How to Create a Look Development rig with Area Lights | Maya and Arnold | Tutorial |

[Music] so [Music] hey guys what's up welcome back to swat studs i know it's been a longer than usual since i've made one tutorial that's because it's been a really busy month with a lot of works in my studio plus i needed to test our rig with a couple of objects to really know whether it's working or did i just waste amount of money well i put one of the test runners in the youtube shots i guess you've seen that the awesome hulkbuster render that i just finished in eight hours no okay so now finally our basic lookdown setup is ready there's nothing fancy or advanced things in this rig it's just a couple of lights with some simple plane under character and now you are seeing the results that i have achieved with this simple setup so there are a couple of things that i use in this rig which i have already explained in my previous tutorials like look the rig with hdri and constant exposure light in maya so i won't be explaining those things again in this tutorial that will be so boring so i have put the links in the description make sure you check that out so one thing that i need to tell you is that this is a baseline rig really a simple one so i want you to explore more and experiment more on this rig on your own so let's get started so we are back in maya the first thing i am going to start with is locator so i'm creating a locator changing its name to main underscore control ctrl and i'm going to scale the locator to around 2d so uh all of the lights meshes or anything that we create is going to get under this main control so the main control is our main like the name says the main control of the rig this is mainly used for adding any attributes if you want you can add attributes on this or basic in the basic thing we are just going to use it to scale the rig up and down so uh we are going to use the area lights with the constant exposure expression in this so that it won't change the exposure of the lights so we can easily scale the rig according to our asset size so coming to the asset size uh why we would have to scale according to other assets because in loop development if you are going to follow the physical accurate workflow or you want physically plausible shaders you need to look div each as it on its actual physical scale that means if you are going to look div a human character an average human character has a height of six feet or five and a half so you have to scale the human character or make the human character in that particular scale so uh i have already imported this uh character on here so you can see that uh i have already scaled this character onto a six feet uh dimension and if you don't know how to do this uh the simple way is if you think uh the character is on any other scale you can just create you can go to any orthographic key and just create a measure tool distance to and you can just [Music] uh use the second locator too and put the translate y into 180 centimeter so this is the height six feet height of that human character and we can just scale it to that particular height so make sure you model any of your asset on the physical scale in some cases there is a chance that when we are going to like for example when we are doing any city assets like huge buildings that are very big in size like 40 floors or something that is going to be at like 200 meters or 300 meters in height which is uh if you are going to let's say look dev a whole city or just a building you won't probably be going to model it on that particular exact accurate scale you will be then scaling down the whole scene scale into something to a 200 meter into some 200 centimeters or something so in that particular case you can use that size as a base unit so it differs according to your need and uh the project settings but mostly you are going to use the real world scale on most of these assets so we have our asset let's just delete this distance dimension and now we have our locator we have our character now let's create a ground plane for the character so i am going to scale this to 450 centimeter which is 15 feet in length and width so we need something as a room wall uh for the character the background so we are going to make that wall from our ground mesh itself so i'm just going to select these edges and i'm going to extrude the edges onto a particular height uh you don't have to scale it all the way up uh it's just need to be higher than this the height of the character so that the camera will cover the whole ground plane and there will be no alpha on the render so uh also we are going to bevel these uh hard edges so that the mesh will be smoother and there will be no hard edges on the render for the background so i'm going to add some statements on this and now if we press 3 you know we get this smooth plane as a ground and also as the wall and now uh we are back pressing one to remove the smooth and we are going to delete the history of this plane by coming to edit delete all by type history and in the plane shape we are going to arnold and subdivision we are changing the subjection type to catalog also i am going to rename this as ground so now i'm going to assign a gray shader onto the ground so i'm just gonna do 0.18 on this ground and i am not going to use any speculars on the ground because it's just for blocking the background and adding some indirect bounces onto the character that's the whole purpose we don't need any uh it's better if we keep it as a max matte object we don't need any particular speculars on this it's gonna cost to render time and it's not necessary for us on the look and next i'm gonna add the gray and chrome balls so i'm just gonna import the gray and chrome poles onto my scene