#sims blender tutorial

"Environmental Lighting" won my most recent poll, so let's get right into it!

A few notes before we begin:

I render exclusively in cycles!

This tutorial assumes some basic knowledge of blender

Though this tutorial covers the basics, HDRIs can be used in conjunction with any scene/your built scenes

I decided to focus on environmental and other lighting in this tutorial, since they all kind of go hand in hand.

For this tutorial, I'll be using my recent Cupid Sim. Here's a render of her with no additional lighting:

1. Base lighting

In any full body, single sim render (like lookbooks, for example), I really like to use a glowing base. It grounds the sim a bit and casts some interesting lighting on them.

To do this, I add a circle under their feet by pressing shift+A and selecting circle.

An empty circle will appear, but we need it to be a solid disk, so go into Edit mode (by pressing tab while the circle is selected) then hitting F on the keyboard to fill it.

After that, you can go into the Materials tab and add in color and glow.

Mine is adjusted like this:

And gives this rendered result:

2. HDRIs

HDRIs (High Dynamic Range images) are extremely useful when it comes to environmental lighting, I always use them now to add better/more dynamic lighting to my renders.

HDRIs are 3D/panoramic, which makes them extremely useful.

You can find/download HDRIs online in a few diff places: PolyHaven, AmbientCO, and Blender Market.

There are also several available for FREE using BlenderKit (my preferred method).

So how do you use an HDRI?

We can add HDRIs to our render by navigating to the world tab and changing the color to "environment texture".

I chose this vaporware HDRI from BlenderKit, & here it is with no adjustments, but it's looking a little rough so let's adjust it.

By adding vector nodes, we can adjust how the HDRI behaves. Here I mostly use the Z rotation and the background strength:

Here's the same render with the Z-rotation set to 50, 150, 200, & 250.

You can put in any value for the Z-rotation, this is just an example of how the HDRI turns. This is maybe not the best example of the rotation, but putting her in a forest just didn't feel right lmfaooo, hopefully you can see how the light changes on her depending on the rotation.

You can also adjust the strength of the HDRI. Here's the HDRI (rotated to 150) set at .5 and 1.5 strength:

For this tutorial, my favorite lighting is the HDRI set to 150, and the strength set to .5, like this (this is a rendered image):

3. Transparent HDRIs + Point Lights

But I'm not fully happy with the lighting. I don't love how the HDRI is a bit blurry, so I'm going to set it to be transparent.

To do this, go to the Render Tab, scroll down to the Film option, and check Transparent:

The lighting effect from the HDRI will stay the same, but the background will be transparent.

From here, you can add a background (when I do this, I like adding a plane, & moving/shading it until I'm happy (kinda like this):

NOTE that you have to put the plane far enough behind your sim so it doesn't affect the HDRI lighting too much.

SECOND NOTE You can use this same method to use HDRIs in conjunction with scenes. They can provide the perfect backdrop!

This is still really dark, so I'm going to add three point lights: -Two on either side of her head/shoulders that will be smaller (in radius) and brighter -One in front of her to add actual light (so details aren't lost)

Here's how I set up my lights.

The pink light settings are for the two point lights on the sides The white light setting is for the light in front of her

For a basic render, this is almost good enough for me, but I really like the glowing effect I get in my renders.

To achieve this, we have to go to the compositing tab:

4. Compositing

Full disclosure, my compositing tab is set to glow by default (that's how much I love it), so all of the renders in this tutorial have it turned on.

I use the glare node and set it to fog glow.

Here's my preferred setting:

I prefer the fog glow effect, but bloom, ghost, streaks and star are also options.

Here's a guide to the glare node!

Tbh, I never use any of the other settings, so I'll leave this tutorial here for today.

Here's the final result (with no additional editing):

Hii!! Tysm for your kindness, it means a lot! Blender is definitely intimidating and stressful to learn, and I still feel like I'm way behind other creators who render.

For outlines, I paint them on in Procreate on my iPad using a brush tool that has high motion smoothing enabled. I do it by hand because I prefer to make different colored outlines based on the item I'm outlining rather than have everything be black if that makes sense. I also like to do white/light-colored rim lighting in places too, so for my editing style, doing it by hand just works better for me.

To have them done for you in Blender, I recommend this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqmQjgp5LRc

The downside is that you can only have 1 solid color with it and you can't really fully customize how you want the lines drawn and where. It's sort of like anywhere Blender detects an edge, an outline is drawn. But a lot of my friends use this and their pics turn out nice regardless.

In the picture shown, it's hard to tell if it's the Blender shader or hand-drawn, but I'm pretty sure they used the Blender shader and then drew in lighter lines on the inside of the black with an Overlay/Add/Screen layer mode.

Thanks, and I hope you have a lovely weekend!

Heyo!

There's a few ways (I've found) to accomplish this! I had to actually do a test to try to recreate your issue and I think I see what you mean!

This was my end result, & in the right screenshot you can see that the flat meshes overlap.

