subject: 3D Lighting - 5 Tips On How To Make Great 3D Lighting [print this page] 3D Lighting - 5 Tips On How To Make Great 3D Lighting
3D Lighting - 5 Tips On How To Make Great 3D Lighting.
Lighting can be as fun as it can be a pain in the ass. It is all about making it beautiful but also about enhancing your film or image. Most of the time we are creating our own worlds in 3D models and that is really an amazing thing. But it is not easy to make something believable. In this article I am going to share 5 tips I use when I am doing lighting.
1. Have a reference image or some concept art. In most cases you will have a concept that you are working from. A good idea is also to look at reference. If this is new to you, you should really start looking at reference in every part of your 3D pipeline. Because as I said before, you are trying to make something believable and the best way to do this is to actually use the real world as a reference. It makes sense right?
2. Control your audience. Lighting is meant to help us read a picture. A lot of choices are often made in the concept stage. But when you are making your lighting in CG it is important to enhance the choices. The eyes will be lead to where the darkest dark and the lightest light meet. In CG you can do everything with lighting, this means that you are in control of where a person should look, just by adjusting the values in your picture. Some of the concept might be lost, so try to focus on making it like the concept, but also how you could do it better free 3d model.
3. Think about your light. Light behaves in a strange way. It can bounce, absorb color go through stuff and so on. So in the time before global illumination people had to think about the light. I am still a firm believer in that you should think about your lighting. If you have light from a window, it will land on the floor, and often bounce up on the walls. Besides that the ground from outside will bounce light into the room as well. So it will have kinda overall luminance from the window. When you are making the light, it is important to think about how the light in the real world would act. This will skyrocket the quality of your pictures, and you can do it without using global illumination or any fancy stuff. Pixar did this in some of the early features.
4. Use cheats. I know that I said you should use the real world as a reference. But we are creating our own world. Why not cheat to make it look like we want? Most 3D software got the ability to make a light only effect one or some objects in your scene. That is really cool! Let us say you have a character, he is in a room. You might want some rim light on your character from outside, which hits the character on a special angle to show his shape better. But maybe the light will then look funny on the floor. So the solution is that you can use one light for the character and another light for the room. This means you have a lot more control.
5. K.I.S.S! Keep it simple, stupid. I mentioned this in the 3D modeling article as well. And the reason why I would like to add this again is because it is SO important. It is easy to add a lot of lights, but deleting them is not so easy. If you have spent 2 hours tweaking a light and you suddenly realize that it is better without it. I feel a bit stupid, but I promise you fewer lights are better than a lot. It is easier to tweak and you might get the lost in a jungle of lights if you do not have an overview. K.I.S.S is a general thing within computer graphic so you might as well get used to it free 3d model.
