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Sexy Lighting for your creations. The secret sauce.


Skree000

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Hey guys, figured id do a micro tut on lighting. This specifically deals with Max, but can be applied anywhere else since its basic light theory.

 

Sometimes people make models and texture them and do all the proper steps to make great art assets... and sometimes they wonder what is missing?

 

One of the most overlooked and easiest things to setup is an interesting lighting rig that can produce more interesting screenshots and eye-catching results.

For the most part, the appropriate lighting rig for your models greatly depends on the model itself. As a general rule you should tailor your lighting setup (or 'lighting rig' as i call it) to best show off the strengths of your creation, and hide or distract you from the weaknesses.

 

In this thread ill cover a very BASIC light setup that should help you show off most objects in a typical setting. These are not 'rules' nor are they 'the best choices' for lighting. These are only my opinions and if anyone finds better light setups, please share them so we can all learn your methods!

 

Here is the basic layout I usually use. This is a Top view, and the camera is at the bottom looking towards the object.

 

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g69/Arctura000/SkreesLightingSetup1.jpg

 

Lights are arranged in sequence from warm to cool. Intense lights are situated behind the model to reproduce only a very thin rim lighting. This accentuates the silhouette of the object.

(NOTE: this rim lighting should only be attempted if the model has a good silhouette. It will show off bad modelling or poorly made structure very easily. Only use it if you are proud of your silhouette. It can be detrimental in some cases)

 

The rim lights are setup as 'Directional' so that they can achieve this rim lighting from every parralel side of the back and edges, achieving a balanced rim light. You MAY wish to set these to 'spot' instead of directional if you wish to focus your rim light on one or two areas of your model (or do not wish all parts to be rim-lit)

 

Saturation of the lights falls off towards the center, this gives the viewer a truer idea of texture colors on the model near the middle of the scene. Nearing the fringes of the model the colors are shifted to either end of the spectrum.

 

This 'warm to cool' contrast gives visual interest and makes things look more dramatic. By achieving a balance between warm and cool, neither becomes overpowering and the scene looks overall balanced. If you choose, you can stray to one end of the spectrum or the other by shifting the hues of the lights towards cool or warm.

Be aware however that an overall cool or overall warmly lit image produce drastically different visual results. This can work against you, or with you , depending on your goal.

 

Warm colors seem to relay feelings of friendly, caring or warm emotions, whereas cool colors convey indifference, lack of empathy, etc. (if you want to read into lighting that deeply)

 

--

Here is an advanced setup, this is what i would call a 'rig' in that the Circle (which is just a basic Shape in max, create Circle) controls the lights and the camera.

The lights and camera in the scene are parented to the circle, so that whatever happens to the circle happens to the lights and camera. Likewise the camera is now a Target cam, and the target is placed inside the object, This allows the user to rotate, scale or move the circle, and the camera will always fix upon the object.

 

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g69/Arctura000/SkreesLightingSetup2.jpg

 

The reason you want a light rig with a setup like this is because The Rim-lights can often be very overpowering at any angle other than the back and sides of an object.

Typically rim lights are set to be extremely strong, a value of about 11 is a good start, ive had scenes where rim lights needed to be in excess of 100-200 intensity to achieve the proper rim-lit glow. Play around with the values before considering adding more lights.

 

The best part of having a rig setup is you can use animations easily. In the 1st frame take a Key of the scene, then scroll to the end of your time slider, rotate your circle, then set another key. When you view this as a rendered movie, your light rig ORBITS your model, but the best part is, the camera never passes close to the sides that are rim lit, thus allowing a proper ORBITING rim light that hilights all the best parts of your model, without becoming too bright. (note: this also directly depends on the topology of your geo, if your model has large flat sections, they might be 'lit up' by the rim lights and almost act as overpowering areas of brightness (in the same way someone would have a large mirror in direct sunlight).

 

Again, as always, tailor your lighting setup to best suit your model. If your model has very ornate intricate parts, consider adding more lights from various angles to achieve the best hilights on the important parts.

