How I Rendered a Disney Style Animation in Blender - Behind the render

hi my name is poems and i've just posted this huge new project is a disney style musical animation and i had the pleasure to work on the lighting and compositing for this and for those who are not familiar with these terms lighting and compositing is a stage where 3d goes from looking like this to this and there's a lot going on um as a matter of fact it was quite a rough process i learned a lot and i wanted to make this video to share some of the things that i learned and considered and learned some of the lessons i learned so that you don't have to go through the same mistakes i did uh to to to get to them uh so i want to start with with what's happening here what what's going from this transition um and a pretty good list of objectives we have when we think of of of what what we do when we're lighting it comes from the the block uh from chris bridgeon which is a lighting supervisor and his blog is golden i will link it somewhere it's it it's amazing and and he speaks like when we're lighting we're trying to uh direct the viewer's eye so we're trying to use design to to to make the areas of the image pop the image the areas that we are interested in the audience to look at uh enhancing the mood atmosphere and drama which means that we're conveying story we're conveying uh what's what sort of of moment of the storyline what sort of feeling should we feel um uh creating depth which has to do with with understanding the environment using lights to make a clear read of the space we are on conveying time of day and season which is something that is in the script of the film like um soon 30 day and and it doesn't in 3d doesn't come to to anything until until lighting revealing character personality and situation again uh something something to do with with storytelling similar complementing composition and that has to do with with lights we can create shapes and shapes our composition and of course in layout you place certain objects in certain places in the camera with a certain framing but with lighting we have also a say in in the composition of the scene so that's something we should keep in mind now this project comes back to uh an animator uh giuseppe castano uh who who who made this uh disney style musical animation because it turns out you can make a disney style music animation with a disney style music animation uh he this is an assignment that he did for for anime school uh and it's great is this this this animation of this girl that's that's like uh freeing herself she has dreams and she she wants to to be big and she wants to be a star and and and and it's amazing it's it's like an emancipating it's it's cool it's really easy as a matter of fact uh it's like this i want songs i i don't know and he said bow can can you can you turn this uh i have i have a scene which is very blocking modeling and can you turn this in into a disney style render and i said yeah sure i can and i wasn't sure that i could but i mean i i made this um this is the outputs that i came up with it isn't perfect i mean don't get me wrong he was happy with it uh i mean it was successful uh but but it didn't quite look like i wanted it to uh it didn't quite look disney so and so what i have done is to try to start this project all over again and make it look like a disney style film only using blender and this is a story about it um so my first consideration was well what does disney films uh stand out that that that mine hasn't um so one quick answer is basically the the use of of form you see disney's always trying to light their characters in a very soft subtle way that's very appealing it's very cushy that's very very very very appealing uh and and one thing that you you can see is how they use gradients a lot they try to make every surface be extra smooth the transitions from from light to shadow are always super soft and super cushy and they're they are super nice um and and mine on the other side had some very abrupt uh very harsh lines you can see even this the arm that is basically a cylinder uh it it it has like two shapes and and i'm using some some design language here i'm i am referring to shapes when it's something that's flat and i'm using form we need something that's 3d and in 3d we try to convey everything to our form so this would be a shape and this like some shaded stuff with i don't know this would be form very basic um and you get the idea uh and so disney has a lot of form and we and another thing to consider is how light doesn't really overexpose it much especially not in the characters uh and then it was a mistake i i i did a lot uh for example here the the the character is greatly overexposed in the arm in the face even i have very ugly clothes and such and when getting feedback another thing that people really found odd is the sun placement uh and and my answer was no it totally makes sense i mean i mean there there's this room and and she's in a window and there's the the balcony and the other way the only way i can have the sun lighting is if i put the sun here and i make it light through the balcony to the uh window and and and it just looked weird and what i learned um actually from analyzing references is that actually sun position or a light record like light consistency between shots doesn't matter all that much at least in the position uh matter so case in points again encanto because because it's kind of the style we're we're looking for um we have this scene where abuela like looks at the sisters and looks at bruno and the sisters react and i want you to look very carefully at the sun position here um at the first glance the sun comes from directly in front of abuela and then once we switch the