In this lesson video, we are going to continue discussing about the viewport shedding modes. This time we will focus on the look death mode, also known as the material preview mode. You can access this mode by clicking on this button up here. The name look death is actually an abbreviation from the words loop development. It is a viewport shading mode designed specifically for tweaking materials as you can get an instant preview of your material settings in the viewport. If you use the wireframe mode, or the solid mode, you will not be able to see the changes you make on the material.
Because as we discussed earlier, these two modes don't use the materials to display 3d objects surfaces in the viewport. If you click on a shading option, you can see that it has several settings that you can tweak. The most obvious one will be this sphere. If you click on it, you can just read environment lighting you want to use in the viewport. These environments spheres are actually panoramic image files stored in x bar format. If you open the blender installation folder, you will see a subfolder named data files.
Inside it, you will see studio lights folder and then inside it again, there is a folder called world. In here we can see the actual xR files used for the environment lighting. Besides xR Blender also supports HDR file format. You can try opening one of these files using Krita. For example, this one studio dot x bar. As you can see, this is a panoramic image stored in the XR file format.
What I mean about panoramic is basically you can wrap the image on a sphere and it will look good. Now you might be wondering, why not just use JPEG or PNG Why use xR? Well, EXR is basically a high range image format similar to HDR format, or cameras roll file formats. Unlike ordinary eight bits, JPEG or PNG file formats that we commonly see in the web xR file format able to contain a wider range of lighting information, so it is better at preserving the real world lighting condition. That is why effects are an HDR files are commonly used in computer graphics as light sources. Now, if you want to add your own image as a look dev environment preset, you can click this gear icon button here.
And then in the loop they have section you can click this install button. Just use your xR or HDR file that you want to use. I have one here download from hdri heaven calm which is in HDR file format then Click this install custom studio light button here. Now the image file is available as one of the environment light preset in the loop dev mode. If you need to remove it, you can go back to the Preferences panel, select the image, and then click this minus button here. Okay.
Next, you can rotate the image using this rotation slider. You can control the lighting intensity using this strength slider. And down here, you can change the viewport background to better represent the colors in the image file. The next option we want to discuss is this Cineworld option. If this is on then Blender will not use the images in the look def presets anymore. Instead, it will use the parameters in the world properties.
So if you have this option active to change the viewport lighting, you need to Go to the properties editor and open the Properties tab here. As you can see, when I make changes here, it reflects immediately on the viewport. Okay? The last setting is the sunlight option. If this is on Blender will calculate the lighting from the light objects present in a scene. In the default scene we already have this light object.
There is why turning on the scene light option here will brighten up the cube object a bit in this area. turning this off again will make Blender ignore the light objects in the scene.