10 Lighting Setups for Your Animated Shots

even though animation demo RS don't need to be lit and rendered a play blast is more than fine just to show your animation abilities a well-lit shot can make your performances pop and your demo real stand out so I'm going to show you how to light your shots better in myf blender and unre engine cuz why not first thing I want to just mention and kind of get out of the way is three-point lighting a long time ago I did a video on the basics of lighting in 3D where I talked about the idea of three-point lighting and different types of lights and that kind of thing so if you've never touched lighting before you can check that video I'll have a link down below but I want to go far beyond that today because while 3point lighting works great as a way to just some lights in your scene be able to see stuff and it works there are much more interesting ways to light your scene that help actually tell the story to help set the tone give a mood provide that energy that you want your shot to have so people feel a certain way when they watch it you're not going to get a ton of that just throwing in a generic 3point lighting setup but before we jump into 3D a quick word from this video sponsor skillshare which as you probably know and You' probably heard before is an online learning community and platform with tons of classes for all kinds of different things like lighting so if you want to learn about production lighting for example for film and for photo and kind of the core of what this all is there's classes on skillshare for that there's classes on business on creativity on project management and things like 3D modeling or again lighting I'm going to point out these two classes cuz I think they're actually a really good starting point there's one called Advanced lighting for film professionals which gives you a good sense of how you would do lighting with a real camera and exposure and things like that so if you're trying to get a handle on this whole topic that's a good place to start or if you want something more practical there's a class called good lighting for film and video at any budget which is again a good way to practice this kind of stuff in the real world so that you get better at it in 3D so if you're looking for a way to level up your skills and your career a link to skill share can be found down below and the first 500 people to click that link will get 30 days for free so thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video now let's start lighting and so just like a good animated shot the first step is research and planning this is shot deck it's something that you have to pay for but I just have the free trial for like three more days so you can get the free trial too to do the same thing I'm doing but what it lets you do is just browse movies TV shows commercials and if you click a particular shot because you're like oh I like the shot it'll show you the color scheme all the tags that it's using what lens was it shot on it'll also show you similar shots that kind of have the same Vibe and I just throw everything in pure ref which is free this is a free software to just throw images so our journey starts here this is my research for this video for the shots that I lit for this video so to very briefly run you through this this is my exterior or outdoor direct lighting section where you can very clearly tell yeah there's some kind of you know a light source like the sun outside over here I've got the indirect version of that which is more muted more soft like the Shadows are softer and so there is still sunlight but it's not as harsh here we've got you know very top down light creating these dark circles for Voldemort we've got shots from Daredevil Walter midi crazy Rich Asians this one's really cool because you've got her among friends and and peers where she's in the light and then she goes to take a call that's a little bit more quiet and she's in the Shadow with the light facing them which is just a cool takeaway and that's something that's really interesting here in these sunlight examples is that even though characters are in the bright Sun in very few cases in these two cases that I found in parasite yes fully lit by the Sun and stranger things half flip by the Sun and all the rest of these the sun is a highlight contouring the face creating a rim or a hair light around our characters but the faces are primarily in Shadow or not necessarily Shadow but just in the dark part of the frame which I just think is really interesting so this is my sunlight section direct and indirect and then I've got my Sunset section these are really stylized different times of day different levels of of moodiness right like this is super intense and super dramatic whereas is this is much less so and this is much less intense in terms of lighting but they're all different versions of What the sunset can give us and how we might light our characters these are really fun I tried to think of what types of shots do I usually see in animation and I see a lot of Office Buildings or retail or indoor shots right cuz we do a lot of shots where people are inside places this office section is split into three kind of main categories the drab Bland flat lighting of an office that's meant to be mundane that can be a principal's office even though there's a window it's still pretty evenly lit you've got the fluoresence up top the window on the side but it's still pretty even this has very little contrast they're still Shadows but like pretty flat and everything everywhere all at once it's also like that but with a little bit