2.8 Blender Lighting Template for Endless Sky

Template and basic guide to imitate ES-style lighting for 2.8x+ version of blender.

Intro

This is basically a publication of my attempt to imitate the lighting and style of Internal Render engine of 2.7 Blender into 2.8 Blender, not perfect, but should be decent enough. This is made as Blender 2.8 no longer support Blender Internal engine and because of the technique I used, normal light in Blender won't work so I'll also guide you a little bit on how to customize the lighting on your own. (Hint: Just post-process it.)

Disclaimer: These templates are not perfect and are made for those who have no choice but to use Blender 2.8 for whatever reason including stubbornness. If you're not happy with the template I made, feel free to improve it(and share it).

Comparison between two un-post-processed ships rendered in 2.7 and 2.8(With my template) respectively;

How it works

What I used to imitate 2.7 Internal engine is MatCap. What's a MatCap then? It stands for "Material Capture". These MatCaps would be placed on top of your objects and material along with their lighting. Normally it's used by sculpter to get clear and quick response allowing them to see the changes on their model instantly as the MatCaps appears relative to your view/camera.

What I did here is making a custom MatCap and adjusted the shadow until the lighting on the model looks similar to what you can get from Blender Internal render. The MatCap itself is nothing complicated, it's just a 2D picture of a sphere with lighting. Yes, this does mean you can basically make your own Matcap with MS paint or any other art software you prefer. The MatCap I made is simply a sphere rendered with Blender 2.7 with original template setup and some material and light adjustment.

An example of my custom MatCap.

Setting Up (And download link)

So here's how to properly use the templates.

First, download the template you want along with its custom MatCap

For some reason Steam don't trust mega.nz links... f it, the links are in here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H6-picQWLREfiLEr8e5BB5WGvTY9sMn57qKWdfWJYyE/edit?usp=sharing


Templates
Ship Template[mega.nz]
Shipyard Thumbnail Template[mega.nz]
Outfit Template[mega.nz]

MatCaps
Ship MatCap[mega.nz]
Thumbnail MatCap[mega.nz]
Outfits MatCap[mega.nz]

Second, after you downloaded both the template and the appropriate MatCap, open blender and go to "Render Properties" tab on the right (DSLR camera icon). Change the render engine to "Workbench".

Then, (still in Render Prop.) under lighting you'll see that MatCap selected (if not then do it) notice the sphere, on the right of that sphere, click the gear icon.















(It's fine if the your sphere doesn't look like this, it'll soon do(if yours is the ship template))

A new window popped up? Cool, now if you haven't went ahead and did the rest yourself, click the install button that is in the same bar as the word "MatCap", navigate it to where you downloaded the MatCap, select it, press [Install Custom Studio...] button and it's in. Pretty easy isn't it?

Now to actually use the MatCap, just get back to your main screen, click the sphere and select the one you want, the most recent MatCap installs will appear last in the line.(Though, reopening blender will re-sort them by name)

Well that's pretty much it to render with my template properly.

Wait, you noticed no change to your model's lighting in the viewport after changing the MatCap? No worries, MatCap and stuffs in the viewport can be changed independent of the render settings/properties in this menu:

Customizing Lighting and Shadow

Perhaps you want to help me improve the 2.8 template by making the colors and lighting more accurate? Or you just thought the lighting doesn't work for your model and want to make your own MatCap.

Well sure, as I've said already (probably), the MatCap is just a picture, of a sphere with lighting and shading and stuffs. The MatCap I made a just spheres rendered in Blender 2.7. So, you can just put the MatCap I made into any image processor you want and add fake light spots and shading on the image. If you have Blender 2.7 you could also use the original template to render the lighting for the MatCap, but there's not much point to imitate Blender Internal when you already have the real one.

For shadow you could adjust with the shadow slider found in the very menu I showed above. The shadow angle can be changed. Below the shadow slider you can also notice the sliders for [ridge] and [valley], these highlight the edge/high spot and deep "valley" respectively, though too much of any of it would make your image grainy(noise) and you might not want that.

Other than that I mostly suggest you to simply fix the lighting during the post-processing.