so all these settings and the things are already explained in my other tutorial looked every with hdr eyes so check that out do you know what the shader settings are and how we set up the chrome and mirror balls now let's add a camera so i'm going to create go to create cameras camera so you can see this as this key scene scale is larger this camera locator is so small so we can change that on the camera shape object display we can scale the locator into let's say 20 and we get a bigger camera and now i'm going to change the focal length into 85 you can prefer any focal length more than 50 55 i prefer 85 for this particular tutorial but uh it's your choice just one thing is don't go beyond uh 35 even if it is a landscape you can work with uh focal length more than 35 it's totally fine on look dip we are not going to do any short lighting on this one it's just we just need to see the shader properties or straight up parameters working fine or not we are not going to see the aesthetics of like the perspective aesthetics on this thing so we don't need to go beyond 35 i mean below than 35 so this is our trend account so let's say if we are going to get some objects which are smaller or bigger so uh when the object height changes you'll have to move the camera and we have to move the [Music] camera aim into another position so either we can adjust the camera freely like this or you can create a locator and aim constrain the camera onto that locator so that it will be easier if the character is smaller you can just move the locator down and the camera will focus rightly on to that particular character you can adjust your frame according to that so it's your preference i'm not going to do any uh fancy things on this anymore it's just simple setup remember so we are just making a basic setup of lighting and uh all those things so our ground is now you can see uh from the camera anchor there's a gap you can see on the sides of the plane so to avoid that i'm going to scale it on the x-axis just the x-axis so that the plane completely fills the camera frame so now our basic object and camera settings are all done so let's create our first light so the first light i am going to create is an environment light so even if we are going to use area light in this one there is always a need for some fill light let's assume a situation where we get an object which is completely reflective like chrome like the crown pole so it in it reflects the environment which it is placed so if there is only a plane and a three or four area lights on the scene that is the only thing that is going to reflect it on that object and from the frontal side there will be nothing for it to reflect so the reflection is going to be black pure black we don't want that and also there's a chance that there will be areas which are filled with very hard shadows so in order to avoid all these situations we are going to first add a an environment light which is going to act as our main fill light so i'm gonna rename it as environment and i'm going to add a texture onto it so i've already created an image or a texture this hdri is from hdr i haven't and you can see there is light information on this so i've painted out all the light information from that particular hdri so that it has only a bounce lights on it so there won't be any particular shadows or hard lights coming from that hdri so this hdris job is just to provide enough fill so that no areas on the object or the that particular frame goes to black so i'm just gonna open it so you can see it's just a flat hdri now let's do some render settings i'm gonna first put the camera samples into four okay first we are going to put the camera samples on the environment to three so this is a base uh light samples because as this is a like a wide area light it's it needs more samples to reduce the noise amount so usually three samples does the job and back to camera for the start i'm gonna come put the camera samples to four rest of them to one one and right now we don't need any transmission or triplers we don't have any objects which uh which has a transmission or triplets on the scene so we leave it as zero and on the ray depth we are going to put two two so usually most of the things we do for reducing the render time and being cost effective we don't put the diffusion specular more than one not in the case of specular because if there is a multiple reflective objects we need more specular bounces but usually we leave the diffuse into just one because the bounces after one is very low in energy and it doesn't really produce any difference on to the indirect uh information so usually we leave it as one but here i'm just i usually put it on two on both of them transmission we don't have any but still since it's we have put the samples on to zero it doesn't make any difference whether we put any number in here or put it on zero it doesn't make any difference so that's our basic sampling settings uh we don't change any of these things uh leave it as it is maybe you want to turn this option off auto convert to textures dx so that you have a control manual control uh to which texture is to convert to tx or which not so i'm gonna leave it as off and i'm already added this couple of aovs onto it it's just diffuse albedo diffuse direct diffusion direct specular dark and speckle and direct this is the basic aovs which i need to use for calibrating the exposures of the lights uh just like we have done in the looptail rig with hdri tutorial uh there is nothing more i'm going to add into this it's just the same process we have a 0.18 gray value on the gray ball and we are going to uh match the same luminance value on the direct diffuse with the diffuser below that's it so now let's just quickly do a render