more color theory you still have that top down lighting it's very warm and you know let's call it Municipal right but you still have these nice little highlights of light shaping the characters and defining them from the background if we look at the Matrix however very oppressive lighting very interrogation style top down very dram itic and contrasted which fits the tone of what this is meant to be so this is meant to feel trapped in an office as opposed to just trapped in an office right like different Vibes just interior indirect I guess where there's like an implied window you don't really see the window all that much but you know there's one there and these are interesting cu the characters are a lot darker compared to other elements of the frame than I expected this is a night time when we've got practical lights behind him but the characters aren't the brightest thing in a lot of these shots as opposed to here in the science Medical lab sci-fi area characters are the brightest things the hair especially little highlights in the eyes and the clothes here we've got retail and stores and things like that which are also very common examples for animation and so we've got implied Windows lights and lanterns in the background thunderstorm outside different examples here this is a great example of rembrand lighting which is a technique where you light half the face but you allow the light to peek over the bridge of the nose and create a little triangle pocket of light moving on these are my window lit where you can see the window even just barely on the edge of frame you can can see the window that is motivating the light at different times of day these all feel kind of morning-ish to me this one you can actually see the shape of the light which can do interesting things for example if I pull up I didn't have this on shot deck but I I found it here double Wares Prada shot towards the end of the movie where an Hathway's character is walking around she's just lit by the sun Merl streps characters in her car and the reflection of this tall vertical building with these like vertical Windows creates bars creates a prison of the world she's built around herself so you can do that with lighting as well later times of day say more kind of Moody emotional stuff I've got different car examples that I learned some stuff from these silhouette ones are just too cool to pass up had to put those in here these are like starting to introduce some color and some style but they're indoor like events for the most part birthday parties casinos uh Mall more parties got to have Barbie in there so this is starting to get into some more stylized stuff and then finally my last section where I learned a lot this is all night this is all nighttime stuff so I've got black panther Lord of the Rings stranger things various types of stranger things we've got a Soviet prison with danger versus you know looking up at a motivated light source here we're just in the darkness we've got a quiet place that's really just all about that Rim light behind the character thedevil which does a lot of that same stuff too uh Game of Thrones where you might have moonlit scenes you might have torch lit scenes where Darkness plays a big part how do you light the dark so I wanted to learn a lot about that we've got some City versions where you've got a little bit more depth you can have street lights and you can have lamps and you can have lanterns and color can be added by you know stop lights or other things like that which can add intensity this is a great example of the composition of the frame doing a lot of the work having the lines from the background elements kind of draw your eye to the character lighting works so well with surfacing it works with a motography it works with staging it works with everything right it works with music lighting is such a big part of this and your set design can play a big piece too if you have these lights behind look how much fun this looks like how nice this environment is versus here much more dangerous because she's screaming but the car headlight could be coming right at her we don't know and then finally this is my like neon section where it's color where the colors play a big part in sort of shaping that into something more interesting so this was my process of finding a bunch of examples forcing myself to categorize them in interesting ways and sort of learn from that analysis how to do them and what I'm getting from each one so now with all that research done what can we do in 3D and how can we make things better good luck this is my first scene I did this one in Maya because the rigs are Maya Rigs and then I just exported to light and blender or light and unre for the other examples a quick tip that made this really easy is yes I've got this great character this is a pro rigs character and then the environment I didn't make the environment came from kit bash they actually have that new app called cargo which is you can download it for free if you have any kit bash packs it'll just go into cargo link to that down below but if you use like the interior storefront or restaurants or various things they have whole built restaurants you can just drop in a set and you're done you don't even have to build it yourself so that's what I did here this is one of the stores put the character in pose the character this is what my viewport looks like now if I throw in just a basic three-point lighting setup and hit seven in Maya so I hit I turn on the lights in the viewport so I'm not rendering I'm just using the viewport lighting this is what I get so you can see the