A key part of look dev is lighting. In order to achieve appealing visuals and effectively tell a story, it is important to know how to light a scene, not only in a realistic way but also one that serves the atmosphere, subject and narrative. In other words, lighting can be useful in two main ways: the technical way, a scientific phenomenon that involves real-world lights, gag effects, TV lights and candles and the creative way that involves building contrast and tone, building a focus and adding appeal. In many ways, this lesson linked to one of our industry Week talks by Victor Perez, a director and VFX guru with a passion for light and how it can help construct a story. He used a lot of art as an example, which I quite liked since it took me back to the roots of film and, reminded me that no matter how advanced VFX becomes, we will most likely always follow the same base principles of light manipulation.
We often forget that all film is essentially light. Everything we see on a screen is simply made up of coloured pixels, all of which exists on the spectrum of light. This brings us back to the discussion of colour theory and the colour wheel, which is one of the main things that we focused on in the task. With additive colour mixing, RGB, red, green and blue colour channels can be mixed to make every possible colour. They also create secondary colours that look similar to CMY and can therefore be handy to refer back to for complimentary-colour combinations.
Lighting in Maya Arnold
Unsurprisingly, we would be using Maya for the lesson’s tasks. Under ‘Arnold’, ‘Lights’, there are several options available to light a scene.
- Area – a simple surface that projects light
- Skydome – image-based environment lighting
- Mesh – an object that emits light
- Photometric – real-world light data for architectural visualisation
- Portal – an area light that projects skydome lighting
- Physical sky – internal sky environment lighting
We jumped in and created the first option along with a poly plane. I scaled it up to be as big as the rid, went to the light options and chose ‘area light’, which I then moved off the grid and rotated so that it was pointing all the way down. I had never used an area light before but I was told that the line sticking out of it was an indicator of the direction of the light.
We wanted to have coloured lighting so we had to go into the attribute editors and find the light properties. There, in the colour sections, six primary colours were located conveniently on top of the wheel and were all that we needed for the lesson. I made the first light red.
I then duplicated the original and created green and blue lights as well because, you guessed it, we were making the colour wheel! Every colour option would be available to us, plus it’s a great introduction to professional lighting using Arnold. I turned the intensity to 0 and the exposure to 5 for all three, after which I changed the ‘disk shape’ to a circle since we were aiming for a spotlight feel. I think that ‘spread’ was the option that we worked with most, however, since at 1, it made the light smooth and blurred like a low-softness Photoshop brush, and at 0, it was sharp and clear.
Once our disks were set in a triangular arrangement with some overlap in the centre, we were shown how to preview the lighting of our scene before rendering. It only took the click of a single button – more specifically the lightbulb icon along the top of the viewport. Once that was selected, the set-up immediately flooded with a brilliant rainbow of light and it was such a marvellous difference from the dull grey that I am so used to seeing and working with.
This soft halo of light did look quite different in the render view, however, where the properties of each area light that I had set earlier were actually applied. The three spotlights were harsh, clear-cut circles of colour overlapping with one another. In other words, I had successfully created a colour wheel đ
Now came the fun part. Experimentation! We were given the chance to play around with the area lights and their respective properties and see what kind of combinations we could create. It was also permitted to use an open-source model to showcase how our lighting would work with an object in the scene. As per usual, since Maya and I don’t really like each other, the program wouldn’t accept any of the downloads I attempted to import and I had to use a cube. But first, I played around with the scale and size of the disks.
I then moved on to the light properties and toyed around with changing the colour of one or more and even changing the ‘spread’ value. You can see the effect it had in the render through these side-by-side screenshots.
I returned the settings to normal and added a cube, excited to see how it would look in the light of the soft rainbow. I had to turn up the spread but it ended up looking quite ethereal, mainly because I noticed that the purple and pink tones were most predominant from my perspective.
I also added a diamond preset onto the cube because I was excited to see the classic combo of reflective material and coloured spotlights.
I just love these renders! They’re so cinematic and better than anything I have rendered out before, which shows how great a difference good lighting can really make. We went on to talk more about this by recapping a technique that we have covered before, called Three Point Lighting.
It is a universal set-up that can be used to light any scene for any situation, utilising the three different types of light: key, fill and back.
Key Light – lights the key area of the subject and is usually the harshest/strongest source.
Fill Light – fills the unlit areas and helps define the form.
Back Light – separates the subject from the background and provides depth.
We looked at this example amongst others, with the tutor’s professional opinion labelling the image. Sometimes I found that my opinion on which light was which kind differed from these answers, which I believe is normal since lighting is often subjective and not precisely the same for all those who see it. Here is an example that I quite like and that captures the technique perfectly.
