Video Tutorial (Full Guide)

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New 2D to 3D Modes in True Depth V3

In addition to the Flat Relief mode, there are two new modes in True Depth version 3: Perspective and 360° HDRI Dome.

• Flat Relief generates, despite its name, a 3D displacement based on a depth map generated from a source 2D image.
• Perspective creates a camera-projection-style 3D scene, stretching into the depth and is useful for environments and cinematic shots
• The 360° HDRI mode creates a dome projection setup for a selected HDRI environment (in one click)

Jump to sections:

Perspective Mode NEW

Seamless PBR Workflow

360° HDRI Studio Modes NEW

3D Printing NEW

Depth-Anything-V2 – Installation (Local, 16-bit patch) NEW

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Flat Relief Mode: True Depth’s Main Blender Workflow

The main mode of using True Depth is still flat relief – or actually a 3D relief generated from a single image. Think Polyhaven textures and PBR workflow. Or capturing heightmaps and other surface properties using photogrammetry. 2D-to-3D gives you a pretty high-quality, close-to-ground-truth heightmap.

How close to ground truth is it?

I saw this question on X/Twitter. Depth maps generated by Depth-Anything-V2 are miles ahead of *any* algorithmic solution. For instance, Materialize app: its displacement output isn’t anywhere near.

Machine-learning-based depth estimation can only be topped by real heightmaps captured via photogrammetry. With the obvious caveat: to photoscan it, it has to exist. You need to have access to it and so on.

Check our photogrammetry course for more info on capturing real PBR maps.

Flat Relief Mode

Click Open Image, store the depth map beside the original image, and hit Generate Depth Map right away. The further away the pixel is, the darker it appears.

Instead of grayscale, you can use fancy color palettes for aesthetic reasons, but they perform a bit worse than grayscale palettes and are not recommended for actual production.

Depth maps are stored in the same folder beside the source files. Once in flat relief mode, simply click Create Mesh and the mesh will appear.

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Lighting for Relief

If you use EEVEE for rendering, enable Raytracing.

Add a stronger key light (sun or area light) to emphasize the shape and relief. One of the best ways to position it is on the opposite side relative to the camera – known as reverse key lighting – which is an axiom of cinematic lighting if you want a more three-dimensional relief.

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True Depth Modifier Properties

Resolution & Subdivisions: Increase the number of subdivisions to make displacement much more detailed, keeping track of the poly count. You can even override this field and input higher values like 7 for extreme detail. If your computer can handle it, pushing subdivisions to 6+ can get you into the millions of polygons.

Thankfully, recent Blender performance improvements have made working at that density much more manageable.

Displacement Frequencies

True Depth splits displacement into base displacement (low frequency) and displacement detail (higher frequency spiky undulations).

Keep both sliders at bay, especially the detailed one, to avoid heavy stretching or spikiness.

Note that base displacement is driven by the depth map, while detail displacement is driven by the color map.

An extra high-frequency bump map is applied in the shader for fine grain (which should also be approached with moderation).

A smooth slider is available to soften the geometry.

Tilt & Distortion Correction

Use the undistortion slider (e.g., set to 1) to correct tilted or horizontally skewed geometry.

Some images have distortion the slider can’t fully fix on its own – for those, pre-correcting the tilt in Photopea or another image editor before generating the depth map will usually give you a better result.

Modifier Stack and Converting to Mesh

All interface settings are hooked up to modifiers. You can disable them individually to see what each one does: subdivision surface, base displacement, then detail displacement etc. The last one, TD Base, is what makes the mesh manifold – or watertight – which matters later for 3D printing.

If you’re happy with the result, right-click and select Convert to Mesh to collapse the stack into a regular 3D object.

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Seamless PBR Workflow with True Depth

Start with seamless source textures.

How to make any texture seamless?

Gimp: Filters -> Map -> Tile Seamless. Simplistic, but it works.

Photopea: offset a copy of the image and paint over the seam with a soft brush to erase it.

Photoshop: generative fill to extend the texture (Firefly has not been scraping the internet for this, as far as I know? Though that’s a separate discussion), then content-aware fill to paint over the resulting seam.

How to make a height map seamless?

Even when created from a seamless source (color) texture, depth maps usually aren’t inherently seamless.

Use True Depth’s Make Seamless feature to remove the annoying seams that ruin any attempt to tile the displacement.

You can prove it worked by duplicating the mesh with Shift+D and placing two meshes nearby.

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PBR Shader for True Depth textures

I made a PBR setup for using maps generated by the True Depth add-on and you can download it from our Gumroad for free. It replicates the way True Depth organizes its shaders (the base vs detail displacement split and more).