difference right like it's better but it doesn't tell us anything now if I go ahead and render this again I put no thought into this I just like threport lighting go render here's what we get and you know if you compare the two images this is much stronger in most most ways the one thing I don't like about this is that the reflection of the light is showing in the glasses and the eyes which is losing that contrast and that strong focus on the darkness of the eyes the pupils but things like the mouth are much more interesting cuz you get this great dark shape inside the arm you get the the depth of the arm you get the actual Shadow context of the fingers things like this become really helpful to actually see the depth of your scene so already lighting is helping us but it's not telling us anything about this shot about the story that we might be trying to animate here and so the first example I looked at was The Matrix and I thought okay well Matrix has the top fluorescent lights on top and that environment actually has those as well so I just said all right let's throw some lights in at the top we get an immediate Improvement you can see that there's actually a lot of detail that we can now see on the back wall now if we look before the wall is cracked it's got detail it's got texture but we weren't really pulling out the surface in Perfections without the lighting these two work together so well actually just feels a little bit more realistic if I keep going my next attempt was crazy Rich Asians and these are all pretty quick just like let's try this let's try this and what I liked here is that he's it's more dramatic they're in a conversation it's not like an intensely like a bad conversation they're just having a dinner conversation so it's a little bit more close emotionally right it's not crazy intimate but it's closer and so this is he's mostly in Shadow but he's got these strong highlights on each side of him and then the background is pretty well lit so I did that here I made the background pretty well lit from the side and I gave them those two sides here now if I had been really lighting this for for real what I probably should have done is turned off the Reflections in the glasses that's one of the benefits of working in 3D that people in liveaction film making get to be jealous of us for here we have something that's a little bit closer it's a little bit more cozy right it's warmer but then my last example is this one from stranger things I really like this one this is much more emotional it feels like it feels we're closer up in the camera the lighting is really kind of more dramatic and it gives us this more intimate feeling and this is my favorite one of the series where we have him kind of lit from the backside it causes the hand to actually pop a lot more than the previous example from that background and because we got all the little twinklings of the eye we're actually seeing more reflections of the lights in the eye it gives a much warmer and more grandfatherly presence to this character who's now giving Sage advice and trying to help you and trying to you know really make your night special and so if you look at these different examples you can see how much the lighting changes the vibe and the mood of the shot now none of these were very specific I just posed a character talking in a register and I just picked different lighting examples there was no real thoughtfulness that went into what is the character actually saying what is the character actually doing what's the actual context or subtext of the shot and how can the lighting help that story I didn't do that but even so it still improved moving over to blender now I'm going to render in Cycles you can do this Eevee but I wanted the the Shadows from Cycles so this is another character from Pro rigs posed in Maya with the kit bash asset and then I just exported the character's geometry into blender reconnected the textures and stuff and I noticed when I was working here I actually had some slowdown to my computer things were getting a little bit slow and I think it's just cuz there was so much I mean I had screen recording I had Maya open I had blender open I was doing other stuff too I just made a proxy version of the character using Primitives and then I'd fine-tune it with the full character and I just put them in different collections so the main thing here is that we've got a window and I wanted to use that window to do some different stuff you can see this first example we've got that those blinds right creating these lines over the character it doesn't necessarily have to be like the prison feeling but I did want to make sure that these lines kind of Drew you to the character's face and so this is one example this feels like kind of the afternoon lighting and this is what it looks like sort of proxy and full but then I wanted to try something with that Sunset Vibe so then I took this example and I made this I took the wall out and just shot sideways cuz I wanted this Shadow here I thought it might be kind of cool in the late afternoon where this the sun's really bright I can have the character maybe squinting against the light and they're talking to their friend and they're kind of like one eyes closed cuz it's kind of bright on this side and then this example this felt like morning to me this kind of Rim light along the back the sun's kind of high up more kind of straight down that was cool and so I did this instead of the first one where you get the lines all across from that angle this one is much more kind of top down it feels like it's like 10:00 a.m. or something he's