Texturing / Lighting - which one first ?

[jeremybirn]

Texture first.

Test your shaders and textures in a nuetral lighting environment that includes white lights using typical intensities of key/fill/rim you'd have in a lit scene, then start lighting once you have all your surfaces mapped.

If needed, you can go back and do a fix to your shaders or textures after seeing them in a lit scene, but as you do more work you want to try to reduce the frequency of that.

-jeremy

[Dan Wade]

Hay Jermey. I know that textures is the way to go for obvious reasons, but i heard a very interesting thing from a friend. He said that he and a team were working on a very large scene for a feature, that required alot of intensive use of textures. They had to do 70% of the lighting using simple lambert shaders on everything, then moved that over to the master scene. Does this just depend on what studio is working on the project?

[francescaluce]

doing a lighting pass on a diffusive surface is more to check shadows, volumes and general light contrast.






ciao
francesca

[MandelbrotJr]

Great, thanks for your help !! It's always nice to learn from the guys/girls who really know their stuff :thumbsup:

[rendermaniac]

Jeremy

For your texturing lighting is it better to use a generic lighting setup for all texturing (whatever that is?!), or to have a shot specific general lighting setup, or a library of setups?

You could probably get a pretty generic lighting setup so that you get the levels correct for going to film (or video or whatever), but you'd want to do different things depending on if you have very contrasty backlighting or very diffuse daylight etc wouldn't you?

Simon

[soulburn3d]

It sort of depends on what you're final result is going to be.

If you're working on an animation where you'll potentially see your objects in multiple lighting setups or from many different angles, it's best to texture everything first in a neutral light setup. This will let you concentrate on making the textures look right.

But if you're only going to see the scene in a single light setup or from a single angle (like in a still image), you could potentially spend a lot of time texturing something that ends up in the shadows and never gets seen, making your texture work sort of useless.

When working on still images, I tend to model, then apply colored diffuse shaders that are just the very simplist of representations of the final color, then do a quick light pass which is very rough just to work out what'll be dark and light, then do my texturing with that context in mind, then go back and do the final lighting.

Anyways, just another approach. Basically you'll need to choose your approach depending on what the final result needs to be.

- Neil

[jeremybirn]

Jeremy

For your texturing lighting is it better to use a generic lighting setup for all texturing (whatever that is?!), or to have a shot specific general lighting setup, or a library of setups?

You could probably get a pretty generic lighting setup so that you get the levels correct for going to film (or video or whatever), but you'd want to do different things depending on if you have very contrasty backlighting or very diffuse daylight etc wouldn't you?

Simon
Yes, shaders and textures usually need to be approved in a generalized lighting set-up. The shader test lights should be white, not colored. The intensities should be neutral, usually with the Key at 1. If your project often uses lights above 1 in intensity, such as for rim lights, then a >1 brightness rim should be a part of the set-up. Most importantly, the test lighting needs to be the same for every shader that gets approved. Shaders and textures usually get approved rotating in front of a background plate from a sample scene in which the model will be used - it's good to see surfaces in the context of colors that will be near them.

-jeremy

[jmBoekestein]

I have a question for you mr. Birn,

when ou put color on an object and light as in final versions, you'll get color mixing. Whatever computermodel of rgb space or similar you use you'll get strange results sometimes at certain lighting conditions.
In such a case why isn't a texture being approved in different conditions a long with white light. Like the terminator scene where the robot stands immobile and the suns crawls along.

I would find it nasty to have a texture gray out in a very vivid lighting situation, redoing the shader for the that one shot doesn't seem the right approach. I would want to plan ahead.

How do you approach this?

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