PBR Shader for Truedepth – Gumroad (Free)

• Choose the base color texture and set its color space to sRGB
• Choose the depth texture and set its color space to Non-Color (since it’s height data)
• Control base displacement strength via the Displacement node
• Control the detail displacement in the Add node
• Control the micro detail (bump) via the Bump node
• There’s also a Mapping node included to scale and move the texture (so you can see how seamless it is indeed)

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Perspective Mode – V3

Perspective is a new mode, introduced in V3. Compared to Flat Relief, it creates the environment-like depth, which spans much further into the z-depth of the scene. Think camera-projection and pseudo-3d cinematic shots.

Render: The Hallway by Gleb Alexandrov

Select a source photo (like a city photo from Unsplash) and hit Generate Depth Map.

Before creating the mesh, choose Perspective as the mode, set the field of view to roughly correspond to the lens focal length, and set mapping to Inverse for realistic results.

Set grid resolution, choose Shadeless if you want the original image without extra shading, and press Create 3D Scene.

Scroll down and click Setup Camera Projection to create projection and view cameras.

If the image looks washed out due to Blender’s default AgX or Filmic view transforms, set it to Standard for a 1:1 match.

You can select specific parts of the environment in edit mode (like floors) to apply different materials using True Depth’s surface presets: matte (default and safest), glossy floor, or mirror/metal.

The more reflective the material, the easier it is to break the illusion, so matte holds up best if you’re adding multiple lights.

Mapping (yeah, again). Linear mapping gives a flatter, more contracted, tamer result that’s easier to work with but looks less realistic once you dolly-zoom into the scene. Inverse mapping looks stretched in the viewport but way more correct (read: realistic) from the camera’s perspective.

Grid resolution and detail displacement are connected: add enough resolution, then crank up the detail level.

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360° Dome & HDRI Studio Modes in True Depth

The biggest flaw of the vanilla HDRI setups is that 3D objects look floating and not integrated.

Achieving proper dome projection manually (to help ground the objects within the virtual scene) requires custom shader nodes.

HDRI dome projection – like this one (Gumroad freebie).

Ideally, it also requires a shadow catcher – though those don’t work in EEVEE yet.

HDRI Studio

True Depth’s new HDRI studio mode handles all of this out of the box.

Select your HDRI image (no depth map needed), switch mode to 360 degrees and HDRI studio, and click Create HDRI Dome.

Tweak live parameters like ground sheen, heading, capture height, and horizon fit – these vary a lot depending on the HDRI, so testing is the best approach.

Note that ground sheen needs to be explicitly enabled for wet-patch effects to work.

For EEVEE renders, enable ray tracing and adjust Fast GI approximation for realistic ambient occlusion / heavier contact shadow; namely, adjust the Thickness (in both Fast GI and Screen-tracing panels). Turning off denoising also helps keep EEVEE’s GI sharp.

A few extra details worth knowing: you can hide the backdrop and show only the plate (Cycles only), which is handy for compositing.

You can also reduce the light output or diffuse light contribution.

Depth Sphere

For HDRIs with objects close to the camera (like caves or garages), convert EXR files to PNG proxies first in Blender’s image editor. ‘Save as Render’ and choose a display-referred format, for instance PNG.

Download HDRI on Polyhaven.

Load the proxy, set mode to 360 degrees dome / depth sphere, set mapping to inverse, adjust far distance, increase grid resolution (e.g., to 2048), and hit Create to approximate the environment.

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Extra Features in True Depth V3

Video Mode

Select an image sequence or video file (like an MP4), uncheck Save as Video to prevent compression from ruining it, adjust the undistort factor, and add flicker-free depth.

Once processed, use the frame sequence as a displacement map.

I imagine it can be very useful outside Blender – in DaVinci Resolve for instance (I know that the Studio version has own tools for generating depth maps, but anyway).

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3D Printing Tab

Use the new 3D Printing settings menu at the bottom to convert models into guaranteed watertight print models and save them as STL files.

The Lithophane section allows you to set max thickness, add a raised frame, check Stand Upright, and create a lithophane – a thin translucent material that reveals textures when lit from behind.

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Depth Anything V2

True Depth uses the 2nd generation of the DepthAnything machine learning model for monocular depth estimation.

Depth-Anything-V2 is a widely used monocular depth estimation model, capable of predicting depth from a single image.

Free demo on Hugging Face

p.s. Resolution of the free demo is limited to 518px and color depth to 8-bit (256 grey levels). When used for displacement, it results in a stair-stepping effect.

Depth-Anything-V2 Training Set

• It was trained on labeled synthetic data (photoscans), but also on 62+ mln unlabeled images – some of which were scraped from the internet (Google Landmarks etc).
• All it learns is how to estimate depth, not generate artworks or imitate artist styles
• There are also potential licensing issues, so make sure to do your research before using it commercially. For instance, the ViT-S (small) model is cleared for commercial use, but the ViT-B (base) and ViT-L (large) aren’t.

TLDR: This is a bit of an uncharted territory, so do your research before using it in commercial projects.

Some AI researchers question whether the use of Google Landmarks and so on can be considered fair game for training, so it’s not a settled debate.

