How Ian Hubert Hacked VFX (and you can too!)
De-lighting lets you see 3D VFX elements integrated with live-action footage directly in your viewport—no rendering or compositing required—by using a clever mathematical trick to remove and replace lighting information.
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TLDR
• De-lighting divides footage by a "lighting measurement" image to cancel out original lighting, creating a neutral base that can be relit in 3D space—borrowed from photogrammetry but applied to VFX workflow
• The key insight: light-receiving materials look wrong because footage contains baked-in lighting; by mathematically removing it (footage ÷ lighting measurement = delit footage), you can relight scenes in real-time
• Ian Hubert's Compify plugin automates the entire setup: camera projection, UV unwrapping, baking lighting measurements, and creating the delit material—turning a complex manual process into a few button clicks
• The technique is surprisingly forgiving—you don't need perfect geometry or lighting recreation because any lighting measurement will "cancel out" in the division step
• Enables real-time VFX integration in the viewport, fundamentally changing the workflow from slow render-composite-iterate cycles to immediate visual feedback
In Detail
De-lighting is a technique adapted from photogrammetry (removing shadows/highlights from 3D scans) that Ian Hubert and Nathan Vegdahl applied to VFX workflows. The core problem: when you project footage onto 3D geometry as a texture, you need it to behave as a "light-receiving" material to accept shadows and new lighting, but this makes it look too dark. The breakthrough is treating this as a math equation—if you divide the footage by a measurement of how much light is hitting each surface, these terms cancel out, giving you "delit" footage that looks correct when relit by your scene lighting.
The workflow involves standard VFX steps (camera tracking, scene reconstruction, lighting recreation) but adds a crucial baking step: render the scene with white materials to capture pure lighting measurements, then divide your footage by this baked image. The technical trick uses Blender's light path node to switch materials mid-ray (emission shader for light contribution, white diffuse for camera rays) to get accurate lighting measurements. Once delit, you can add VFX elements and see them integrated in real-time in the viewport—no rendering or compositing needed. You can even completely change the lighting of your scene and the footage adapts accordingly.
Ian's Compify plugin automates the entire setup: it handles camera projection nodes, creates proper UV maps, manages the baking process, and constructs the delit material with one button press. The technique works best with flat lighting and rough surfaces like concrete, and it's forgiving enough that imperfect geometry or lighting still produces usable results. This transforms VFX from a slow, iterative process into an interactive, immediate workflow where you can build and visualize shots in real-time.