shot the sun is suddenly coming from the left and if if we would make a map of this this would be like the sisters are here and what i see when bruno is here and here's the door um and the sun first is coming from here and then it's coming from here and it actually makes no sense but you actually look at it and don't even notice because since the sun intensity the sun um the sun color is the same and and what's important is that you get a good read of the image not that the light is consistent and and with this in mind i tried to rethink the whole lighting setup so uh i i tried to make some some renders to figure out what what was the best way to to to light the characters uh this was an attempt uh you can see here i'm struggling with with one thing and it's the lighting windows is quite hard because uh when lighting from a window um you get uh the cameras in front of the window and the sun must be in front of a window since since it can't be behind you get the idea and and you get like very very uh flat lighting because the sun is really parallel almost to the direction of the camera and another thing to take into consideration is how i'm trying to get this the shadows on the windows from the trees to get some storytelling going like i don't know she she comes from from from a village and she wants to go to the big city i don't know and what i'm trying to do here is just having very sharp shadows that get the patterns of the of the trees on the window but a thing that that i have is that making a sharp sun actually lighter very sharply which is something we don't want as we've said before we want soft shadows for for our our rendering and this is something i didn't know how to overcome uh you can see me here doing some some tests uh but you you can see as we soften the sun then goodbye shadows uh another thing to note uh i am using real trees to make the shadows because um they have more natural shadows since objects are really close get sharper shadows and objects that are far away like the trees that are off camera they get softer shadows and it's nice and other shots um the second shot uh had like very flat lighting on the on on the first attempt like everything was lit super uniformly so what i try to do is to add more contrast and at first glance i added too much uh this is a roasting of my own work yes i tried to use a technique which is called counter charge where you get the background to make it light on one side of the character and then this side of the character can be dark so there's contrast then create an area of the character that's light and then create the other area of the background that is dark and it usually works but the thing is that making a light background that's so noisy has lots of stuff um actually it's very distracting and also the window super distracting lots of contrast here lots of noise in the image very bright spots and i want the viewer's eye to to go directly to the character and it's something i'm i'm not not quite um getting to with his attempt and again third shot same problem i'm trying to get like sharper reflections on her and sharp reflections on the sun don't really work on the character i'm getting lots of noise i'm getting lots of shapes we are don't want specially this shape from from the hair is very distracting and it looks very very ugly on the character and we want to again softer softer stuff not happy with the results i got i started again uh but this time i mean it was final i started by reevaluating my my references this was the image board i i can forgotten to the end um it had like mostly spiderwebs because i found this this color scheme like this yellows to oranges to purples to blues to i i found it very very very very um attractive and also disney stuff pixar stuff and live action stuff which is very very important because um starting from reality and then stylizing helps your your work to look very very believable and and grounded and it's amazing and now if we're showing the final result and speaking a bit about it i want to make a glossary of terms i will be speaking of lights and i want to like establish how are we calling lights uh first there's the environment light which is a light like blender we call it like world lighting um but it's basically the lights that affect like a very diffuse uh and help like getting the shadows never go to full black it always has something then there's the key light the key light is is the main shaping light someone in pixar said and i find this to be a very very good definition because it hasn't always to be the brightest light has to be the light that gives the most information about form and then there's the bounce light or which which basically gives some range on the on the shadows it works on the shadow side and you can see i am establishing also some contrast on the colors as i had in my reference i had some warmer highlights and purple shadows and that's what i'm trying to establish here um warm key purple shadows and rim lights uh i i want to point out that uh when we're speaking of key bounds frame this is what most people call a three-point lighting setup i think this is a bit on an oversimplification because uh first i am using various uh lights for example the the rims are various lights that are acting as rims and also because there are other roles that lights play on our characters like for example a fill light fill light is the light that comes sort of from this from a similar direction from the key but it helps it's very soft and it helps us really sell this um gradient effect we were speaking about and then last but not least there's the top light it's light that's coming from the top and it's very natural because we humans are usually in environments where