The consensus among 3D artists, however, seems to point in this direction: generating depth maps can’t be solved algorithmically, so a machine-learning based approach, even through not entirely transparent, still produces a genuinely useful tool.

As Macroblock put it: “Humans should not be spending time hand painting depth maps from 2d images.”

Yet, Sam Krug raises a valid counterpoint too:

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Local Installation & 16-Bit Tweak

To use Depth Anything, you don’t even have to own the True Depth add-on. For instance, as we’ve mentioned, it’s available on Hugging Face so you can compute depth there for free. The caveats are low resolution and 8-bit output, which lead to (very visible!) banding when used for displacement.

Alternatively, you can use it locally by downloading it from GitHub to crank up the resolution.

The local installation process may seam a bit… emm… technical – if you haven’t done that before – but it’s actually fairly easy.

Here’s the commands I used for cloning the official repository via Git (in Windows cmd or command prompt).

Here’s the exact command I used for generating depthmaps locally on my Windows PC: C:\Users\[YourUserName]\Depth-Anything-V2>python run.py –encoder vitl –img-path [here goes your image path] –outdir depth_output –pred-only –grayscale –input-size 1540

Modified run.py for 16-bit Output

Also, I tweaked the run.py file to unlock the 16-bit output, which is crucial for rendering smooth displacement (without the awful stepping).

Needless to say, I did that with the help of LLMs.

[Modified run.py file]

P.S. Depth-Anything-V2 does support 16-bit files output out of the box – but for some reason it isn’t exposed in the run.py by default, as for today.

There are custom forks that do something similar, too.

https://github.com/petermg/Depth-Anything-V2_16bitPNG_Touchly1 – I haven’t personally tested it, though

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Depth Map Resolution and VRAM

The issue with fitting all the details into a high-resolution depth map is that it requires a lot of VRAM. I ran out of VRAM trying to calculate a 2048 depth map on my 11GB GPU locally.

By the way, True Depth works around this issue by splitting the displacement pass into two: base displacement and detail. This way, the depth pass doesn’t have to be too crisp – hence no crazy VRAM requirements. We discuss it in more detail further (no pun intended).

And just for posterity: True Depth renders depth in 16-bit.

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How to Install True Depth

After downloading it from SuperHive, go to Preferences, Add-ons, and simply drag the zip archive over there then click OK.

If you are updating True Depth, make sure to uninstall the previous version first and wipe out the entire folder with its remnants. In Windows, it’s usually located under C:\Users\[Your User]\True Depth…, or you can check the path in the Add-ons settings.

Next, you have to install the dependencies for CPU and GPU. Click Install, let it go through the process, and do the same for GPU. It may look dreadful if you haven’t done that before. After that’s done, reopen Blender.

Actually, closing and reopening Blender is *really important*. Don’t skimp on this.

If anything goes wrong at this stage – some dependencies like torch.py or whatever don’t want to get properly installed, for instance – also close and open Blender and try again.

Once you open the sidebar and scroll down using the mouse wheel, you should be able to find True Depth there.

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Download the Models

The models shown there have to be installed too. Previously, you had to download them manually from GitHub, but now you can just click Download Model to get them downloaded. I grab them all, including the large one.

Officially, the large model and base model are for non-commercial use only, while the small one is available for commercial use – though that’s a bit of uncharted territory, so do your research.

Also, technically the large model produces sharper, more precise results, but the smallest model is also pretty good and definitely usable.

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Conclusion: Is True Depth for Blender Worth It?

True Depth brings machine learning-based monocular depth estimation straight into Blender. While you can compute solid depth maps for free online via Hugging Face or locally via the official GitHub repo, True Depth still earns my recommendation due to its Blender integration and extra conveniences.

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F.A.Q.

Is True Depth free?

No, True Depth is a paid Blender add-on. The underlying AI model it’s built on, Depth-Anything-V2, is free to use on its own, either online via Hugging Face or locally via GitHub

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Can I use True Depth / DepthAnything commercially?

It depends on the model size. Officially, the small DepthAnything model is available for commercial use, while the base and large models are non-commercial only.

Licensing here is still a bit of an evolving area, so it’s worth checking the current terms before using it in paid work.

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Does True Depth work in EEVEE?

Yes. True Depth’s shader setups are render-engine agnostic and work in both Cycles and EEVEE. Actually, shader-based displacement works just fine in EEVEE (thanks to Blender devs). However, dynamic micropolygon tessellation only works in Cycles.