The right arrow represents the key lighting, which is throwing most of the light onto the far side of her face. Towards the bottom, we have the fill light, which is illuminating the rest of her face so as to not leave it in the dark, providing clarity to her expression. Finally, at the back, there is some back lighting, which shows the audience her form in regards to position in the scene and separation from the background. Three-point is extremely common because it is one of the most natural ways to light a subject and feels realistic to the audience when they are paying attention to it.
We also briefly went over a second technique, also one that we have learned before, called Chiaroscuro. It is a style of lighting that utilises the stark contrast of light and dark values and was popularised by many famous painters during the Renaissance period – examples include Caravaggio and Da Vinci. It is quite common in the genre of Film Noir and horror and can also be really effective when displaying 3D models, which is why it is a consideration we could take for the next render.
– Final Task –
Lastly for this lesson, we would be matching three-point lighting from a reference, possibly incorporating Chiaroscuro if the side lighting was harsh enough in terms of contrast. As before, we were permitted to import a model from a website or use one of our own, and of course, an image of a scene as a reference. The requirement was to use the three-point lighting system authentically, so with only three area lights, to match the scene’s lighting as closely as possible. I think that this is excellent practice since it is training us to break down how the lighting in a particular moment is created in order to mimic it, hence furthering our understanding and skill.
When choosing my image, I knew that I wanted some interesting lighting so I tried to think of films that used colour more creatively. Although I haven’t watched it, the first one that jumped to mind was Blade Runner which based on images I have seen, is a visual beauty. I found this screenshot that I really liked and went ahead with it as my final choice.
I like this shot because it has very extreme yet also subtle lighting, all of which adds to the tone. Yellow is often used to induce fear or falsify a heightened sense of happiness to lull viewers into a false sense of security and this mixed in with the green along the sides creates an unsettling mood. It makes me think of terrariums or synthetic nature and how we attempt to overcompensate for our bleak reality by focusing on the joy that stems from machines and other unnatural parts of our lives. It is also framed very nicely and gives me more scope for creating a scene. Since I couldn’t import anything, I knew that I would be going back to simple shapes and that this would most likely lead to a modern-art style. Hence the more bizarre lighting, which gives me an opportunity to balance out the two and not have the focus be entirely on the subjects, which I knew would be quite simplistic from the start.
I set up three different kinds of primitives in a manner that makes them seem more purposeful and returned the area lights to their original size. I also made the red one yellow and moved it to the front and centre, since it was the key light for the scene. I quickly realised that the other two spotlights were too strong and saturated and also two separate from one another. I noted that there were some blue nuances to the green lighting in my reference but these weren’t overly visible and sort of blended in. So I shuffled around my lights and got to playing with some of their properties as well. Keeping an eye on the render view as well, I turned the intensity and spread values up and down for each, seeing what sort of colour combinations I could achieve.
Eventually, I realised that it wasn’t the position or the colour of each area light that was the problem, but rather their size and shape. I hadn’t utilised all of the freedom/customisation options I had! I remembered that I could change the shape of the disks and also scale them sideways if I wanted to. After doing this, I noticed a massive improvement in the likeness of my scene to that of the reference. It was at this point that I added two extra primitives at the side so that I could frame the centrepiece better and also reflect the reference subjects’ positions.
I think this type of lighting perfectly highlights the subjects in frame. The yellow area light is the key light, which I moved closest to the cube, circle and cone in order to achieve the most intense exposure in that area. The fill light is the green one, which I also turned back into a quadrilateral and stretched out so that it could reach the rectangles on the side. Since it is above the key light, they mesh together and create a softer balance that fills out the edges of the scene. Finally, the back light is the small circle at the very top, which you can’t see but is further back in terms of the Z-axis. It is quite small but disperses with the green area light in order to reach that aquatic colour that tinges the very furthest reaches of the plane. Here is what my render looks like!
To improve, I could have made the key light more intense and also moved it further down so that it was facing the subjects and shining a more bright, direct light on them. However, I am proud of how I used three-point to achieve a similar effect to a movie scene and managed to make it resemble the colour palette fairly well. Just for fun and because of the spare time, I also added an aistandardsurface shader to some of the primitives, using the gold preset this time. To spice it up, I changed the key light’s colour to pink and moved one of the rectangles closer as well. I think that I got a pretty beautiful render with this one.
My final renders from this lesson have become a source of pride for me since I don’t think I have made anything this beautiful before. Considering that these were all just primitives, I am excited to think about what I could have done if Maya had let me import an actual model. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the lesson and I think that lighting has become one of my favourite parts of look development. In general, I love seeing how a model can be ‘jazzed up’ and brought to life with colour, but the lighting is what adds that finishing touch and takes it to a more professional level. Thank you to Jake for teaching me this skill and I hope we’ll get more opportunities to experiment with it in the future!