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.

—

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

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

Lino Thomas on ArtStation

—

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.

We also have a sneak peek at the upcoming EEVEE course, artistic thinking, and the broader creative patterns behind creating atmosphere, mood, and storytelling with light.

https://www.creativeshrimp.com/free-sample-eevee-lighting – wishlist EEVEE Realistic Lighting & Rendering course (coming soon)

Originally streamed on Thursday, October 30th at 19:00 UTC (14:00 CST)
Hosted by Andres Stephens (Trinumedia)

Check out Trinumedia:
https://www.trinumedia.com/
https://www.trinumedia.com/events/bewithartists
https://www.youtube.com/@trinumedia

The post A Long Chat About Lighting, Style & Creativity (on Trinumedia’s Podcast) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.