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Links and Credits

True Depth Add-on

True Depth on SuperHive/Blender Market (affiliate link)

Blender

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Depth Anything (Model & Resources)

Depth Anything V2 – official GitHub repo

Depth Anything V2 – free online demo on Hugging Face

My tweaked 16-bit run.py file (65,000 grey levels)

Other 16-bit output fork on GitHub

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Custom Shader Setups

Free Seamless PBR shader setup (.blend file) for True Depth maps

Free HDRI dome-projection shader node setup (Cycles & EEVEE, non-True Depth method)

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Software & Tools Mentioned

PureRef

GIMP

Photopea

Adobe Photoshop (generative fill / content-aware fill / Firefly)

DaVinci Resolve (mentioned as a possible use for video-mode depth maps)

Poly Haven (referenced re: tileable/seamless textures)

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Image & Asset Credits

Rocky images used in the Flat Relief demo (Unsplash, CC0):

Unsplash

andrey-nuraliev-875U3YejtnA-unsplash
jan-kopriva-uGbXPo31KGs-unsplash
moon-moons-hnDUxPJ9hMc-unsplash
tasha-k-F34cXeZPSo4-unsplash
thomas-ho-jukvktMOFv0-unsplash
zoshua-colah-yJjF7hiKsdY-unsplash

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City photos used in the Perspective mode demo (Unsplash, CC0)):

grigorii-shcheglov-F3CVP9qrW9Q-unsplash
kristen-morith-IWpd8KixceA-unsplash
sander-crombach-Zst8CE0bD9c-unsplash
tommy4gsus-new-york-6578473

Space station hatch (CC0, public domain, NASA)

Cave Wall HDRI used in the Depth Sphere demo

Gleb Alexandrov, Artstation

Sea shore animation used in the Video mode demo

Space station corridor: Anton Dmitriev, Artstation

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Other Monocular 2D to 3D Tools and Apps (Diffusion-based)

Sparc3D

Sparc3D tutorial

Another bas-relief depth map generation tutorial (with the comparison to Materialize app – algorithmic vs machine-learning)

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Music

Ambient track: Coffee Jam 001 by Creative Shrimp (unpublished yet. ping us if you need it. Gleb)

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Creative Shrimp

Website: https://www.creativeshrimp.com/

YT video

Newsletter

Discord – for comments and discussion

Thank you for reading!

– Gleb

The post True Depth Blender Add-on: A Complete Guide (V3) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Discover how to manipulate indirect lighting bounces within Blender’s EEVEE engine (in 5.1+). This tutorial showcases new tools for controlling global illumination intensity to enhance realism in real-time scenes.

Here’s the old workaround (which is still pretty cool) – if you want to check it out.

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Links:

EEVEE: Add light path intensity controls #153340 (Blender developer forum)

Download the Pizza Delivery scene by Lino Thomas (for Cycles)

Lino Thomas on ArtStation

EEVEE Realistic Lighting and Rendering course

Complete Lighting Courses Bundle

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You May Also Like:

How to Light 3D Portraits in Blender (Photographic Lighting Techniques)

In this tutorial (video and article) we’ll look at a mix of practical Blender techniques and timeless lighting principles used in cinematic character lighting – things like light direction, falloff, focal length and how to use HDRIs effectively.

Reading time: 15 minutes
Video length: 24 minutes

The post New Blender 5.1 EEVEE Feature – GI Intensity appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Reading time: 15 minutes
Video length: 24 minutes

Introduction

This lighting tutorial is split into two sections:

1. The YouTube video – a free chapter of the EEVEE course. A blend between EEVEE techniques and applied lighting foundations
2. A written article: general photographic lighting tips and tricks for 3D portraits

Huge thanks to Yaw Onyina for the permission to use his astonishing Tribal Character 3D model (more precisely, .blend file) for this lighting tutorial.

Yaw is a medical doctor, 3D artist and data scientist crafting stunning portraits in Blender.

Download Project Files

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Character Lighting in Blender | EEVEE (4 Difficulty Levels)

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Lighting Tips and Tricks for 3D Portraits

A theory extract

No matter the render engine – EEVEE or Cycles – here are the character lighting tips that will help you create cinematic-looking portrait shots.

Front light is flat

As a rule of thumb, If the light sits between the camera and the face – directly in line with the camera – the face goes flat. No nose shadow, no cheekbone. Think passport photo, but in the worst possible way. Of course, frontal isn’t always bad – Breezeh built an entire liminal world around the on-camera flash (even though not exactly for portraits).

Usually though, it’s worth moving the key light off-axis. Even a few degrees. Suddenly there’s shape.

Actually, the original light placement in that .blend by Yaw featured exactly that type of light direction. A bit fronty, yet slightly off-axis.

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Focal length changes the face

It’s a camera decision, not a lighting one, yet focal length (and the distance to the subject) shapes the portrait just as much as where you put the light.

Short focal lengths (12-35mm) usually also means that you pushed the camera closer to the subject. And close cameras distort – the nose gets bigger, the forehead pushes forward and so on. When extreme, you get the potato face.

Long focal lengths (85mm and above) – aka the camera is far away – compress everything. It flattens the spatial relationship between the nose and the ears. It can make faces look more like faces. Arguably, it can look more appealing.

In 3D it’s worth trying different focal lengths, because the same light at 24mm vs 120mm reads completely differently on the face. The shadows and reflections land in different places and so on.

Quick tip: the lens compression effect really clicks when you see it animated. Search for “focal length compression comparison” on YouTube – watching it move can be the aha moment.

