Lighting in 3D scenes (discussion)...

Okay, one thing I have noticed from the image gallery, and my own work in Strata and so on, is that people are either unsure about their lighting and make half decent attempts (me), really crap at it, ignoring the whole thing, or incredibly good.

Basically I want to get a discussion going about what techniques you fellow artists use, good, bad and ugly, that we can all use to make better scenes and models. Feel free to fire away with any contribution, no matter how small. Between us we should have a pretty good body of knowledge on what to do, and what not to do.

My contributions:

- Ambient lighting is a definate no no in final renders.

- One of your lights should be a "key light" that faces towards the object just like the camera, from the same angle. Most of the time anyway, depending on effect desired.

Add your own, let's all learn!

Thanks.

~A~

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"How can I make it go faster?" -Me-

For a moment there I considered just randomly quoting the previous post and adding absolutely no new thought to it whatsoever, but then I thought "What's the point?"

Anyway, I'm finding that regardless of how many lights I use I like to keep the sum total of all the lighting at 100% or 1.00. Since I primarily use Blender, my main light will be a sunlight. This is usually somewhere around 70%-90% intensity. Then right on top of the sun I'll put a spotlight that creates shadows only and doesn't contribute any to the lighting. Then I generally throw 2 or 3 low intensity lamps around the model to help lighten areas that are too dark. This part just takes some trial and error for me, moving lamps around so that the ship is well lit but it doesn't lose any definition. And as we all know, but for some reason people have a hard time learning, ambient light is evil.

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I usually put a fairly harsh bright light pointing from somewhere above, then a few dim lights to brighten up dull areas.

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From my reply to your post in BSG5's Image Gallery topic:
Well, Im not really the best at lighting here by any shot, but I usually have a set up that has one pretty strong spot' at an angle just off centre behind and above the ship. This creates a really nice specularity on the edges of the ship and helps give the scene depth. Then I have the main colour spot' for any other features in the scene at an appropriate angle for that. Then, one other random spot' at an oposing angle to the colour light just to lighten up the scene a little. If the scene still looks too dark, then I may add a light in the environment pallet with really low intensity (1 or 2 %) and shaddows off, just to bring everything in the scene out a bit more. Usually try to play with the other lights in order to avoid that though. You can see an example of the lighting technique I described here (including the last part) in my render of Uncle Twitchy's Constitution Class. Should be (url="http://"http://www.evula.org/ewan/constitution.jpg")here(/url). Not hte best example, but with the lighting positions, I was trying to emulate the look of the orriginal TV Series.

'bout all I can think of really...
ewan

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great tuts:
(url="http://"http://www.ap3d.com/betterspace/betterspace-tut-12.htm")http://www.ap3d.com/...pace-tut-12.htm(/url) (url="http://"http://www.ap3d.com/betterspace/betterspace-tut-13.htm")http://www.ap3d.com/...pace-tut-13.htm(/url)

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Sparky, wow, great site. Those guys are pretty damn proffesional, make sure you check out the mesh detail tutorial. Anyone know how to do Mesh work in Strata Pro? I'll have to look it up I suppose, and someone at uni can help me.

Keep up the tips guys, this is all good info. Special thanks to sparky for the inspiring link.

~A~

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"How can I make it go faster?" -Me-

My current technique:
In StrataPro, set ambient light to 5%, main lighting to 90%.
Set up the spin etc and the 45 degree camera, and then, in the camera window, set the lighting to be almost on the horizon. I find for the stuff I'm doing this picks up the best shadows.

Things to watch for in Strata:
Get the glows right. If you set porthole etc glow too high, it actually effects the effective ambient for the whole surface, making the ship lighter and thus destroying the effect of reducing the ambient. On the other hand, if you set them too low you might as well not have them.

Work hard on cockpit areas - these give a lot of character to a ship, but, as they tend to be a bit glowing and are large areas on small ships, they can easily mess up the lighting as above.

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There are three schemes that I usually try for, in increasing order of difficulty.

1. (url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/weepul/smoothfreighter.jpg")Example(/url). Cookie-cutter, I might as well call it. The key light is the main, bright "sun" light (you got your terms mixed up, Azdara :p). I usually make it fairly strong (often over 100%), either white or slightly tinted yellow or whatever color would work well, and directed at an angle from behind the ship. The goal of the key light is to provide the strong light source as well as accentuating features on the ship - shadows, and, most importantly, specularity. The highlights on whatever surface your ship has are what really defines what the material looks like, so a somewhat glancing key light is good for showing it off.

Then, I'll usually use two fill lights - somewhat dim, colored lights to let you see in the shadows of the ship and to approximate environmental lighting (assuming the ship is near a planet, in a nebula, etc.) I personally like blue, but that's just me - I like the color blue. I'll often have one coming from below the camera, and another from the side, a bit more toward the camera than straight off to the side of the ship. Either that, or both lights will form about a 100° angle between them, with the camera mostly in the middle. There's no particular science here, though - just play around with the lights until they illuminate the ship nicely, hopefully picking out some more details.

Since fill lights can look odd with hard, raytraced shadows, what I sometimes do (when I'm not using area lights in LightWave) is turn down the shadow opacity - or, if your program doesn't have that option (Infini-D, which I used to use, doesn't) I'll duplicate the light, make the two copies' brightnesses add to the desired value, and set one to cast shadows and the other to not. That way, there will still be visible shadows, but dim illumination will carry through and keep black, shadowy pits where you can't see anything from forming. It also keeps some variations in shading that "ambient light" utterly lacks.

I always used "distant" lights, not point lights or spotlights. That way, I could direct them simply with rotation, not having to worry about their position. Any of those would work.

2. Scheme #1 looks decent, and it's fast, without requiring too much thought. It gets somewhat boring after a while. #2 is essentially just making a similar scheme (key, possibly a second bright light, and fills) but not following the key-from-behind-add-fills scheme. Do something more creative - something that fits into a scene better, a scene that doesn't just show off the ship but is a full scene. (Um, I don't have an example.)

3. (url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/weepul/weepbatscene.jpg")Example(/url) (ship by Captain Skyblade). The realistic approach. Figure out where light sources would be in the scene, and stick lights there. Engines, explosions, the sun, planets, a brightly-painted station and its lights - they are all fair game. The trick here is to keep everything arranged such that you can see them with the camera and form a good composition, and still have a good lighting setup. "Fill lights" just for the sake of adding light can be used, but only carefully - light just for the sake of light is sometimes needed and beneficial, but not "realistic", which is the goal here.

Keep in mind, guidelines are just that - schemes to guide you. They aren't rules. The only rule is that you should think the final image looks good.

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Ehh, I haven't done too much lighting stuff in lightwave. Still trying to get modeling down.

As for strata. Basically what other people have said, 1 harsh light, at something like 90% (or two that are really close together, like a twin star), followed by 2 or 3 soft, colored fill lights coming off nebula/planets, set at around 10%. This gives the best effect.

Then there is the silhouette style lighting. I want to be able to see if I can attain a good effect with that. So far my attempts aren't that great.

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