before that i'm just gonna assign the same gray material of the gray ball onto the object and you can see the object diffuse albedo value comes to around 0.173 just like the gray ball and the diffuse direct value is around zero seven five which is in our calculation around uh one point five or one and a half stops lesser than the actual neutral exposure or the luminance value of that particular texture so uh as a fill light this value is good for me uh it gives proper fill amount of fill onto the object which is neither too dark or new not too bright which works for me and now let's create our first light which will be our key light so i'm gonna go into arnold lights area light so here the first thing we are going to choose is on what size we gonna put the area light into so let's consider the situations or if you watch the video of any uh vfx studio reels or vfx studio look developmentally reels you can see they have added area lights onto some kind of soft box setups and if you also watch some photography tutorials or photography making videos you can see they also use soft boxes to light up the scene so this area lights kind of acts as or kind of mimics the same thing uh the real world soft boxes in our 3d softwares so as you can see this is a kind of a soft box you can use real world softbox meshes to put into the area light sizes so i've checked some uh softbox sizes on the internet and i've selected two different sizes of soft boxes for fill and key so for the key light we are going to use 48 by 36 uh size softbox which is 4800 and 36 in height and we are going to put the scale z into 50. the next thing is we are going to create an aim locator for the lights so that when the character is small just like adjusting our camera angle we can just put the locator down onto the characters so that the light will automatically aim onto that object also it will automatically adjust its exposure if it is too high you can move down the light it doesn't going to affect the exposure it doesn't going to affect the shadows so that's the idea so let's just quickly create a locator i'm going to name this locator as lgt log which means light locator and i'm also going to scale this to a particular scale and i'm just gonna put it right on the forehead of this character so that we are going to measure the light exposure from the character's forehead so yeah we have placed it exactly in the middle done so from this on this thing onwards the things i'm going to do is exactly as it in the thing in the tutorial constant exposure light with expression in maya i'm going to add an ink constraint from the light to the locator and then i'm going to add a distance dimension shape and i'm going to put the distance dimension to measure the light distance from the locator and i'm going to add an expression so if you guys haven't watched that tutorial just click on the link and watch it so our setup is ready for the key light let's position it now into a particular area so this is like a three-point lighting setup so we put the key light onto any of the area which is 45 degree to the character and we're gonna put it into a particular height which is like like two or three feet higher than that character so that we get this light from a particular height not the not like on the same height this is a better choice for a good dimension i guess and now we are going to adjust the exposure for the light so this is already hitting on the left side so we are going to measure the pixel values from the right side of the character sorry not the left right side so you can see if here ev shows around minus 0.56 so we are going to add the exposure to 0.6 and still its rgb values is around 0.149 so i'm again adding it to 1 almost close 0.175 so 1.2 yeah we are getting a value around 1.18 to 0.19 which is good for me so 1.23 is a good value so our first slide is set now if you find it hard to position where to position the light just look at the nose shadow the make the shadow little bit lower than the nose not the exact line as the nose so that's the other thing uh we have to do here don't put it like very high like this because then it may cause some problem or when we do the taintable renders on this object so keep it on a sweet spot like 45 degree angle i'd say okay so even this you can adjust this uh light position according to your need because we are already done the expression and we have already aimed it so wherever you move this light is gonna cast the same exposure and it's gonna cast it on to that particular point so no need to worry about this you can place it wherever you want according to your need what i'm showing here is a base setup remember so i'm going to do the next light again an area light the second light size would be 72 and 54 [Music] now i'm gonna do the same setup for this slide too so our next setup is also ready the second light and i'm going to place it on the next opposite angle which is again 45 degree to the right of that character of left of that character so yeah you don't have to make it so accurate it's not about that because you can you can kind of make it like i put kind of make it onto a 45 now the next thing is keep it on a particular distance i'm going to choose a 10 feet distance from that particular asset so 10 feet means 300 centimeter on the distance dimension so i'm going to move it on the object orientation so just about 300 yeah so this one light you can see i haven't moved it on to the top side because uh this is this acts as a fill light that covers or fills the shadows that's been created by the key light so i'm gonna keep it lower than the film so let's just hide the key light and now just calibrate our second exposure so i'm gonna just add it 1.2 here straight so we just used that value