Any good lighting tutorials that cover a scene with people?
Ive watched a bunch of youtube tutorials which all had their varying degrees of being helpful, but they always use a sphere or one character to demonstrate their lighting.
As an example if i want to render a room or something outdoors with two or more characters in it, what would be a good way to set up the lighting for it?
If i use environment lighting I would get images that look good but with no shadows or use this 3 point personal surface lighting with i found works good for one character but spread it for everything and unfortunately render times will go through the roof.
Distant lights and spot lights ive had little luck with but unsure if they are key in this scenario.
I know im being picky but I want to make an image that has a nice smooth coat of lighting on it and characters casting shadows so that they look apart of the scene.
Any tips or pointing me to the right place to get some learning will be most helpful,
Thanks!
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Can you post a render showing what you have now and explain what you don't like about it?
That's odd that your environement lighting isn't throwing shadows. Are you working with Iray or 3Delight?
I wasn't very good with 3DL, and when Iray came along I started using that exclusively, so my advice is probably only good if you're also using Iray.
Even working with just the Iray Sun-Sky options in the render settings should give you some shadows. Have you tried any of the HDRI products that are in the store? For outdoor scenes, HDRIs like these might be handy. There's also a site called HDRIHaven that has a lot of free HDRIs, both indoor and outdoor. I would suggest trying some HDRIs and then supplementing with spotlights or mesh lights as necessary if you need more light on a specific character or area in the scene.
For this silly pic i used 3 planes that emit light around a character, of all the tutorials ive watched this one gives a good amount of lighting.
Unfortunately theres no shadows from it.
Aaaaand I did the three planes technique for each character and this simple scene took a looong time to render.
This render i used the default environment map and set it as a light source. I cant recall atm if i used any scene lights.
No shadows though :/
You mentioned you've gone thru some lighting tutorials on youtube. I'm sure some of the video tutorials mentioned the type of lighting available is DS (HDRI, Parametric, and mesh light or emissives). There's probably mentions of how thes light behave an how shadows are cast.
In this render you've setup 3 emissive with a 'good amount' of light. The lights did illuminate the scene adequately, however they didn't produce the desirable shadows to your satifaction.
Here are my deductions:
1. The camera you used to render this scene might have the 'headlamps' on. The light from the headlamp illuminates the entire scene creating this 'flat' look. The headlamps are there for you to navigate and see the scene. Most of us turn them off because it doesn't the scene accurate lighting.
2. mesh/emissive lighting are 'diffuse' lighting and not concentrated beams like sunlight or point lights, so emissives give out 'softer' light and hence 'softer' shadows. There are shadows in the scene, but they're just too soft to be noticeable. There are instances where you want shadows to be soft, so emissives have their usefullness. solutions, you can replace the emissives with spotlights or point lights. By default, spot and point lights produce very harsh shadows
3. not all HDRis are created equal. They blurry default HDRi is more of a diffuse type. There are other HDRi with more intense type light information (I e, from a distance sun, or harsh lighting) that can produce darker shadows)
The headlamps automatically turn off when you add any scene lighting (at least im pretty sure on that), headlamps are a topic that every tutorial goes over and i can say with some confidence that he isnt the culprate here.
Your point about mesh lighting makes 100% sense, is the ideal using both mesh and point lights?
As for the hdri's i'll have to play around with them more. One with more intense lighting to see the difference in effect.
If you do not mind me asking, if you have set up a scene exactly like with one or both of the pics above, what is your go to set up for lighting that scene?
But anyways thanks for the replies! Lighting I know is not a simple topic but it is something that can make or break a render.
The headlamps turn off automatically only when parametric lights are added to the scene (point, spot), They won't turn off if you add emissive mesh lights
Can you make a simple test scene like shown in the attached screenshots?
It was made in Studio 4.15 with the default HDRI map in environment and iray as render engine (no lights, no mesh emitter, no camera). You should get a ground shadow in this scenario.
Are you using the Filament render engine? As far as I know you may have to activate shadows on the light source settings. However I don't use Filament myself, so I cannot give you a more detailed information.
There are shadows on this and the previous render but they are very feint as they are being overwhelmed by the environment light.
I don't have the same assets as your's but here is a scene with 3 figure and a set of prop (bus stop). Both scene with only the HDRi as the light source.
I used the default HDRi in this scene. As you can see, the shadows are softer overall. If you looks at the Map, it is a bit blurry, but there's still a pretty bright spot in the middle, the bottom part is all dark.
In this scene I swapped out the default HDRi map with one from Dimension Theory's Hawaii HDRi resource pack. This map provides a lot more direct lighting (not blurry) and the bottom part is a lot lighter (you can even see harsh shadows in the HDRi )
In the scene you can see the harsh shadows on the figure outside the bus stop receiving all the light directly, while the 2 figures in the bus stop getting indirect lighting (hence the fainter shadows)
https://www.daz3d.com/city-bus-stop
https://www.daz3d.com/iradiance-hdr-resources-hawaii
I use camera controlled mesh objects (rings and squares) with the IRAY Ghost Light shader added to them. I can move the light sources around by aiming the cameras at the assets and control the amount and tempature of the light that is placed on each object. Also do not be afraid to mess around with the tone controls in the environment tab.