having a burger at 9:00 in the morning I wanted to do something a little bit more interior light based so I tried a few different things I thought well what if we're in like a break room now obviously I didn't redo the set I didn't I I wanted to keep the environment the same just for this video's examples but if I were doing this for a shot I would have changed out the table changed out the bench seating taken the window away and the whole Burger sign I would have changed it to more of a break room environment and lit this differently but let's take this flat lighting and so here's what I got now I actually made one mistake with this that's really driving me crazy but I didn't save this version of the shot so I can't go fix it really easily I didn't light the window like here it's the daytime you're in an office building and it's daytime cuz you're at work this is nighttime because I didn't light it outside and I feel so stupid for that but it's fine it's not a big deal but I would fix that I would make it so that it's actually daytime this is very much not my favorite but it gives you that very kind of drab boring lighting very flat I think it could I think I could have done better in general like he does have some directionality to the lighting and I think I could have done more with that but eh it's okay now this one's much more cozy I like this one a lot you have the kind of blue nighttime outside and he's clearly lit by a different interior light source and there's very little light leakage from the outside onto him from in now here on the inside and there's really no separation along the back which is fine in in our case but I decided I was going to kind of mix the two a little bit so here I've got the warm light lighting the character on the inside and the blue outside kind of casting light here it's a little bit more stylized but I liked it for this example I thought it was kind of cool since we do have that big window may as well use it and I threw an extra light specifically on this wall to create the feeling that there's something up top stop lighting the wall without it it felt just a little bit too unmotivated like where's that light coming from why is he just orange without any reason now I wanted to stylize the last two in this scene so these are my last two blender ones obviously there's a big top down yellow light and it's really not affecting his face all that much and then there's like a a red light from the side that is affecting his face somewhat and then the yellow kind of wraps around hits the shoulders really strongly but it's really not like a front light it's like a back light somewhere and then if you look closely his hand is bright more white it's actually brighter than his than his face and he's got a reflection in his eyes down below and if you look at the wrinkles on his forehead they're lit from underneath so there's a white light kind of underneath the character that's providing the main fill light for his face so I took that and did this this was my proxy for it I have the yellow really focused on the hair and the wrap around the face I've got the red on the side and I used a white light to kind of fill in the face and I actually think this looks pretty great I'm really happy with how this one came out I was not expecting it to look so good it took a lot more work than some of the other ones because I really had to shape the light I wouldn't say it's done perfect yet but I think it's really interesting and then the last one I love the John Wick movies and I thought this is such a stylized interesting thing where you have a well-lit red background with some visual noise on the left strong lines on the right and almost no bleed onto him it's very just Stark blue now there's other shots in the sequence that I have saved in this board where we do get a little bit more red cast on him so I allowed myself to kind of borrow from that and I did this I added some little red emission bars on the side used that as the noise on the left the bars on the right and the strong blue light I don't think it's right I wouldn't call it finished but I would call it interesting and I think it could be workshopped further but for now this was good enough for a test these are all my different examples of how you can light a table scene CU you could just use standard 3point lighting or you could put a background in use the window use it to motivate the light create the feeling of depth and of ambient and environment and I really actually am a fan of these two these kind of nighttime ones it makes it feel like there's a story there just feels like a really interesting location like that's not something you usually see in a demo reel or something like most people don't light like this cuz it's harder now finally our last examples are from Unreal Engine I did once again took the characters posed them in Maya I really wanted to have something with two characters this time I kept doing the one character shots and I thought well let's do something that's less dependent on an environment and more character based more story based so I took two kids and I had them fight I wanted them close enough to where they were interacting though although I didn't actually like deal with the cloth interactions between the two there wasn't really time I didn't really need to do it for this example it's one frame for a video but what I wanted is two characters were really focused on their connection now there's some weird artifacts here with the characters like the textures are fuzzy and geometry weirdness I did not spend a lot of time properly migrating the assets over