before so let's you know if it's the same uh it's on the same distance and the size the exposure doesn't change with its size so it has to come close see it is already closed but still i'm going to add that 1.23 so yeah we are getting some values [Music] so yeah i'm satisfied with this one so let's see how it looks with all the three lights okay yeah we are getting a good amount of speculars good amount of light good amount of contrast the shapes are really visible on each of the part like this one that's the that's the best sign and one final thing is we are going to add our last light which is the third light on the three-point lighting which is a rain light i'm gonna add another area light but this time i'm going to use the shape as a disc and one thing i forgot i'm also adding samples three on the lights and samples going to change according to each asset because some of them will have uh a really glossy specular some of them have really rough speculars so we'll have to change according to the subject's shader properties but as a baseline we are going to add samples 3 into the into all the lights so i'm gonna put the scale to 10 for this one let it be hard lights with some hard shadows so that even if the object has really rough specular values when this light comes in the turntable we will hopefully see some specular breakups or something on even that particular object too so because these two lights are really uh have a bigger size on it so it produces um comparatively uh softer shadows and softer speculars so we need some hard lights like this one now the same thing for this one too in constraining and distance dimension expression so our rim light is also ready we are going to place it exactly opposite to our field like 180 degree opposite so even this one we are going to choose a 300 value we want on the fill light let's put it 300 [Music] okay now you can see on the value the uh the light is penetrating onto our background plate so we are going to move the vertexes of that background plane a bit back so let's just group all the lights into a group called light group [Music] so let's just try rotating the lights see if we are not penetrating it with our ground so it's not penetrating but still it's really close so we have to move it again a little bit further let's add some loops here okay so let's see if the top part is still enough yeah the top is enough but see there is still comes a gap yep our setup is now ready and one more thing if you want you can add is you can add a soft box texture onto our lights color so it's just a flat white color soft box texture which is going to give some variation on the light it's not going to be really visible on the light or the object it's really not going to make any bigger difference on the light variations or anything you are not going to see any bigger difference but still you can prefer to add some light so uh since we change the shape of the area light to disk for the rim light it's the texture won't work on the rim light but we can add textures on the area lights so we can add a file on this and we can choose the softboxes this softbox i have downloaded from sidl.com i'll put the link in the description you can download it from their site so i'm gonna add the same texture into my other color also so we don't have to use two different textures in here we just need one texture so let's just again see how that looks now so one thing we forgot is we forgot to calibrate our ring light before putting it down in that particular position so let's just bring it on the front and let's just hide all the other key and fill lights now just take it under and calibrate so we are not putting the key light or fill light onto one exposure higher or one exposure lower we are putting all the lights into a zero exposure which is neither under exposing or over exposing the object so let's just like put one on the exposure let's calculate read the values closer and point let's just put the 1.23 value here also yeah it's working good let's just put it back where it was before yep so now let's just save our file and let's just do whatever now so we are getting our ring light our fill line our key light and our environment light all together we are getting this particular setup so we have finished setting up our basic setup for the look devrig with area lights now one additional thing we can do is we have discussed this thing on the loop devrig with hdri tutorial that when we are using a particular hdri on the or any set looked rig setup or lighting setup on the look dev it is important that we check the shading consistency on many other different lighting situations so in this situation we can also use a different hdris on the environment light to just check the the shader consistency on different lighting situations so now i am going to show you how we can set up multiple hdris on the same single dome light to check the shader consistency so for that i'm going to load editor and just add the light environment light shape here so you can see we already have our fill hdri setup here so for adding multiple lights or hdri images onto single environment i am going to use an ai switch [Music] we are going to add different multiple hdris onto all these inputs and according to the index number the switch is going to select one of the input and it's going to connect it on to the environment so i'm just going to add the switch to the environment shape and i'm going to select the first uh hdri on to the input zero so when the index is zero it's going to show it's going to render our first environment here if we change the light into zero you can see there is no input on the zeros so it goes black so we are going to add another hdri we are going to add multiple hdris into