His job is to take the directors vision and make the movie look like it. He's making compositions and helping the story to better read. If you've ever talked to me on DA for three or more posts, you might have heard me blab about my major and what I'd like to do. I'd like to do into Lighting, animation second. I just don't feel my skills are as suited for animation, even though I really enjoy it.
Before they start lighting, they work on color Keys
Color Keys are painted works that are used to indicate:
time of day
mood
Key/Fill ratio
Key/Fill color
Hard/Soft light
Atmosphere
When you're lighting a piece in 3D ask yourself, "What would I do if I was painting this from scratch?"
There's
logical lighting
An actual source of light
the viewer can SEE it
or it's implied (practical source)
Then there's
Pictoral lighting
This is lighting set up to make the picture pretty.
Like light coming from imaginary places.
Until recently, this was how ALL animated films behaved. Film like How to Train Your Dragon
decided to start using a cinematic approach. Instead of rim lighting everything, they let places fall into shadow. That's what gives it that natural feel.
Movies like Kung Fu Panda had a more graphical sharp feel because of the stark contrast between lights and darks and the way it used light.
Lighting is cave painting (telling a story)
Lighting is Illustration
Lighting enhances mood and drama
reveals character personality
Lighting tells the audience how to feel
What helps the composition?
Controling saturation and exposure is another way to bring out your focal point and direct the viewers eye.
See here how they allowed the darks to get dark? They didn't throw a rim on both sides of him. You can see on his arm how the background darkness pushes his form forward. The simple shapes in the background keep your focus on Stoic and Gobber. And the light on Stoics face is the strongest, because that's where you want your viewer to look and pay the most attention.
As a bit of fun trivia, can you guess how long an average frame in "The Croods" takes to render?
.
.
.
.
.
8 to 24 HOURS for ONE frame. Fur eats up lots and lots of render time, even at big companies. And they have have small galaxies of machine power; trust me. It would probably take you a year to get that done on your home computer haha
If you're curious what he was like as a person, Imagine Flint Lockwood's hair in real life. Now imagine an energetic guy with a family that plays WOW in their spare time. Seemed likea really cool dude. So no, he's not some intimidating wizard haha
For Dragons they looked at a lot of different movies for reference, like The Village and Jarhead.
When you allow your darks to go dark, it creates a feeling of believeability
For intense dramatic lighting, there's usually a broad single source
For action scenes you'll notice that they'll use big simple shapes, so your eye can follow them. A good example is the final battle at the end of HTTYD. Watch it again if you don't remember and you'll see it then. That and regular movies. Watch them, doesn't need to be animated.
Types of lighting
- Low Key
- High Key
- Low contrast
- High contrast
High Key
Well lit strong sources
Light-hearted
Lots of soft fill
Low Key
sinister, bad guy stuff
What is seen is as important as what is NOT
Low Contrast
Calmness or bleak oppression
low range of shades
High contrast
well lit
strong sources
Hope this was helpful guys C; I left out the technical jargon you might not know as much as possible C: He went on about occlussion in Maya (or any other 3D space) and compositing.
His main thing was:
is it Dark over Light or Light over Dark?
You can't just have it all in the mud. If you need to, lower the shading rate to about 1/8 so the texturing doesn't get in the way of the bigger picture. To you illustration people, blur your eyes, or throw a posterize filter on it. See where your eye looks first.
To maya and other 3D people, Paint over your renders! If you're stuck on what's wrong with it, try a paint over and mess with the Curves in Photoshop.
And always always always use reference! Weather it be other at, or film or real life or photography. Use it!
- ------- As a side note, and as a bonus for reading this far, Bert Poole says his friend in story just sat through the first run through of the entire movie for Dragons II in boards, and the man cried three times. Guys, it's gonna be good, and it's miles better than the first movie already. Also, Dreamworks has a new render setup they're using on the movie The Croods that they only wished they had while working on Dragons. It's going to be amazing people. The first movie switched Directors and story direction three times before it was even out of the gate and it was still awesome. -------
And as another note, if you have any questions about anything CG related, as in, anything you would want to know about animated movies. I might be able to help you out. I have access to tons of resources and people and I forget sometimes that some people don't even know what a character rig is. So I hope this was helpful, because I loved his presentation and it's exactly what I needed to hear, despite the achey flu body haha
On that point of topic, thanks for all the well wishes guys C:> I'm almost better, and Im going to go see the Lady in Black tonight. *yesssssssss* and then I have tons and tons of thesis work to do. I might show you guys once it's more solid and we have more assets, just to get a second and third and tenth opinion lol We've been hiding it for the past two months, but it's getting presentable.
I hope you found this lighting information at least entertaining and reassuring, if not helpful. I'll probably go back in any color code different areas to make it less STARK WHITE on black lol (Sorry if some of the images don't load...working on it)
skin by neurotype-on-discord