 

Avoid OVERDOING IT! ... although overdoing it can sometimes be necessary to determine how far you can push your lighting!

 

PS. NOTE: Objects with normal maps (or ornate geometry) always look WAY better with a rim light. Objects with no normal maps (or simple geometry) usually look way worse with strong rim lights. Use discretion!

 

 

Here are some images (you might already have seen) showing this light rig, or variations of it, in action:

http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Renders/Kate04.jpg

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g69/Arctura000/test4-2.jpg

http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Hydrant-Breakdown1.jpg

http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Normals%20vs%20regular.jpg

 

This version of the light rig has no key grey light in the foreground, which leaves most of the model dark. This allows the rim and colored fill lights to give a more dramatic feel.

Sometimes having no key light is beneficial

http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Mjolnir_BIG.jpg

 

This pic has NO rim light, because the model (from Halo 2) was really Low poly, and there was no possible way to implement a rim light without revealing the boxy model silhouette

http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Pelican_Halo1.jpg

 

In this render, I used colored rim lights, and a main central neutral key light. It makes things look way more dramatic... maybe even TOO dramatic ><

http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Lambert_Carbine_F.jpg

 

Heres an animation showing an orbiting light rig around a model:

(DivX AVI, 1meg)

http://www.kolcrosbie.com/Animations/KC_Kate_WalkCycle.avi

 

The main point here is to have fun with your lighting... and Experiment! my rigs are only what I think works best. You might discover better light rig setups, please share your findings! Im interested to see how other people light their scenes and objects :)

 

(Note: This theory of lighting can be applied to any piece of software or program, just have to implement it, IE lighting in Geck or any other editor)

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you might want to add planes or whole rooms in which you place your model to enable the reflection of light back to the model (like the ambient occlusion thingy but not limited to the model itself)

 

if you have more than one render of the same item in one picture, try not to rotate the lightning or camera but rotate the object itself... this gives the impression of really having the thing in front of you and behaves as if youd turn it around in your hands... lightning comes from the same direction always

which method suits your needs probably depends on the situation tho

 

that cool/warm contrast is nice i must admit :)

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yea i dont like rendering too much on planes because then i cant get good alpha tga renders that allow me to overlay render on render additively, without worrying about backround overlap.(if theres only black backround, you can set the layers to Lighten, which allows you to cluster rendered pieces together easily.)

 

To really take advantage of advanced rendering you should really enable MR or VR... get some good Radiosity, GI and FG....

 

but then, I loathe these pre-rendered methods, in game there is none of this stuff, its 'faking it'.

 

Id rather stick with regular light sources that more closely simulate what you can expect ingame :)

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well you can still render the lightning and shadows to texture for ingame use but i agree that this is "faking" and you can hardly copy mesh elements to save uv space

apart from the fact thata a really good game engine shouldnt need that anymore nower days

but honestly i think beth overdid shadow mapping abit with fallout

 

as to a lightning room or planes to reflect the light:

im not sure bout that but i think you can deactivate an object from being rendered but still get its light effects rendered the same time in max and therefore still utilize the cut n paste operation to combine renders

 

oh another tip:

use a skylight with somin like 0.5 intensity and then add omnis to accentuate the shadows and speculars

could be combined with the rigs presented by skree further above

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there are some pretty nifty architectural and rendering materials that now come standard in max such as the ambient occlusion mat, etc. fun to play with

 

for most AO check out a tiny program called Faogen, its really REALLY fast. Import your model, instant hi-res (4096+) ao/shadowmaps generated in under 8 seconds.

only problem is it doesnt work too well with importing hipoly meshes for maps transfering or render-to-texture. But thats where Xnormal excels....

 

Once you have your ao map, throw it in photoshop and stack it on top of your color map with a 'multiply' blend mode and it will give all the nice AO shadowing :) (only works best on non-tiling-UV models that have no texture-overlap)

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