we are lit by it from the top and sometimes is artificial but we want to make 3d look natural and we often a top light usually helps and here's the final result yay but first let's go step by step and speak about it first shot the first big challenge how we get soft characters and sharp shadows uh what i ended up doing is just splitting the renders in various layers that's something you can do and i always do in my renders but in this case i use various um different lights from for each layer like for example this is the um environment layer which has everything inside the character the character is only casting shadows and here is the character and they have both have the sun but are different suns this is a sun that's softer and since it's the same intensity and the same color as the other sun it completely sells it and and and it looks nice when when combined one on top of the other ah another thing i want to point out is how i i made the the composition for this shot uh there's this background that is like a square like a dark square and the character is like a bright shape on top of that so bright over dark creates contrast and contrast guides the eye to what's interesting which is the character and i want to point out that although the background is dark i tried to add lights which maybe come from nowhere but help like selling the separation between the the bed and and the wardrobe and and giving some detail on the background which is always kind of nice and what else what can i mention about this shot uh yep um the trees uh the trees i added to get some again depth uh one of the one of the one of the objectives was to create depth and i felt it was it was all in the first term so it helped to add some trees but when animated it felt weird that they weren't moving so what i did was to just parent the trees to a lattice and move the lattice with a wave modifier did the trick uh second shot well the challenge here was the contrast there was too much contrast in the background two less and then too few on the on the character so what i did was first darken the background the background is super super dark uh now the character is always brighter than the background so that gives contrast and another thing i did on the left side the window was too contrasted i removed all the shadows now it's way softer shape and i added a volumetric which is a light that irradiates the the atmosphere and gives this sort of gradient that eases the transition and and we have less contrast here and more contrast on the character which is what's interesting sharp shapes interesting shapes nice and on the left side of the shot i added a polaroid wall which has two objectives first it adds some detail some high frequency detail which helps selling the idea that this is sort of believable because reality has lots of detail and 3d usually doesn't uh and also it helps me justify like if here there's light then i can place a rim light on her that helps me separate her from the background and on this shot other things to mention she is stepping into a light so as she gets in she gets more lights first one coming from below and then a top light that make her look very bright against attack dark background and gives very appealing results and also lots of contrast i actually like this frame a lot and last but not least the third shot uh this was a pretty complicated shot because the camera moves a lot and i had to make sure that everything looked right uh from every angle so what i did is to start the environment was in shadow everything was in shadow and the character was in shadow so that wasn't reading quite well so what i ended up doing is is just basically add a volumetric below here so that the background here is clear it's very light and then you get the strong silhouette and everything reads quickly and it's lovely and still same idea here she's dark background is light thanks to the volumetrics and it looks cool it reads visual language yeah uh and then it transitions to a scheme where she now suddenly is light and the background is dark and you get light over dark contrast cool you're now looking at her uh again something i want to mention i am trying always to get like this smooth shading on the character i'm trying to make everything flow with gradients everything like the face you can see on the forehead everything should flow with gradients the arm even in the shadow i had some sort of light that wouldn't be there but i justify it with like having this bright spot sort of allows me to have this arm going from bright to dark and have a gradient everything should be great everything and that's it for the lighting but there's some composing on top just very simple stuff uh this is the render with all the layers stuck one on top of each other and this with compositing here i'm basically just putting some glows grain uh lens distortion which is what makes it look like bulged which is something that cameras do and we're trying to emulate cameras because cameras are real and real stuff helps 3d be believable um and was we're also adding chromatic aberration which is this effect that glass in cameras have they disperse various light frequencies and you get this color fringing on the hard edges of stuff in the borders of the image and some green because cameras also have grain and that's it here's the final result if you want to see it with audio and all in 4k and everything it's in my youtube channel you can go and check it out thank you so much for watching if i hope this was uh useful for you and i hope to see you soon bye bye thanks [Music]

Channel: Pau Homs

Views: 35,799

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Id: Yt9dpgFBPbI

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022