Cinematic Lighting Techniques Using Arnold / Maya

have you ever won a watershed mellitus in today's video I'll be showing you cinematic lighting techniques and how you can make your renders look more interesting and how to bring it up to the next level [Applause] hello everyone and welcome along to another episode about lighting techniques in today's video I want to go a bit more into depth on how to create specific light setups one will be the shadow light and the other one will be like a high key light setup and I will guide you through that this will be more a faster pace tutorials so feel free to jump back realign and play it again and go over it one more time right so we are in Maya today using Arnold the latest version I have a few examples I want to show you how much I want to recreate I'm just using a basic model which I found from my manufactory while you can download all that all kinds of models and you can play around with that today's video is just about lightning so I will not be focusing about shading at all so let's jump right into it so as you can see I have quite a few reference images on my window here this is the famous shed no light and you can see that it's quite in a few images or pictures like you can see it's an Allegro movies right super famous stuff and the most iconic one I think is is born right so this is a typical Shatner light and we will be recreating that it's fairly simple to set up but to make it more interesting there's a few minor tricks which you can do just to bring it up from the back road right so we will be going over that and I think we will be recreating this here I think this is from Fight Club and so you can see this neon tube here is lighting his side I don't think that this practical light here is actually doing the lighting I'm pretty sure that they placed on my soft boxes there just to get this nice perfect lighting and then there's a super strong rim light here which brings them in front like it lifts them from the background right so this is how you make your images definitely stand out more and I'll be just showing you a few techniques of how did have to do that and I think why not just start off with that right so let's just move my little window here to the side and you can see my character here on the left is from the mandalorian a new TV show which aired on Disney Plus right now I just have my lighting environment it's just a super basic physical sky and it's just there to just get some shaping and we might just remove that in like while we go so I think the first thing is to create our key light and the key light is always the light which gives you the main light direction right and in this case here for Brad Pitt it is definitely coming from the right so our obviously our camera is not the same framing but we will just quickly create a light source I like to always tear off those menus so I have him always at my disposal up here so create an area light and it's important to have lights and physical scales if you have tools to small light sources your reflections get just to painting so make sure you have more or less real size scales which I think this is pretty accurate here and then also important is to not place your lights to your objects the closer they are the more they burn out and if your subject is moving they just very easily move out of the lights right so make sure to place them a fair distance away which is just more natural as a more natural fall-off of the light source itself so why don't we just rotate the light and place it to the side here and hit render button and the first thing is obviously we don't have exposure so let's just bring it up to 15 and now we can already see that we get some lighting on the side there so this is the basic way of doing this and obviously this is not enough so we can go up to 20 and on the bottom here is my viewport and on the top left is the own render view so the important thing is now to place the light fairly accurately and you can see it's it's a bit coming from the top here so there's a slight downward facing angle so let's just move the light up a bit and then bring it around and make sure you angle it to your subject like that the default range of an area light is 180 degrees right and you want to angle it down so you just have a focus beam I pretty much like a spotlight and stuff boxes on set do that too they have these little things flaps which go around the lights so let's just make sure that we do that as well we just bring down the spread so now one is fully open like 180 degrees and then half would be obviously half of that so this is how you can beam the spotlight or the area lights super basic stuff so let's just try to get the light intensity as well and let's just move it up a bit more like that and so let's just try to dial this in obviously our shader is still super specky and I need to adjust that quickly so let's just go for a more broader light setup and you can see the slide is a bit cooler so we can introduce Kelvin which is just a color temperature and so if you increase the Kelvin scale you get more cooler lights the lower you go the more warm they get all right this is actually slightly green as well but we don't just care about this right now and let's just place this a bit further back here so we're just touching his nose and we can go a bit higher up so this would be I would say the basic shape for the key light and now let's focus on on this rim light here so I just create another area light and it's always a good habit to to name your lights properly so in this case I just want to call this lgt key oh one like that and this would be lgt rim oh one and let's just place this one as well make sure you have some scale to it like that and then also bring up the exposure and just move it to the side here so it should be behind it because you just wanted briefly to to get on on his cheekbones and the back of his head like that bring it up and we need to increase the exposure let's just refresh our render here there we go and now let's just fairly easily place it until we satisfied with the result this would be way too much so we just we really just want to brush it up on his on his cheeks here and you can see it's super important that you have a nice key fill