to get ourc prepared to do some animation and you can keep the lighting basic for now and if you want

Me to do like Advanced lighting tutorial be sure to leave the comment down below but for this one let’s keep this lighting let’s R the SE and let’s see how it looks so we can keep this look for now it looks pretty neat pretty vanilla and

We can continue off the part four so this concludes part three of the series where we covered the basics of lighting compositing where I showed you how to change the contrast I showed you how to import HDR skies and the sky texture and this gets us ready to jump into part

Four where we will be doing animation and I’m going to explain the animation basics and we’re going to create this cool short animation and make our character do some cool motions also be sure to check out my patreon if you want to support the channel I to get cool

Rewards as well now part four should appear on the screen so click here and I’ll see you in part four