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Big light = soft shadow. Small light = hard shadow

Large area light close to the subject: soft, gradual, flattering shadows. Small or distant light: harsh, crisp, contrasted shadows. For portraits, you almost always want soft. You can always pull back, but start soft.

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Falloff

When a light is really close to the subject, brightness drops dramatically from face to chest. When it’s far away, everything gets lit uniformly. Neither is wrong! But pushing the light(s) too far away can flatten it out. And we usually try to avoid flat.

A bit of falloff adds life to a render.

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Skin subsurface scattering

Skin isn’t opaque. Light enters the surface, bounces around under it, exits slightly tinted – warm, red. That’s what makes a face look like a face. Without SSS dialed in, no lighting setup in the world will save you. With SSS, even a single-light setup can look gorgeous.

Quick tip: In EEVEE, realtime subsurface scattering work wonders not only for skin, but also for… alien skin.

Or simulating translucency in plants.

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Try single-light setup

Before lightmaxxing, try nailing a single area light. If anything, it’s a great exercise. Multiple lights can muddy the waters and even fight each other.

Just one light, placed slightly above and to the side, can produce a portrait that blows people away. The shadows – especially the soft shadows – are doing the sculpting.

Despair – Portrait by Yaw Onyina

Quick tip: The subtle secondary light bounces created by Raytracing, and SSS add nuance to the single-light schemes. So it’s never truly one-light.

Quick tip #2: not all lights are the same: a gridded studio lights with half-frost diffusion are way different from… some other types of lights. In 3D too. The ‘Single-light’ setups are about light qualities.

There are add-ons for Blender which imitate real-world photographic lamps with different modifiers: grids, various softboxes and so on. Light Wrangler for instance.

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Choose HDRi with a strong key

When using 360° HDRi environments for lighting your characters, find a strong key light within the HDRI. It can be anything. A big and bright opening in this Hangar HDRi, for instance.

E.g. Choosing this HDRi, I don’t care about airplanes. I care about big bright areas.

That’s your key light. Treat it exactly like positioning a studio light. Spin the panorama until the light sculpts the face from an interesting angle – off-axis, with shape to it. And don’t limit yourself to Z rotation only. Tilting on X or Y can throw up light directions that feel genuinely cinematic.

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Decouple background and light exposure

Physical accuracy and ‘looking cinematic’ are not the same thing. A physically correct HDRI result often gives you a blown-out backdrop or an underlit face. So decouple them (using the Light Path node) – control the background brightness separately from the light hitting your character.

Slightly muted backdrop, well-lit subject. That’s often the sweet spot. Just don’t push it so far that the shot starts to look lit (as cinematographers say).

It’s a common practice, in cinematography, to expose for the background – to make sure it isn’t blown out, and then push more light onto the talent.

Quick tip: Patrick O’Sullivan channel – Wandering DP has many great lighting breakdowns. “Exposing for the sky” is a recurring topic there.

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The double HDRI trick

Use one HDRI for the backdrop – the story, the location, the mood. Use a completely different one to actually light the character. They don’t need to perfectly match visually (however, it’s good if they’re in the same ballpark as for their colors). What matters is that the lighting HDRI has good light quality and direction (read: the well-defined key light). A hangar door. An overcast sky. Whatever casts the right shape on the face.

Pick the backdrop for atmosphere. Pick the lighting HDRI for how it sculpts.

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Match your lights to the environment

When you go Full Cinematic Setup and layer studio lights (all these Blender lights) on top of an HDRI, color match them. Cool environment? Cool lights. Greenish scene? Your fill can be quite green and it’ll sit naturally – the HDRI will motivate it. Sample colours from the HDRI. Use them as your palette.

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Eye light / Catch light

Add an eye light. Eyes without a catch light can look glassy. A small area light, placed far enough to register as a glint is enough.

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Add a kicker

A kicker – or backlight, or rim light – is a strong light placed behind and to the side of the character. It traces the edge of the head, the shoulder, the jaw. It helps to separate the character from the background. With it, the subject pops.

It’s not that you always need backlight. But it can be super effective. The trick is motivation. The kicker needs to feel like it could exist in the scene – a window behind the character or just a bright spot on the backdrop.

You can even start with the backlight – making it a Reverse Key Light setup. And then wrap the light around the back of the head, onto the face, using a bounce card or an area light.

The trick is motivation. The kicker needs to feel like it could exist in the scene – a window behind the character, or just a light blob in the background plate.

Quick tip: It works beautifully in real-world cinematography, outside CG, when you have just one lamp, but still want to have both the kicker and the key light.

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Haze

A thin layer of volume scatter gives the scene depth in a way that’s immediately cinematic. My outie is a cinematographer and he’s very generous with using haze machines on set. Haze helps to pop the character out of the background.

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Shallow Depth of Field

Adding depth of field can help make a portrait feel more photographic and dreamy.