and rim ratio and you always want to make sure that your key light is the strongest light or that's most become and how you should be doing it and right now the rim light which we just place is competing against the key light so we definitely need to tone that down and it's always good to play with colors as well to create more interesting renders so right now we're using a cool and a warm color this is typically the way to do it or this is the most seen way I would say and we just want to make sure that we match our reference right now so a cool thing now we can play around with the temperature again and we can just go fully warm or we can actually go very cool which is more closer to the reference and if you don't like the color we have on the top here you're not forced to use temperature like Kelvin you can just disable that and you can actually just use a color until you're satisfied with the results so I think we go for like a subtle teal green color and let's just dial it down a bit more and we can see now that for Brad Pitt now we also because he has this these spikes spiky hairs you can see that the rim light catches those very nicely obviously our character does not have that a cool trick now is you should not be just leaving it as it is right now because we just want to create more interesting renders so another cool trick is if you just create a really subtle fill light or like an up light which will just bring more features of his face so let's just create one more area light here make sure we place it fairly close to him but underneath let's say it's a it's a balance card which I have on set like these big reflectors or something just lighting up into his face so let's just move this guy over like that and let's just bring in some lighting let's go maybe on 15 alright let's go a bit more and we can make a smaller light source to read harsher shadows so small light source harsh shadows big lights soft shadows that's pretty much how it works alright so let's just move this over something like that and you can see now it's casting some shadows on its chin which is fairly fairly interesting I think it's a bit too strong we just want to really subtly bring this light in just to make it a bit more interesting and you can see now this light which we just added just gives this nice read on his face it's not really bright you don't really it's not really interfering but it helps you read his facial expression like you can see the light underneath these cheekbones and everything so this is a quick way to create more interesting renders like if you want to present your stuff for your show reels or your art station portfolios like these basic setups are like gold it looks really a lot better than just placing one light there and be done with that right right so the next one is obviously the shed no light in and essentially what it is it's pretty much a spotlight which is in his face and it's it's not not much more than that but we have a few tricks to to soften the edges and to just place it a bit nicer so and you can see it's in Lego movies it's pretty much a common light to to give focus to your character to to like say oh he's he's mean or he wants to say something or important or whatever so these kind of things helped quite a lot to bring out your characters alright so let's just focus on which men should we try to do let's just try go for that Lego guy right so you can see there is this really hot light beam in his face going over his hands and then you have this rim light again and another kick like quite is like like small placed highlights which just helps again to lift your characters from the backgrounds right so let's just move the slide fairly quickly and here call this lgt bounce one and let's just group all of these lights and call them I don't know light setup eight and now I'm just creating an empty group here control G drop it in my light group and we just call this light setup be set up like that so now have to light setups and in this one we will just be creating this shed no light we just want to extract our env here so we just have a global just like an ambient fill light which just brings some lining over also we don't have pure blacks all right so let's hide light setup a and hit render and now we can see we just have our ambient lighting and this is it just helps it might be too bright for our light setup B so we can just tone that down by like 1/4 stop maybe this is not updating half a stop so just it's just a bit darker now right alright so the first thing let's just first create the romantic eco lights so let's add one area light and another one and let's just rename them quickly lgt rim o2 and LG t kick light o one alright these two lights will be our main light switch just give some shaping and you can also see there is another light it's not just the shatner spotlight there is also some kind of camera reflection light let's see if we can create those two guys alright let's just scale both lights up and just move them somewhat alright so the rim light you can also do like look through selected which is also sometimes helpful it just helps you placing the lights so the rim light is pretty much from here I would say let's just bring up the exposure for the rim you can see already we're getting somewhere right so let's just go 15 here so that's our room pretty much the same as we just had like that we just want to maybe go a bit higher just to get a bit more different read on him so this would be that and now let's create the super hot pink on his on his forehead there so for that what we can do is just make the light source a bit smaller and then let's look through that light and frame it again and just move it to the back of his head like this and boost up the exposure let's try it 20 and you can see now it's filling up his sides as well so we need to place it a bit nicer needs to be in the back and top without trying to shadow his shoulder so what we can do now is we can just introduce a light filter or like a gobo or like a blocker whatever you want to call it and just to get like fade off this shoulder piece here so let's go to perspective mode you can see this is the thing yeah we can either create a light filter here like a blocker and let's just do that