Create AWESOME Effects with Light Nodes in Blender!

Demonstrating the power of light nodes in Blender.
Get the files: curtisjamesholt.gumroad.com/l...
Kev's Wormhole Video: • The Easiest Warp Energ...
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00:00 - Intro
00:54 - Quick Breakdown
01:53 - Light Nodes
03:03 - Texture Coordinates
04:55 - Procedural Textures
05:38 - Spotlight Tip
06:32 - Animating With Drivers
07:33 - Water Shadowing Effect
08:23 - Corridor Demo
09:32 - Wormhole Demo
10:10 - Building the Tunnel
12:13 - Experimentation
12:24 - Animating the Tunnel
15:35 - Streak Effects
16:58 - Useful For Many Things
17:26 - Grab the Demos and Closing Thoughts
17:58 - Outro
#blender

[@CurtisHolt]

Share your alternative methods in the comments 😉

[@Kram1032]

Why not just shrink the end of a cylinder down to 0 (without actually merging the vertices)? That way you can get as many loops in as you want afterwards. You can also extrude the already zeroed vertices and then just merge that extrusion in the same spot as the ring of vertices if you really want it to be closed off - but really you shouldn't even need the closing

[@aaronrothwell7615]

@@Kram1032 yeah just read this after my own comment, it makes it nice and simple this way.

[@niemanickurwa]

Legit tutorial man, thanks and subscribed.

[@atomickipachaka821]

@07:24 - Holy Crap! I was looking for a way to loop the W Value forever (I actually gave up) and that little gem of knowledge was just casually dropped in the middle of what I thought was an unrelated video. TY!

[@SuperSunshine321]

My man... in Blender, I've done hard surface modelling, sculpting, animating, UV editing, texture painting, worked with shaders and geometry nodes, as well as done some compositing... wtf are light nodes?!?! You are definitely right about this going under the radar, will enjoy this one!

[@clanker8021]

I know the feeling, i've used this software since 2019 and only now i've discovered this is a thing oh my god

[@njdotson]

This is actually so funny i know blender tries to have nodes for everything bur this sounds like a really weird meme

[@drumboarder1]

I just discovered drivers and the ability to control animations via music/audio

[@robrobusa]

@@njdotson Just gimme video editing, filestructure and sound design nodes.

[@existentialselkath1264]

I like the idea of doing a brief rundown at the start. I always have some fun figuring out how to do stuff like this myself, but this acts as a great starting point

[@4.0.4]

Blender is like a box of chocolates that has several layers of false bottoms and hidden compartments with more chocolates.

[@KevBinge]

Thanks Curtis! I love these types of effects. Things like gobos and cookies are great in Cycles. It's usually not "highlighted" in the community, and you're getting some really nice results. Now, let's get the GPUs back into reality and go crazy! Great video.

[@JoeyCarlino]

Super cool effect! I'm not sure why I haven't tried light nodes sooner. Also, the summary at the beginning is always appreciated 😉

[@janos71]

Another quick way of getting the cone shape: -add cylinder -select one face -scale it to 0 -make the loop cuts -dissolve doubles

[@guibnv]

I would extrude the larger size a bit, then slide the loop all the way close to the other side.

[@sarthak3320]

If someone is using blender 2.8+ and wondering what is dissolve doubles, it is called merge in newer versions.

[@cr4723]

Where can I find the command "dissolve doubles"?

[@janos71]

​@@cr4723 i think, it is called merge by distance now. but i would have to check where it is found, i am a bit rusty right now. i made a shortcut for it, Ctrl D, as that was unused or used for something i didnt need.

[@cr4723]

@@janos71 dissolve doubles and merge by distance are different things. Ctrl D makes nothing for me. Well, that's not important now. I don't use Blender anymore.

[@SpurlinCinema]

The way you explain things is very smooth and precise. Snooping through your channel now!

[@polipano]

Hi Curtis, your tutorials are great and it’s a pleasure to listen to you and learn from you. Thank you so much. Have a fantastic weekend 😍

[@extasyGH]

Honestly, your voice is just damn good.

[@serenity44444]

Really appreciate the quick breakdown!