A very shallow depth of field (low f-stop, say f/1.4–f/2 or in Blender, or even crazy low values like f/0.1) puts almost – everything except the tiny sliver of depth – out of focus. It can look truly cinematic.

Experiment with the bokeh ratio for vintage lens weirdness or an anamorphic squeeze.

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Post-pro and Color Management

Not a part of lighting per se, post-pro and color management settings are not to be neglected.

View Transform in the Color Management settings: AgX or Filmic are solid defaults. ACES 2.0 has more punch and contrast. Avoid anything that oversaturates highlights if you’re going for photorealism – Khronos PBR works well for product shots where you need to preserve brand colors, but tends to make skin look like it’s been Instagrammed.

Film grain / sensor noise: a small amount grounds the image. Like It’s the silver halide reacting to light thing. Chromatic aberration: Tiny amounts only – just enough to push that ‘analog photography feel’ further.

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Start with one light. Get it right first.

Everything above is additive. A single well-placed light with decent SSS settings – or a single HDRi rotated the right way – will beat a messy ten-light rig every time. Learning the fundamentals – direction, size, falloff, skin response is still what makes a portrait work.

Once that foundation is nailed, adding extra lights becomes a creative choice rather than trying to fix a flat-looking image.

Actually the light setups in Yaw Onyina’s character portraits are usually quite simple – yet they work beautifully. Not least because the models themselves are exceptionally well made – but tsss… that’s another story.

Desheveled Sailor by Yaw Onyina – 3d Generalist and Medical Doctor

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Bonus EEVEE tips

Turn off denoising and Fast GI for portrait work

Two Eevee render settings that quietly ruin HDRI portrait quality: denoising and Fast GI approximation. Denoising smooths things out, but it also smears fine detail – skin pores, hair strands, contact shadows. Switch it off and the image gets crispier in a good way.

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Environment Shadow Threshold

Fine tuning the Shadow Threshold in the Environment settings can have an interesting effect. Higher threshold means softer, more ambient lighting. And lower threshold means harsher shadows.

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Shadow jitter: the microshadows

When you use a soft area light, turn on shadow jitter – both in the light settings and in the global render settings. Without it, you lose the tiny shadows under the nose, along the eyelids, beneath the chin and so on. Those microshadows are what make a face look… more photographic.

For sharp, small light sources like a sun lamp, jitter doesn’t matter as much – it’s the big soft lights where you really feel the difference.

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Links and Resources

HDRIs and Textures

Polyhaven – HDRIs

Free CC0 HDRIs up to 16K. One of the best sources for lighting environments (used throughout the video – South Africa outdoor, workshop interior, hangar).

Blender

Official Blender download

EEVEE

EEVEE Realistic Lighting and Rendering course

Post-processing and Color Grading

Free minimal post-processing setup for Blender’s compositor

Courses

CreativeShrimp.com/courses – Deep-dive Blender courses on Eevee, photoreal lighting, and rendering. That’s us

Cinematography

Wandering DP – cinematography lighting breakdowns

Lighting Techniques

Reverse Key Lighting – Creative Shrimp tutorial

Light Falloff – Creative Shrimp short

Photography Inspiration

Breezeh – flash photography aesthetic (liminal walks)

Steve McCurry

Richard Avedon

Joey L.

Dan Winters

Edward Weston

Hyperrealist Art Inspiration

Alyssa Monks

Gottfried Helnwein

Books

Direction and Quality of Light – Neil Van Niekerk

Commercial Photographer’s Master Lighting Guide – Robert Morrissey

Light Science and Magic – an Introduction to Photographic Lighting – Fil Hunter

Master Lighting Guide for Portrait Photographers – Cristopher Grey

Credits

Yaw Onyina – the author of the Tribal Character model

Photontown Studio – Omar Hewady and Ahmed Naguib’s studio. Facial animation specialists. They made the animation in this video and honestly, they nailed it.

The post How to Light 3D Portraits in Blender (Photographic Lighting Techniques) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

We completely rewrote the core rendering logic of Dust Particles+, switching to point-based sprites with virtual UV mapping. Expect massive performance gains for both the Free and Pro versions.

In this video:

• What makes Geometry Nodes particles so powerful
• Why AI-generated motion graphics hit a wall fast
• Dust Particles+ 1.3 features (including 3d presets and BIRBS!)
• The new rendering architecture behind the 1.3 performance gain

Big thanks to Shahzod Boyhonov aka Specoolar for helping us with the virtual UV mapping for point primitives.

