1. I’ve finished the course and in case somebody hasn’t decided to grab their copy yet, I’ll make a little spoiler on what you’re finding inside and why I think it’s good 🙂
2. The course is basically about the light in Blender – in general. And apart from that, you’re getting a closer focus on the subject of lighting your scene with High Definition Range Images and on the new color management called “Filmic”, the one that everybody’s been talking about lately.
3. The tutorials are very fast because you’re not actually supposed to start projects from scratch, and rather practice lighting skills using .blend files that come with the product. Gleb cuts to the chase from the start, he’s focused on the subject and makes no unnecessary distraction, so I think that even if you don’t consider yourself an intermediate blenderer, you’ll enjoy the course anyway. Also, there’s a lot of comparisons, “before and after” – both in pictures and the stuff you are practicing in Blender, so I think it’s really user-friendly.
4. I really like the introduction to “Filmic”. I put off switching to it because I thought it would cause incompatibility with older stuff (tutorials and such) that was created before “Filmic”Well, Gleb explains it all: how to configure the Look of “Filmic” (by default it’s quite different from sRGB), how to take advantage of its features and what you need to be careful about (using mixRGB in Node Editor) not to lose its functionalities.
5. Lighting your scenes with HDRIs: you’re getting the basics and information on how to modify its look (because pure, unmodified HDRI usually looks awkward in a scene). Then there’s this longer tutorial on how to combine to HDRIs and use them as a super-elastic lighting combo. Very interesting!
6. There are more things in the course like techniques to kill butterflies, adjusting Light Bounces values properly and even how to creatively use just Spot Lights with image textures to get those surprisingly interesting effects. But what I like about the course the most is that I’ve found out “What’s wrong with the picture?”. I try to use some nice textures, all those diffuse/AO/reflection/glossiness/normal maps but the materials often suck anyway. Well, they suck because the lighting in the scene is not appropriate. I don’t have much experience in Blender, but the lighting is definitely the thing worth practicing – a lot 🙂