How I do my lighting in EEVEE for Blender 4.0 (´｡• ᵕ •｡) ♡
Are you running your Blender on a toaster? Don't wanna spend much time on rendering in Cycles? Here's some EEVEE tips for you!
1 - Let's put some HDR lighting on! Go to the Worlds, choose Use Notes and hit that little yellow dot next to the Color.
2 - Pick 'Environment Textures'
3 - You'll see everything in purple. But worry not! It's just bc you haven't applied any textures yet! Just go on and hit Open.
4 - You can find plenty of free, high resolution HDRI textures on Poly Haven. I have almost all of them! Go get some for yourself too and navigate to their location. Pick any you like!
Well... It doesn't look good yet :D
5 - Lower the Strength of the light.
6 - Now. Let's go to the Render Properties and check Ambient Occlusion and Bloom (you can play with it's parameters and see which fits you better). THEN... Go to Shadows and increase the resolution to the max. High Bit Depth and Soft Shadows must be checked too!
7 - Let's Add our very first light (The Sun)! And go to the Camera Mode.
8 - In the Sun Shadow settings: Soften the light by increasing the Angle; Lower Bias to the max.
9 - Change the parameters of Cascade Shadow Map the way it looks better for you.
10 - Also don't forget to fix the specular appearance of your model ;3
Now. I don't hate it. But I don't like it much either... So I played and tried several Environment textures for better result.
11 - Looks way better! Now let's go to the Render Properties once again and remove the background in the Film category (in case you don't want one)
12 - It's time to add another light source!
13 - Settings for the new light are quite similar. I made them softer, lowered Bias, changed color, etc.