Get Dust Particles+ v1.3 on Gumroad

Get Dust Particles+ v1.3 on Superhive

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Dust Particles 1.3 Changelog:

Lite & Pro

• Changed from camera-facing planes to points with virtual UV mapping (5-10x faster)
• Scale with bounding box (there was a request to bring that back)
• Transparency variation (in addition to emission variation)
• Dithered alpha option
• Cast shadow option
• Bug fixes and optimisations
• New thumbnails

Pro only

• Custom 3D Objects; birds, bees, flies, moths, leaves, papers, clumps, raindrop – each with its own geometry nodes control in the modifier panel
• Added ‘Use texture color’ option to preserve more varied texture colors on some of the objects (e.g. birds and bees)
• 3D Object deformation options (good for floating bags and underwater stuff)
• Align rotation to direction
• Random rotation amount (should work for 2d and 3d)
• Particles following curves can now be influenced by the curves radius and tilt

The post Dust Particles+ 1.3 is a Game Changer (5-10x FASTER) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

No hassle. Just the essentials.

Download for Free

How to Use?

• Open the .blend file
• Load your EXR
• Tweak the nodes for a quick color-grading pass.

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Let us know what you’d want to see improved in this setup!

And check the Blender to Resolve freemium course if you want to see an alternative workflow – in DaVinci Resolve.

The post Minimal Post-pro Setup for Blender | Free appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

While AI-based tools like Sparc3D or Hunyuan 3D can generate genuinely impressive results from a single photo, they often rely on credits, paywalls, and non-so-transparent processing of data. In this video, we strip it down to basics: a smartphone, free software, measurement-based photogrammetry.

Free Photogrammetry Software

RealityScan Mobile

Agisoft Texture De-lighter

And of course, Blender is a hub for assembling, editing and previewing photoscanned content.

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Photogrammetry: Best Practices and What Camera to Choose

The capturing practices described in this tutorial still apply to mobile photoscanning, so it could be worth (re)watching.

And here’s the basic guide answering the question of “what camera to choose for photogrammetry”. Or, understood more broadly – what makes capturing device better or worse for the purpose of capturing photographic data.

If you haven’t heard the term spatial fidelity before, make sure to watch this video.

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Photogrammetry Course

If you’d like to go deeper into DSLR-based photogrammetry, advanced capture techniques, and desktop RealityScan workflows (again, way more advanced), check out our full Photogrammetry course.

On Superhive

On Gumroad

For this week only (till the 3rd of March) it’s -25% OFF (Winter Sale).

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Sparc3D: An Alternative 3d-from-image Method (AI)

In this video, we have explored an alternative 3D reconstruction method – represented by SPARC3D here – and discussed what makes it stand out, along with its potential impact on asset creation and 3D workflows.

The post 100% Free Mobile Photogrammetry Workflow: RealityScan appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Cinematic Lighting Remastered on Superhive

Cinematic Lighting Remastered on Gumroad

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What’s New in Remastered?

Here’s a changelog for the updated Cinematic Lighting (v 1.3, 2026).

TLDR:

• Our foundational lighting course – updated and remastered for Blender 5.x (course version 1.3)
• Free update for existing users
• Over 2 hours of brand-new content: Sea Shore (Cinematic Outdoor Lighting)
• Many hours re-recorded from scratch
• Completely remade Post-production Essentials and Monastery Dungeon chapters
• Blender 5.x-related inserts into original videos from Minerals, Robo and other chapters
• Updated Project Files (for Blender 5.0 and higher)
• More lighting theory
• Improved flow and user experience.

Worth re-downloading and re-watching (especially the new and reworked chapters), even if you’ve watched the original one.

Full changelog (v 1.3):

• The videos, especially from the Minerals and Robo chapters are supplemented with the Blender
  5.x inserts dealing with the changed / new features like Light Source Temperature and so on. The
  inserts are seamlessly integrated into the videos – re-rendered and subtitled anew.
• The folder structure is optimized. New, clearer naming conventions.
• Improvements to the overall flow of the course.
  The Light Groups section was moved from the Robo chapter to Bonuses – to make the learning
  experience more streamlined, e.g. moving from the Robo character lighting straight to the new
  Monastery Dungeon chapter.
• An improved cross-referencing of tutorials (from within other tutorials).
• More theory and lighting foundations peppered around the videos.
• Note: No DLSS denoising for Cycles mentioned yet – waiting for this feature to mature and the
  NVidia licensing issues sorted out. Will be covered in a separate video.

Videos Info

Intro

• A new introduction video (v 1.3)

Minerals

• Minerals: new explainer of Cycles vs Eevee differences.
• Minerals: a reworked section on the Principled BSDF material properties in the context of
  lighting (“Lighting and Materials”).
• Minerals: the Subsurface Scattering update. The fix to the .blend file in the project files.
• The new view transforms comparison (ACES, Khronos etc).
• A new anisotropy explainer
• Animated Dust Particles mention

Post-processing Essentials (Chapter 01b) – Re-recorded from scratch

• New content: +1h02min
• A new, Blender 5.x-based workflow for post-processing in the compositor and the color
  management panels.
• A mini-collection of EXRs for practicing color correction

Robo

• Light Ratios section expanded. How to measure light ratios (15:1, 2:1 and so on) sampling the
  pixel intensity.
• Beam shape spread extra
• Light linking mention
• Light temperature 5.x
• A minor update to the volume section
• Animated particles mention
• View Transforms comparison
• IMPORTANT: The entire Light Groups section moved to a new BONUS folder.