[@zonyzhao469]

I love your begining 2mins explaining everything in a fast way, which almost works like a catalogue of a book. It really helps for audience to understand!

[@bd3d]

I love your content, always original and refreshing!

[@mind_of_a_darkhorse]

You are one of the best at relaying how to do amazing things with blender! Keep it up!

[@ImNorman]

Light nodes are amazing! They do tend to fly under the radar, but are such a powerful part of Blender with some great results. The underwater tip is amazing and so simple!!

[@LittleFellaDynamics]

Love the procedural approach and the end results look fantastic 👌💯👀🌟 definitely a technique that I will be trying out... thank you for the detailed tutorial 💡😎💡

[@WaterShowsProd]

This is brilliant, and I liked having the overall concept described at the beginning, before going through the details.

[@DanielGrovePhoto]

Very cool! I remember applying noise to lights in Maxon C4D way back when I was in middle school and it gave 3d volumetric noise lights, very fun to play around with. Can't wait to play around with this.

[@3enny3oy]

Very cool! Thanks for sharing

[@ryanbrunette3870]

The W in 4D noise is the 4th dimension you can smoothly move a long to animate 3D slices of the noise. Useful for volumes. Because lights can only display 2D textures, you could just use 3D noise and animate the z axis in a mapping node. Useful when using more than one light as its way more performant in viewport playback. 4D can be expensive in larger scenes.

[@caddywampa6602]

I'm curious, what do you mean "4d can be expensive in larger scenes"? Do you mean scenes with more geometry, more textures, more complex shaders, or scenes that are actually larger in scene units? Procedural textures are calculated for every render sample (at least in cycles, not sure how Eevee handles them), and I get that having an extra dimension means a bit more calculation. So having a bunch of 4d procedural textures in a shader instead of 3d ones would take longer to compute that shader on each sample. But other than shading complexity, I don't see where 4d would cause a performance hit.

[@ryanbrunette3870]

@Caddy Wampa Depends on your needs and how valuable speed is over something like flexibility. My job involves getting eevee scenes to render on demand on servers. Complex procedural textures or premade node like Fluent Materializer are amazing but can shoot up the compile and render times in eevee. And when you render using multiple instances of the file each instance on the server gets hit by a lengthy compile time. Cycles might not suffer from this but, everytime a ray hit an object it needs to calculate the value of the noise. Not a huge deal, though it might in increase the time it take for some areas to converge into the final image. You can reduce the hit of say 4D noise but only using a detail level that you need.

[@caddywampa6602]

@@ryanbrunette3870 How does Eevee handle procedural textures, anyway? Does it evaluate the texture at each render sample, as Cycles does, so that you can get arbitrarily close to the texture without degradation? Or does it have to bake the procedural texture to a UV image texture with a defined resolution?

[@no-one3795]

Wow, I never know about light nodes until now. Also, nice tutorial. I will definitely try this.

[@Hiv0ltage]

Great video as always!

[@GaryParris]

Well done Curtis!

[@djfenixuk]

this can be used to make a pretty realistic video projector too, especially effective with volumetrics.

[@lollingrock]

Yeah I saw it on cgmatter

[@MsMidnightStories]

Wow totally wild effect !

[@davecooper86]

Awesome!! Thank You!

[@octopusfly]

Wizard! Thank you for sharing your time and energy. You inspire!

[@paweljankiewicz1383]

Amazing video. I like how you started with the end result and then decomposed it by saying why for every part. I didn't know you can enter #frame as a value!

[@hasselhoff3379]

Great Video! I always used blackbody and IES but never tried to use the nodes in different ways. And as a side note you can also scale the vertices of the cylinder to zero, add the loops and then merge the vertices by distance. It's faster and easier but you get a linear and not the convex tunnel shape.

[@WW_Studios]

I always forget about this! Good reminder! Thx.

[@evilotis01]

just re the building the tunnel part-prob the easiest way to do this would be to collapse one end to a point like you do at 11:00, then take the knife tool, make a straight cut across the cylinder (with "cut through" turned on) down near the point. that'll allow you to add more loop cuts along the rest of the shape as normal.

[@WaterShowsProd]

That's a good idea as well. I was thinking to scale the end down to a very small size, extrude that a bit and then collapse it, then fill the rest of the tube up with loop cuts.