let's see if we can't cuz it's working so light blocker and we want it to be a plane wanted some density and wherever this is just fill scale it up and you can see now this plane is now blocking the light source so if I move it in front here you can see you know it's blocking him so if I move it down you get light on the shoulder and then it slowly fades out okay we can move it a bit closer okay so now we just have the light on this on its helmet or whatever it is on the top view so that's exactly what we want and the next one would be now with the famous Shatner light right so let's just create another area light and make this not too big like this maybe and just this one is more it feels like it's a bit side lit right so we can just place it as well on the side here like that and we want it to be horizontal so we just want to scale down the box here and let's just bring down the spread quite a bit and then boost the exposure let's try 18 and move it like that and just make it even smaller and the spread and you can see now we have this super hot light beam and I still think we're a bit too big here on the light source like that so we're fairly close now to what we want to achieve obviously or we are way too bright and you can see now there's what this effect does you can also place these lights by just using some blockers or barn door filters to just get the look your one and we just want to bring it over a bit more right now it's just on his on his right side so let's just rotate it like that so now let's just go a bit up maybe and just place it so you can see now this shaft of light it's just in his face which is very cool we can make it or even a bit smaller maybe not as small at style 5 okay you can see we get super harsh shadows and that's just because the lights are so small we can try to scale it up a bit and then we can reduce the spread a bit more something like that and you can see now we get this nice light beam on his face and this is just giving you the like oh look at this guy now he's very important now to the story or whatever so this is what you would call a typical satellite and you can also make the light round to soften out the edges even more you soft an edge to create a really soft the softbox he feeling through this and then again you can play with colors right so right now we don't have any any colors we can introduce some kind of warmth to the main shed no light some yellow and then the key also the rim light would be like a strong blue like that and then the Sun is pretty much white and again I think what I like to emphasize is that we just add another light just to shape and because you can see his torso is a very flat and there it's not super interesting so what always helps is if you just create a few more lights just to help shaping your your assets right it's super important that everything has roundness to it it's not you don't want anything flat and unappealing so keep that in mind when you do your renders as well so let's just boost this guy up to it 15 maybe place it to the side here and you can see it's it just helps to to bring some shaping and now you can see his whatever it is is belts and whatever just bring it up make it more interesting and I think one more light we want to add is this kind of fill which we have previously as well which is like an up light which just helps make him more interesting or more meaner-looking so all these things are like I'm not saying it's you have to do it for every render you do but it just helps you spend some time on these things just to to to make your renders more interesting and bring them above the average render you see online right is this is just all I want to teach you with this course or this episode just that you have a bit more I don't know more appealing looking renders and just helping you to grow your portfolio and in the need you might need to apply somewhere and you want to showcase or you want to apply it for lighting position this is the way to do it right and present interesting light setups and companies they like to see how people experiment how creative they are and these these kind of things just help selling the look so these are my final renders I just regrouped the lights fairly quickly just to give you the correct order and naming off the lights or how it should be and these scenes will be available on my patreon account and if you want to look down you can join this channel membership and you have access to those source files as well and it will be not for just this video you will get a gain access to all my previous tutorials as well if this video I just wanted to show you a few techniques how to get more interesting lights using cinematic lighting well and all these principles are coming from the VFX said what you would do on film to create these interesting bounce cards and lights and whatnot and I just wanted to give you a brief introduction in these kind of things obviously I'm not using for the real objects or assets it's just about lighting today so obviously for your tutorials or for your videos or your portfolio you can use sophisticated-looking renders or assets to really shape them and it's also helpful if you have hair and it you get these nice-looking glowy hairs and back laid back scatter of the hair hair fibers yeah and I just wanted to give you a quick introduction this is a short video as usual and I think it's the way to go it's a bit shorter it's just more information packed in a short amount of time so thank you very much for watching in this video and if you like what I do I would really appreciate a thumbs up and if you subscribe to my channel it just helps me stay motivated and produce content for you for free so thank you guys again and I will see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 44,408

Keywords: arvid schneider, vfx, arnold, 3d modelling, 3d texturing, lookdev, rendering, 3d rendering, lighting, 3d lighting, maya tutorial, visual effects, vfx artists, vfx tutorial, vfx effects, 3d tutorial, render, surfacing, shading, 3d render, denoiser, tutorial, solidangle, autodesk, arnold renderer, maya arnold, maya arnold tutorial, maya, autodesk maya, maya 2020, maya 2022, maya 3d

Id: 2SDDFiQQH5g

Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020