Lighting for animation

[Andrew W]

I generally find that the best way to light a character in a room is to have one set of fill lights for the character and another for the room. Use light-linking to keep the two sets seperate. Your keylights should illuminate both set and character (unless there's a good aesthetic or technical reason why they shouldn't) as this will help tie the two elements together. I'd suggest rendering your character and backdrop on seperate layers and the compositing them together afterwards. This will enable you to make subtle colour and focus tweaks without having to re-render.

I suggest you don't aim constrain the lights to your character as this will tend to give a theatrical spotlight effect (unless that's what you want), just make the cones of your light cover the area that the character is going to move about in. One tip which might prove handy is to make the walls and floor receive but not cast shadows, and maybe make the walls single sided to enable lights placed outside the room shine in through the walls. This is a cheat which I often use to fake diffuse bouce light.

Without seeing your shot it's hard to give more precise advice so give us a look and we can help more.

Best,

A

[jeremybirn]

Andrew's right to be very wary of constrants that could make your lights move around in an unmotivated way. An aim contraint could be a problem in some cases, but would work fine if it's used to make a spot light aim at a character, the light is linked to the character and not the set, the entire character always fits within the spotlight's cone, and you aren't mapping a pattern into the light's color or anything that would make the beam inconsistent - then it would look just as if the character was lit by a static point light, only it would be shadowed with one properly framed depth map.

Of course, if you're doing this with your key, you probably want to split into 3 render elements: the set, the character, and the shadow cast from the character onto the set. Splitting out the cast shadow is a really big deal if it lets you render just 1 frame of the set when the camera isn't moving, then composite the moving character and shadow over it. Also, for character animation, the cast shadow is a profile that you care about; you'll want explicit control over the position, angle, and perspective, so you wouldn't want the cast shadow to come from the exact same light position as the attached shadows and illumination anyway.

-jeremy

[Rice]

To add another extra layer of goodness to what Jeremy and Andrew have said, once you nail down a specific look/feel with your basic 3 pass setup, (Set, Character, Cast Shadow)... you may want to start experimenting with multiple light passes and compositing passes to have that final level of control on everything.

Most of the time for my Environments and Characters I'll have the following basic render element passes....

ENV: Ambient (Fill), Key, Shadow, and Reflection
CHAR: Ambient (Fill), Key, Rim, and Contact Shadow

It starts to make thing a bit more complicated from an organizational standpoint but once you get the basics down it really helps to simplify things and add a level of quality and control to your work. Each project with it's specific look/feel presents different challanges and sometimes breaking down the global complexity into smaller pieces actually helps you to understand the overall process of lighting and compositing a bit more. You can then begin to add more and more control to your work by adding or removing pass types which allow for faster experimentation for your overall look and helps to speed up revision time as well. Maybe sometime in the near future I"ll make a basic intro tutorial on Lighing and Compositing using these basic passes.

[RayenD]

I think you should buy Jeremy's book. I recommend it to everyone, even for riggers ;). Reading this book and applying methods described in it can make your renders look up to 100 times better without even turning GI and other funny stuff on. At least it did it for me.

Only little problem is that after reading it I got interested too much in ligthing and rendering and now I have less time to animate ;)

P.S. Splitting into passes (background and character) seems to do the trick most of the time.

[benjii19]

Just thought Id update this thread after a while. Ive just ordered Jeremys book. Still having problems with lights, even the basics.

Here we go in Maya. I have 2 sets of lights each containg a key, fill and back light. One set for the character and one for the environment(a simple one at that. The two key lights illuminate both character and environment. The set has been set to recieve shadows and the character has been set to cast and recieve. As far as I know ive used render passes on for the environment and one for the character (well i made 2 render layers anyway, and checked enable passes on the render globals panel.

I dont really understand the passes tho, originally i though u then had to composite the seperate render layers together into something like after effects.
This is an image of what I have come up with after a play, with the settings I described, the surfaces applied to the sphere and ground plane are Lambert. Both the same so why does the floor seem darker.

http://www.benhealy.com/Stuff/testrender.jpg

Hopefully ive made sense, And hopefully reading the book will help me out(once i get it, cant wait)

[Andrew W]

It looks to me like you've tried to add too many lights too quickly. I'd take all the lights out of your scene and begin by placing a keylight - the main light source in your scene. Only when you've positioned that to your satisfaction should you begin to add fill lights etc. The key light in your case can be used to illuminate both the character and the set. Also pay attention to the type of shadow that is being cast on the ground. If your character moves a lot the one you have at the moment may be distracting.

Here's a couple of tutorials that might help you:

Jeremy Birn's (http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html) 3 point lighting tutorial.

My (http://andrew-whitehurst.net/3point.html) 3 point lighting tutorial.

See if these can help you to light more effectively.

All the best,

Andrew

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