[@Kram1032]

better yet: Instead of merging, just scale to 0. (Unless you really really need the geometry to be closed)

[@petebateman143]

Nice job. First time I've ever seen light nodes.

[@HybridLizard_com]

Nice video Curtis! I see you will hit 100k subs soon, congrats and keep up the good work 👍

[@richardturner6576]

Beautiful,thank you.

[@billyjjackson]

Great to have the condensed version at the top of the vid, makes it easier for future ref :)

[@pramodgaikwad9256]

First time I've ever seen light nodes. Tnx Bro

[@jebclang9403]

Coming from a long use of 3DS Max, this takes me quite some effort to get my head around the workings of this all. But i GET why Blender is so powerful. It's a real beast. I'm gonna learn this.

[@dajuicebox7965]

Thanks for the share.🙏🏽

[@stefanguiton]

Great video!

[@jaeslow6347]

I have monkey brain so the most I can glean from this video is how well edited it is.

[@richard29sher]

You are a phenomenal resource, thanks for this Curtis. BTW I really like your Grunge node. I'll post an image on your Discord server.

[@emosewasikcin]

11:20 you can scale the cylinder end down to 0 instead of merging vertices. It will still have quad geometry around the cylinder even though all of the vertices are in the same spot. You can add as many loop cuts as you want and then you can merge those tip vertices into one. That way you'll get a perfectly linear cone with extra loops.

[@razeezar]

Great video! Setting the proportional editing to inverse square seems to give the best results for a nice conical tapering of the tunnel. Edit : Root, Sphere or Constant work well enough for this purpose also.

[@mr_pike4609]

Finally something im actually already familiar with. Feels like I actually kinda learned Blender!

[@mitchellrcohen]

So many one line comments that hold massive value and knowledge in this video. As a new blender user…wow

[@Ratamiru25565]

OMG!! its cool!

[@Jaakeup]

I had no idea you could even use nodes with lights this is cray

[@khudadatbaluch7884]

you are very great person, i mean it, bro

[@gunnarbennemann7849]

Didn't know this feature - until now, good

[@jourdanbiziou853]

Very cool :) !

[@457Deniz457]

WOW THANKS !!! :)

[@coreys2686]

You can add loopcuts, even if you collapse one end of the cylinder to a point: In edge select mode, select all the edges that make up the long side of the tube, and subdivide. As long as you're still in edge mode, you should be able to add as many loopcuts as you want.

[@aaronandrews5731]

love the video quick comment though, around 11:50 you talk about how you made the mesh for your tunnel. a simpler way is (in my opinion) add a single loop cut, slide it to the mouth of the tunnel, then merge your verts at the other end, grab that loop again, g+g and slide it all the way to the other end. ta-da you can now add your loop cuts

[@anonymouxx9261]

6:42 the W is the Depth in the forth dimension.. for eg... 2D coordinates are X and Y 3D coordinates are XYZ and 4D coordinates are WXYZ

[@ethangehrke]

WOAH THERES LIGHT NODES!!!

[@Dhruv1223]

also why use hooks? Go to edit, select the ring where you want the light to be, do cursor to selection, create and empty and a light, parent the light to the empty, then select the empty, shift select the object, go to edit mode, pick any vertex of the ring where the empty is located (i chose the top, just incase selecting one of the side one causes an error), do ctrl p, vertex parent, the empty (and therefore the light) will follow perfectly

[@besknighter]

Instead of collapsing one end, you can scale them down a lot and then add the loop cuts. As long as all those vertices are still there you can add those loop cuts without any issue. Collapse them only after adding the loop cuts. So, here's how I did it: - Delete default cube and added a new cylinder - R X 90; S Y dragged a bit - Edit mode (vertex) and selected one side - S Y SHIFT+Z dragged in; repeat 2x - CRTL+R scroll up click - B select end vertices again (with X-RAY active) collapse at center - A flip normals. Done. You can scale on X axis more if you want the tube to be even longer but it's preferable to do it at the start of the process instead at the end. But at the end works too.

[@stephenwlodarczyk175]

1 person must have thought this was a tutorial on how to make a light saber in his kitchen appliance that is also known as a Blender. Poor guy. This was a fantastic tutorial Thank you 🙏.

