Hello,
I’m curious as to what the general lighting pipeline is like for some of the animation studios. From a lighters point of view, what are they typically given to start, and expected to provide.
my own personal guess is that lighters are given a scene, a shot break down of the mood, and maybe some concept art for the light mood.
Can anyone provide some experience on this?
Thanks!
From a lighters point of view, what are they typically given to start, and expected to provide.
Start: In an ideal world, a color board, some concept art, some good direction. And an assembled scene to light. Generally things are split into key/shot lighting. The key lighting is used as a template for all the other shots in a sequence.
Provide: Rendered images, most lighters comp thier own shots these days
It differs a lot from company to company. If its a big company they usually have complex pipe line. smaller companies tend to let you do a wider range of work.
From my own experience with TV-ads there are a wide range of pipeline approaches.
If i get to choose how i work, i lean more to the bigger pipes. They let me concentrate on my best skills.
Usually i get so called “Assets” from the people doing modeling, texturing, simulations and animation. I import references of geometry that if needed i apply animation cashes onto. That give me clean a scene to begin working with.
If there are any textures made when i pick up geometry, the texture artist has already attached them to the geometry shape nodes. That way my shaders pick them up automatically. No need browsing around the network or asking people for the assets i need.
When i have a basic lighting setup of my scene i ad a grayshaded and one textured render to that days dailies. parallel to the lighting and shading in Maya i have a comp made for each of my shots. when a shot is done all the important comp nodes get exported to the real composite people so that they can make the final tweaks and coloring and make a nice timeline of the ad.
all versioning of assets, scene’s and other stuff are done by the pipeline tools that handle all the data. so we don’t need to searching for stuff in folder manually to often.
To brake it all down. I do lighting and a simple comp. that’s it. If something unexpected happens i yell or send a message to the person responsible for the fault.
At smaller companies you the artist has to solve more problems and error by yourself, taking time from you actual job.
Hope that answered some of your questions?
//Stefan
Thanks Stefan! That is very insightful helps a lot 
If anyone else has some experience on this i’d like to know more.
I’ve noticed this is the 3rd time you’ve asked about lighting scene setup, I think you need to just jump in the deep end, and ask really specific questions, like how do i make X faster, or why does Y make my scene explode. Theory is all good to an extent.
when i was doing commercials at Method we didn’t have too much of a lighting pipeline. They had a barebones asset pipeline, so we’d get animated models that we’d reference into the scene. We painted our own textures and myself and a much better TD wrote python scripts to support the more mundane aspects of whatever show we were on. Its fun work, but the result always felt lacking to me…
Now I work down the street at a features house (i feel sketch mentioning the name) and they have a much more sophisticated pipeline. when doing shot lighting i’m given a scene with animation, textures, shaders, and i just perform some standardized lighting tests so the director can approve light positioning, then i generate the datapasses through our proprietary mental ray shader (which is ohnestly less efficient than the render passes imho). this allows us to bust out many shots very quickly. I do not comp the shots however (whump whaa)
lookdev is much more fun, there we get models and textures from the model department and we extend their work to making it look awesome, generating our own textures. we then match it to the reference and do turntables to get feedback from.
Thanks everyone! This info is great.
@ndeboar Haha Yes i have been practicing! I just don’t have industry experience yet. I want to know what to expect from the world of lighting/compositing. Every bit of knowledge helps :]
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