I just brought them in real quick so we could light them and move on and then here I wanted to do something that was outside and umal engine was kind of a perfect fit for this because of the whole Global illumination Lumin situation so I turned on R tracing I just threw a sun you know sunlight in there and I just moved the sun around I actually didn't do much for the first couple of examples so here I just took the stranger things Nancy example of just having light coming in from the side but with this lighting you can see okay they're well lit it's daytime faces are highlighted we've got some interesting shadows and there's that works just fine the next example was more of the sunset like highlight from the back I think this is a lot more interesting it adds a lot more conflict I think to the story where the first one is just two kids out in the sun this one feels like it's after school it's getting late in the evening they both have to go home soon like there's a little bit more that you can imagine of like what would be going on in the environment but what I really wanted to do was light for nighttime and that's what I'm hoping that you have actually watched all the way through this video to get to CU the nighttime stuff is hardly anyone ever animates shots at night cuz it's hard to light for night so I wanted to tackle it so my two examples were a quiet place and Lord of the Rings a quiet place is very much about that that back rim light and almost nothing else just enough fill to see some of the characters features towards the camera the load of the Rings is light the background really well and then fill the face a bit with a warmer light that's at least in these examples what I was taking away and so this is my example here where I've got the Moonlight really casting on the environment lighting the back giving them that Rim light and I added a little bit to try and wrap around the character once again but it's about that darkness and I think this adds a really cool moodiness to the scene it does I think feel kind of like a mix between this quiet place example and like Harry Potter in the Deathly Hallows and that might just be because of the color I chose to light with but it does have that kind of not spooky but just I guess more Grim lighting right things are just a little bit more dreary and and dangerous in a way and then for my Lord of the Rings example I went for something a little bit more I don't want to say cozy but it's something a little bit more natural I don't know so I lit with the Moonlight once again but then I added some point lights to the uh building back there as if it had little light bulbs outside and so it's two different types of nighttime this to me feels like the restaurant's still open there might be people eating inside and they're having a little chat where this one the restaurant closed a few hours ago it's now like midnight 1 in the morning on a full moon and they're walking around the town and so it's really not important what tool you're using cuz you can use Maya and Arnold you can use blender and Cycles I can use unreal and its native renderer it's really going to come down to the research and the reference and the type of lighting that you're going for this to me is a super underutilized aspect of character animation and demo RS and things like that and you hear a lot of advice for character animators to not like the shot don't worry about it just focus on animation and that's good advice CU typically animation reels like I said they don't need to be well lit they don't need to have effects and cloth and hair and all that stuff it's that that thing about putting lipstick on a pig that if you have bad animation making it pretty lighting is not going to fix it and you should focus on the thing you want to get hired for so if you have an animation demo rail make sure your animation is actually really good before you start worrying about lighting because this won't save your animation but if you already have good animation you're already at a point where you're like you know what I want to start pling my shot adding to the presentation value this can take it to that next level but let me know in the comments what you thought of this video Drop any lighting tips that you might have down below for other people to learn from and if you enjoyed this video hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already if you want to see more stuff like this I have a bunch of Animation courses and classes and workshops and things like that uh link down below but I hope you're able to take what you learned in this video and just really make your shots pop make things stand out and just have a little bit more fun but anyways thanks for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and thank you to skillshare for sponsoring a link down below to check out skillshare remember that the first 500 people to click that link will get 30 days free on skillshare to learn whatever you want to learn I'm sir Wade and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 21,189

Keywords: 3d lighting, character animation, demo reel, animation demo reel, polish animation, animation polish, how to light in 3d, blender lighting, maya lighting, ue5 lighting, lumen tutorial, blender lighting tutorial, maya lighting tutorial, how to light 3d animation, how to light 3d characters, animation lighting tutorial, animation rendering, maya, blender, b3d, ue5, unreal, unreal engine 5, ue 5.3, ue 5.4, how to light animated shot, lighting for demo reel, ue5 rtx, maya rtx, 3d

Id: 99SWQnpBFTE

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2023