Monastery Dungeon – Environment Lighting in Eevee

• New content: +1h10min
• Completely remade for Blender 5.x and supplemented with the extended theory parts and new
  techniques for illuminating enclosed spaces.
• New theory: radial and linear falloff; room as an inverted sphere;
• Real-time rendering primer

Warehouse – Environment Lighting in Cycles

• Flat vs Cinematic lighting in enclosed spaces – explainer
• View transforms comparison
• Volume: density and anisotropy
• New post-pro nodes (Tune Image in 5.x and more) and color management settings update

Night Lighting extension

• Minor tweaks (pretty much no significant changes)

Sea Shore – Cinematic Outdoor Lighting – a brand new chapter

• New content: +1h22min
• Learn the impactful outdoor lighting workflows which use the built-in Sky Texture – Multiple
  Scattering – and a custom-built multilayer lighting setup.
• The project files: Alembic-baked fluid sim (FLIP Fluids); 1 and 48 frames; no add-ons required.
• The extended baked animation is available via Google Drive

• Added references to the EEVEE Realistic Lighting and Rendering course for context.
• A new folder, YOUTUBE. Some of our relevant lighting tutorials from YouTube are now bundled in. Included is a video on navigating the course content by searching in the subtitle files.
• A new folder: BONUS. The Light Groups section has been moved to BONUS.

• All project files put up to date and prepared for Blender 5.0 and higher.
• New subtitles (En) generated and manually edited for all videos.
• Changes to the product pages on Superhive and Gumroad.
• Updated total duration (13+ hours, up from 9+).
• An updated ‘x- BONUS 02 MISC -x’ folder – extra images and videos
• A new ‘xx START HERE 2026 xx’ folder
• The full changelog written.

The post Cinematic Lighting – Updated and Remastered for Blender 5.x (2026) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

This technique involves rendering your scene with and without ray tracing, then using the “Difference” blend mode to isolate the indirect lighting pass. Once extracted, you can mix it back with full control, allowing you to push EEVEE’s visuals (namely, irradiance or global illumination) beyond its default limits.

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Download the amazing Pizza Delivery scene by Lino Thomas (for Cycles):

https://www.patreon.com/c/LinoThomas/

Lino Thomas on ArtStation

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Full EEVEE Lighting and Rendering course:

Superhive

Gumroad

The post The Eevee Ray Tracing Hack That Shouldn’t Exist appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

It’s for those who want to produce stunningly realistic lighting right up there with Cycles and other path-tracing engines in Blender 5.x – at a fraction of the render time.

Superhive

Gumroad

The post Our New Course is Out! Here’s the Trailer appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

Wishlist our course : https://www.creativeshrimp.com/free-sample-eevee-lighting

Lighting and rendering in all shots: Gleb Alexandrov

Modeling, production: Aidy Burrows

All shots rendered in EEVEE, Blender 5.0, Vulkan

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Character model by Yaw Onyina

A folder with the images from the demo reel (kind of a press kit if you want to share it on social platforms): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZOFtwj8B94DwLvDDzLpKiKYN4GtSYw5S?usp=sharing

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Credits

Wirtualne Muzea Małopolski, CC0 and Creative Commons attribution assets on Sketchfab

DemNikoArt and Marlon Nunez – the Alien Monster collab

Lino Thomas – Sci-fi Pizza Delivery scene (patreon.com/LinoThomas)

Lech Sokołowski – Chocofur Library for Arch Vis

Freesound.org

Mārtiņš Upītis, Gints Zilbalodis and the entire ‘Flow’ team

Yaw Onyina – Tribal Character model

Omar Hewady, Ahmed Naguib (Photon Town) – facial animation

Kitbash Sci-Fi Building Hardsurface Vol 03 by cgextend

Albin Merle – NASA ACES Spacesuit

Pavel Matoušek – Green Wreck car model

Morbase on Sketchfab: Tholos do Escoural model (CC0)

SuperLuminal render farm

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Special thanks to:

Blender Institute and developers

Sebastian Mattukat

Jan van den Hemel

Seth Ruthledge

Kaizoe

Vaik Nay

George Rebeiz

Sreliata

Jordan Cain

sorashido

celestia | on hiatus @notyourclaude

Ian Hubert

Andrew Price

Nick Stath

Jonas Dichelle

Lord Odin

Kyokaz

Rahul Chandwaney

Samuel Krug

Daniel Bystedt

Spot’s Kitchen

Andres Stephens (Trinumedia)

CypherPoet

Alyx

PJZ

Alena Alexandrova

RDCsanctvs

Jonathan Lampel

Also, huge thanks to our wonderful Creative Shrimp community!

The Course Coming (Very) Soon!

Wishlist : https://www.creativeshrimp.com/free-sample-eevee-lighting

The post EEVEE: Realistic Rendering Reel (Blender 5.0, Vulkan) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.