The right image is straight up sexy – and it’s all because of a good use of gradients. The left one is lifeless and flat, with little variation in values both on the character and the background. Limited & Bland versus Absolute Awesome use of Gradients

Yes, some scenes benefit from GI more than others: characters and objects, for instance, need it less than ArchViz, where GI is essential. With Cycles, there’s no more tedious lighting with an ungodly number of lamps as GI does all the super-realistic light bouncing out of the box. So when Global Illumination entered the picture, it was like a light bulb going off. That’s, basically, exactly not at all how the real world works, which made realistic render lighting an incredible pain. In the dark ages of computer graphics (like, 5 years ago) all light calculations assumed that light bounces off an object. Global Illumination saves you from eternal damnation High Dynamic Range Imaging is a technique that “photographs” the real world including hyper-detailed information about light which is impossible to replicate manually.īottom line: It’s a must to develop a collection of HDRI images that you can easily apply to your Blender project.

HDRIs have become the industry standard for realistic environment lighting. An image lit with a lamp, versus an image lit with HDRI

Blender light not working