Different methods of lighting

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Different methods of lighting

Postby punkduck » Mon Aug 21, 2017 8:30 pm

Maybe other members will also add a few lines to this tutorial. It would be fine to get information how people doing their scenes.

We are all using our characters in a specific scene, but lighting a scene in an effective way can be very hard ... I often try to get the answers from real photographers and then hope, that it also works in Blender.

To start with, I often had a problem lighting my models from the front. Two lights left and right create weird reflections in the eyes (very light edges). One light from the front creates white circle in the mid of the eyes, but it also make the face look very flat. Then I discovered the ring lights, sometimes used as a real ring, sometimes used as an effect with a number of light sources instead of one ring. Here is an example from the real world:

https://digital-photography-school.com/review-interfit-fluorescent-ring-light/

or in this video for one of the most professional models ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WAKTLBP1AU

The eyes of the model should directly look into the camera, because the ring light should reflect in the eyes only. So I created a ring light and did this setup:

ringlight_setup.jpg


The result, done with filmic log encoding base in Blender using cycles and base contrast, looks like this:

ringlight_demo.jpg
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Re: Different methods of lighting

Postby wolgade » Tue Aug 22, 2017 3:09 pm

Your kind of lighting is often used when the camera is close to the object. Is there a reason for using eight light emitters instead of a simple ring? These emitters are very perceptable in the eyes of your model. This is a bit confusing unless the viewer knows about your setup.

The first thing I do when I want to make a portrait is to change the focal length of the Blender camera. By default it's set to 35mm. For portraits 80mm are quite common. Faces don't benefit from perspective distortion.

I use a very common three point lighting for portraits.
top.png
side.png

Key and rim lights are simple planes. They are quite large which results in soft light. Soft light is usually a good idea for portraits. Keep in mind that simple planes also emit light on their backside. If your scene has walls you might not want this.

The rim light is a simple spotlight.

Here's what each light does:

key.jpg

The key light is the brightest. You'll notice the nasty shadow on the right side of the nose. This gets eliminated with the fill light.

fill.jpg

It emits less light than the key light. You want to get rid of the very dark nose shadow, but you don't want a flat face. Talking about depth, that's what the rim light is for.

rim.jpg

It doesn't light your object at all, but seperates it from the background. Play around with the brightness. This is the final result.

full.jpg

Like in real world photography it's a good idea to get the exposure right. This is especially true when you create materials. I created a small greyscale plane to make sure to fire the right amount of light at my object.

exposure.jpg

If you use Filmic Blender switch back to sRGB for this check.

grayscale.jpg

Load your rendered image with Gimp and measure the greyscale fields. The rendered values should roughly match the values on the greyscale plane. This simple formula is only true for sRGB, because Filmic Blender does some tone mapping. Once your done with your light adjustment you can of course switch back to Filmic Blender.
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Re: Different methods of lighting

Postby grinsegold » Tue Aug 22, 2017 11:42 pm

Indeed! How different lighting methods can be. Yours are so elaborated. Usually i do the lighting as i do my bread dough: as a rule of thumb estimate. I start with a studio light hdri https://zbyg.deviantart.com/art/HDRi-Pack-2-103458406 that i call with the free addon "easy HDRI". If that doesn't do the job, next possible step for lazy people would be to try to combine it with a second hdri. I don't believe people sit several minutes in front of my images, cherishing my lighting. All i want anyway is the viewer to let my pixels get to his retina, so i can drop the bomb, shake the brain, push the borders. That only takes milliseconds. The rest is decoration, secondary.
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Re: Different methods of lighting

Postby wolgade » Wed Aug 23, 2017 1:19 am

grinsegold wrote:How different lighting methods can be. Yours are so elaborated.

I don't think so. It's basic three point lighting. You'll find a lot of documantation how it should be done. My real advantage: As I make a living working for TV I see real cameramen doing this job all the time. I watch them and I learn from them. Best practices that work for the professionals should be good enough for me.
grinsegold wrote: I don't believe people sit several minutes in front of my images, cherishing my lighting

Neither do I. People don't cherish anything that has been done the right way. People only realize if it's wrong.
grinsegold wrote:All i want anyway is the viewer to let my pixels get to his retina, so i can drop the bomb, shake the brain, push the borders.

That's what we all want. Just to get this straight: The setup I described is for creating materials, check your characters and do portraits. In any real life scene I use the available light in this scene, probably enhanced by a ight to brighten my character, but if I run into troube I'll take my grayscale card to see what's going wrong.
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Re: Different methods of lighting

Postby punkduck » Wed Aug 23, 2017 8:22 pm

wolgade wrote:Your kind of lighting is often used when the camera is close to the object. Is there a reason for using eight light emitters instead of a simple ring? These emitters are very perceptable in the eyes of your model. This is a bit confusing unless the viewer knows about your setup.


Yes it was my intention to do it like this. I didn't find the video again, which inspired me (somebody uses 8 rather expensive flashes to create the ring). The effect was quite the same as in my picture. But I found a funnier video, which I like, also creating an artificial effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgj39jkGhiE

A constant circle sometimes looks like an additional hole in the eye for me (well this is my personal opinion) ...

The reason for the technique is this problem (sorry for the poor quality, but it should only be a demonstration):

leska_light.jpg


Look at the right eye in the next link, it is very white because of the reflection:

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/sites/default/files/1665/fashion/833863376/wonder_woman_movie_touchedup.png

Parented to the camera my setup also works for the whole body (the ring and the camera are resized together, but that does not change the focal length). Of course then you have 8 bigger lamps to lighten the model, but the pattern in the eyes stays the same.

If you need more life in the picture, then your setup is better (may be an additional background light for the background itself) like in the fashion render discussion.
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/forum/download/file.php?id=3780&mode=view ;)

I must check these grey maps. Of course they are used in real world. If you don't want effects by changing the color of the whole scene and it should be very natural, this would always be a good method to get the most out of the picture.

grinsegold wrote:All i want anyway is the viewer to let my pixels get to his retina, so i can drop the bomb, shake the brain, push the borders. That only takes milliseconds. The rest is decoration, secondary.


Yep. But who was the guy who explained me the postprocessing of a picture, which also influences the lighting (thanx btw, I really used it in between) :lol:, I guess it always depends on the scene/story we want to tell. If I simulate something, I try to reach the same lighting as in the original. If I have a funny or creative idea (and I don't have much ...) then lighting may be just method to make it visible. My experiments with HDRI mostly end up in a unpredictable disaster, but that is another story :roll:
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