[@HassanSiddique777]

Awesome

[@Nate1994a]

I was confused as to why I didn't have a Nodes tab but then I figured out it only pops up in Cycles and not Eevee. hopefully Eevee gets it too because this is too cool!

[@aaronrothwell7615]

So when making the point/tip of the cylinder, my thought was select the edge like you did, then scale to 0. So they are all then in the middle. Then the loop cut still works as you just have all the points in the same place.

[@davidspiers6638]

In stage/ photography lighting the "leaves" transparent PNG you're referring to is called a Gobo. Its a laser cut piece of metal "light stencil", if you will.

[@TiagoTiagoT]

With a bit of math, you can use the Normal from Texture Coordinates plus the Ray Length from Light Path, to calculate 3 dimensional coordinates, to give you a much more detailed control of the light; allowing for things like impossibly sharp laser/projected images, artificial caustics that realistically change based on distance etc. edit: Looks like getting the 3D coordinates is even simpler than I had assumed; no need to calculate spherical coordinates as an intermediary step, you can get plain XYZ just by dividing the Normal components by 1/RayLength

[@SamsTopBarBees]

One good way to get a dense cone with lots of loops is to scale the cylinders end until its super small, but don't merge them, then loopcut THEN merge the end.

[@theteapote]

Thanks, this is super useful! I was wondering if you cvould explain how yo manage to have a starry sky background with the camera looking inside the cone ? Thanks a lot !

[@superman217100]

yo man do more unreal content! i just found you and i'm so glad i did

[@Dhruv1223]

11:07 actually what i would do is that before i added the loops, i would use the scale down method on the end vertices to get the shape I want. Then I'll add the loops, and then once the loops are added ill collapse them. Although I wonder if we scale the end points down quite alot, say almost till there merging will the collapsing really make a difference, its not really adding that much to the geometry. also one more method of deforming the geometry, albeit a bit tedious, but will make parenting the light alot easier and more predictable, create a chain of bones, then select the first bone, shift select the 2nd bone, ctrl+shift+c copy rotation, make sure both, under copy rotation options, are set to local, do this for each successive bone, parenting the first to the next, then when you rotate the last bone, the enire thing will rotate like a linked chain, itll curl up and everything, then you can set the light (or first parent it to an empty and then parent that instead) to be a child of last or second last bone.

[@IyeViking]

I always knew light nodes existed and I’ve used them before, in the sense of me using an emission node with a lamp.

[@zaidkiwan5168]

one other way of making the subdivided cone : after you collapse the vertices you can ctrl+b to add a small bevel and then you will have quads to add loop cuts

[@martyfouts771]

Here's an alternative method for setting up the wormhole. add a Bezier curve. Call it tube. Give it a bevel. Add a second Bezier curve. Call it taper. Set the taper object of tube to taper. Add a point lamp at the origin. Give it a follow path constraint and set the path to tube. Give it a high value, like 85 to put it at the end of the tube. Hook an empty to that end of tube. Now you've got complete control over the size and taper of the tube, you can position the lamp anywhere along the tube.

[@dutzsgvevo3062]

You can actually make the projection a rectangle using the mapping node (I’m referencing the cgmatter projector video btw)

[@tinurasamudith-tsbr3176]

Light nodes is a concept that we know in frightening level. -Dr Strange 2021

[@example101]

Magic.

[@voyageruk2002]

Great video as always, one thing to note, the symbol # it's known as a hash not a hashtag

[@HyJyncks]

To get the lighting to work with an Area Light, you have to use the Object Coordinates instead of Normal. Then under Beam Shape turn the Spread down to 1.

[@artao5]

Building a tunnel: As usual, there's a billion ways to do things in CG. I would propose that using a curve with a taper object would be more efficient for making this sort of tunnel object. No need for tedious and lengthy vertex pushing. This way you also wouldn't need to create a curve and add a modifier, as the object itself is already made from a curve that can be smoothly animated. This would also allow animation of the profile of the tunnel which could lead to very interesting effects.