When I first adjusted the nodes for each, there was a weird black square blocky "ghosting" that would happen where they overlapped, but after flipping between the material preview and rendered view it just... went away? With another test I also moved one of them veery slight behind the other, which made that ghosting disappear.

A few things to troubleshoot to make sure these processes work properly:

Make sure your nodes for each mesh look like this!

Make sure that your render method under material properties is set to "dithered" (or, if you're in an older blender version, "alpha hashed"

& a bonus setting... under your render properties, you can adjust the transparent value. I think it's 8 by default. 100 is extreme (you don't need to set it that high), but like 15-30 can sometimes help to "smooth out" transparencies.

Rendering seems like an intimidating process to many, and a lot of Simmers feel like they're in the dark and lost about where to even begin with rendering. And gatekeeping definitely doesn't help anyone!

This no-frills tutorial's not entirely comprehensive and assumes that you know some basics of Blender (how to move around, and switch tabs, and use basic tools). It's also not an absolute, perfect tutorial. My shaders and techniques are not perfect at all, and there are many other creators who have way more advanced rendering skills than me, but these are the steps I take for my current renders and they work for beginners. It's also great because it prevents you having to go back into CAS and redoing the Blend setup each time if you want to keep making renders of the same Sim.

GOOGLE SLIDES TUTORIAL: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qI84QstCfa7E-F6b7qzRPuHW_eou_N4d/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=109770128121660962892&rtpof=true&sd=true

Please let me know if anything's missing or confusing. I won't be able to help with every issue (as Blender brings forth many), but if you have a question about something you see in my tutorial in specific, feel free to shoot me a message! Also, if you are one of the more knowledgeable creators, def let me know if there's anything I can do to improve or something I should add to the tutorial.

Thank you to all my friends over the last two years who helped me learn how to render! And to the Simmers who aren't gatekeepers and find the same joy of sharing with the community as I do. I'm also grateful to Simsonico for their Youtube Tutorial, which I recommend viewing.

Hello! Thank you so much! ♥ My settings are pretty generic. If I like how a downloaded scene's render turns out, I often will copy the settings from it. I usually render between 500-1000 samples, but the recent Emeric ones were actually 150 samples because I was lazy lol. These are my standard render settings (under cut so I don't disturb anyone's scrolling experience lol):

more than one sim in blender hi hi! this may be a silly question with a simple answer that i just cant see but i cant for the life of me figure out how to work couple poses in blender, i try adding the pose and it gives them both the same one and i just dont know enough to figure out how to fix it-

It's not a silly question at all and I'm sorry it's taken me a few days to reply to this!

I'll include a link to Part Two of my Basic Render Tutorial that covers posting HERE, but otherwise, let me jump right in to a mini tut:

Here I have my sims in blender, unposed and stacked in a very creepy way lmao:

I haven't yet set them up for posing, so let's do that now.

To do this, select the "pose" option in your outliner under ONE of your sims, then in your layout view, hit "i" on your keyboard and select "location and rotation"

Then you'll see that sim's track show up in your nonlinear animation window.

Do the same for your second sim! Then you should have this:

Now we need to append our poses! Follow the instructions in that basic render tutorial I linked above and export both of the posses.

MAKE SURE YOU EXPORT THE POSES WITH THE PROPER RIGS, I.e. if you're doing a couple pose like I am, make sure you export the female pose on the female rig and the male pose on the male rig.

Like this:

Once your poses are appended in blender, go to the nonlinear animation tab.

If I had to guess, the reason you're posing both at the same time is because you have both tracks selected (as in, both of them are highlighted like this at once).

We want to highlight ONLY ONE, I'm going to pose Ariss first.

So I'll select her track (see how only hers is highlighted?) then Add the pose.

You can see, very creepily lmfao, that Ariss is the only one posed now!

Do the same for your other sim, selecting only their track, and voila:

They're both posed now!

I hope this helps! Please send any more questions my way! & I HAVE A DISCORD NOW!

Hiii, so I can only speak on rendering in Cycles, so that's what I'll speak on.

Some things to play around with would be the radius or sizes of your lights. The smaller the light, the harsher/sharper the shadows. If you want softer shadows, up the radius of your point light or make an area light larger. If you're using a Sun light, increase the angle of it in settings.

I also recommend playing Compositor settings, adding a Glare > Fog Glow node can really emulate that dreamy effect you're looking to achieve.

Color Management modes can also impact the contrast of your photo, which make shadows appear lighter/darker. If you're looking for lighter shadows, you may lean towards Filmic more. I lean more towards AGX because I like my photos having more of a moody contrast.

I also paint some shadows in Procreate after by color picking the Sim's skin (darkest part) and putting the layer on Multiply, Gaussian Blur what you've drawn, smudge out with Blend tool if needed, then lower opacity.

Lastly, when editing, to also get the dreamy, soft look, duplicating your image and gaussian blurring it and adding different layer blend modes to the blurred layer can really add to the overall image. I usually like to use Overlay and Screen (or Add) on lower opacity. This makes everything smoothed out too.

Hopes this helps! Please let me know if you want me to extrapolate on anything.