[@neuvatn]

nice

[@Starwarsfun1-Leo]

Damn, thanks for showing this Curtis! The faked water refraction effect can come in handy, especially since cycles is not the greatest a rendering caustings👍

[@fergadelics]

I don't know if its my players but on different devices my videos dont have sound for the first half second or so and It sounds like I'm coming in after the video has started. Its probably me. Sorry, random but just mentioning. im not into long intros but maybe a one second buffer of sorts would keep me from rewinding, thinking I missed something. Just like I missed light nodes in general. Blender is so vast. I think what you made is cool and will give me a starting point, so I bought it. Thanks Curtis!

[@CurtisHolt]

Thanks for the note and the support! :)

[@mfrazeehvacc5012]

Great Tutorial but include the step that you must change to the Cycles rendering in order to see the Nodes Option. Nodes option is not visible in Eevee.

[@CurtisHolt]

0:56

[@xboxer214]

I cant wait for light nodes to work with eevee.

[@artao5]

The 'W' parameter is better called "Seethe" rather "Seed." Changing the seed makes such things obvioiusly jump. W, or "seethe," causes smooth motion. Also, putting a texture on a light is called a 'Gobo' in the real world. However, in the 3D CGI world we have way WAY more control over them and can do many things not possible in the real.

[@samuelhiggins6617]

👑

[@HrafnNordhri]

For the wormhole effect, rather than a cylinder couldn't you use a bezier curve with a bezier circle as a taper object to create the cone?

[@tmilker]

HardOps Dice after collapsing to a point might do the trick as an alternative if you've got the paid addon.

[@CurtisHolt]

Cool tip :)

[@amolnk]

Great video! What music do you use in this one btw?

[@CurtisHolt]

Thanks! It's this one: www.epidemicsound.com/track/DohjCLQ4Bx/

[@amolnk]

@@CurtisHolt So cool! Thanks! :)

[@theotries]

Hi man, my whole cylinder is moving with the curve when i move the end point from the path. Do you know how to fix this?

[@marcelomoraes2722]

Awesome tutorial! I just can't make it loop, any ideas what's wrong?

[@sseymour1978]

For 3.1beta normal texture coordinate space generates yellowish tint. On 3.0 i get the same results as in video.

[@MrTheTuxedo]

8:45 animate your sampling seed bro that static noise is terrifying

[@ssvisualisers-tech]

Hi Curtis, I am new to light nodes :) and found this refreshing and new approach of using Blender with lights. In trying to follow your tutorial, when render in cycles, it seems to always give a black circles near to the end of the visible tunnel. Have you come across this and how do you resolve this ? I tried to add more geometry and even apply object smooth but can't get right of this single black circle problem. Appreciate advise.

[@CurtisHolt]

That could be caused by many things such as the position of the light, the shape of the end of the tunnel and the surface properties of the tunnel material. I'd say the solution would probably be a lot of trial and error, try making the end more or less pointy and the light closer or further from the end to see which combination gives you a less noticeable black circle.

[@jeffg4686]

This feature is too cool to be so hidden away. I haven't yet seen anyone mention it anyways (before this video).

[@jonathanganske]

Is there anyway to enable light nodes in evee?

[@sakari.niittymaa]

Maybe just scale tunnel another side vertices to 0 to keep the possibility to add loops?

[@CurtisHolt]

You might have a shading issue at the end of the tunnel, depends how you want it to look.

[@GreatZeus85]

Aren't light nodes barely used because of their bad performance? With the archviz example you mentioned, I wonder if it would render in the same amount of time when using light nodes vs a plane with a transparent noise texture in front of the light to create the shadows.

[@cjh.50]

does anyone know what blender version used? 2.93 or 3.0?

[@SneekeeMonkee]

Stupid question - I've made one of these lighting setups, but whenever I go to duplicate the lights or copy the nodes to other lights, the lighting doesn't work in the new light?

[@chrishubka7486]

I could be wrong but I cant seem to find light nodes in the latest version of 3.0 release.

[@ciliaana3389]

I'm trying to learn how to do thing like you did, but I get immediately stuck at 5:00 because for some reason, my light stays completely white. Can't see the texture at all and cannot make it be able to be seen. I am in Cycles. I really don't understand what is going on.

[@Rollthered]

4:45 Rasta Pac Man :D