our environment so these are the hdrs that i have selected for adding it into the setups for checking the shader consistency so if you see here we have different lighting setups like sunny hdris or cases hdri again a mid level overcast or sounding hdri a night hdri an interior night for single light hdri a color casted hd hdri a studio setup an interior with hard lights and interior with a soft light so uh it's not necessary that you test all these hdris all the time you can use these kind of uh these hdrs according to your nerds maybe a particular asset is going to be used in the shorts on a sunny or just on an exterior sunny and overcast lighting situation so we just need to test it how the object properties are coming on only in the sunny and overcast city right maybe uh some other asset is going to be seen on the interior with interior artificial lights like filament bulb or tube light so we can choose some air lighting situations like this one to test the consistency one thing we are not going to do here is uh we are not going to exposure calibrate this one because we need to see how the shaders are working in that particular environment with its or its uh raw light information so we are just going to add this all these lights on to maya so i have already numbered it so we just place it according to its number and just quickly add one by one into the input so when we are testing these hdris we you should not use the other lights like key light feed light on rim light just turn it off and then uh you can even hide the ground if you want to do the testing with the hdris so it's your choice so this is our sunny environment [Music] this is our overcast this is another overcast [Music] this is a night scene this is an interior with single light this is india with soft window light here with multiple lights studio setup last a really color casted hdri so our setup is now complete now let's arrange our outliner a bit so our reference balls has name space on it okay reference balls render cam light locator let's just group the distance dimension shapes together as distance group [Music] now let's put it all together into the main control group now let's just freeze transform character scale into one let's just say our character is on a scale of 10 so what we can do is before putting all the things into the main control we should make sure that our locator scale is also freeze transformed into scale one let's add it back onto the main control so if our character is on a scale 10 we can put our main control scale also into 10 and if you render it again [Music] okay let's just turn off the camera visibility here and i'm gonna increase the max clip link so that our ground is visible so let's just save this one and then put the cam character back to one right back to one [Music] let's see how let's you can see there is no change in the light exposure there is no change in the camera angle there is nothing changed so the scale change is going to visible more on the properties like triplers or scatters other than that there will be slight changes of modification on the shadows but it won't be really visible that much so that is the benefit of our rig we can scale it according to our need now next thing is we are going to add some i hate seeing this locator on the sky down located on the viewport okay let's just do the ten table so if you want to do the ten table look uh animation for the character usually what we do is if the 10 table frames are 100 first 50 frames our character will rotate and the last 50 frames that is 51 to 100 the lights will rotate that's how a 10 table is made so we can put a locator for the character again so any character comes you can just always key the locator and just add the character inside the locator so that we don't have to key on the character just putting it on inside the scale it will rotate itself and now we can put the light group and come to the frame 51 put a key [Music] then on frame 100 we are going to put minus 360. so the rotation always preferred to be clockwise not the counter clock clockwise that's why i have put the minus 360. now the next thing is if we come to windows animation editor graph editor you can see our animation is now has this curve shape we don't want the animation to have this ease and ease out uh interpolation we need a linear curve so just select the keys and just click this button this is the linear tangents button so let's just check how the render is coming you can see first the character is rotating then our light rotates so in this way you can see how the speculars are working is there any flickers on the speculars is there any bomb which that is going creating any flickers or if the scatters are really working proper the transmission is working proper you can have a better understanding on the 10 table ranges so this is our basic lighting setup so guys before winding up i want to talk a few more things about the renders which i have already rendered with this light rig and the thoughts i had when i was rendering uh different objects uh with the same lights so let's just start with the hulkbuster so this was the first asset which i have rented or did the looked at from start to finish in this light setup so most of the times the things or the assets which we are going to do the loop dev is going to be a dielectric material normally almost 90 percent of the things in the world is dielectric which has basically a diffuse color and a specular so it is very rare uh times uh we will have something like which has a properties like triplers scattering or transmission from this assets point of view i was pretty satisfied with the rig because this was mostly painted metal the red part is a painted metal and the yellow part is a gold plated so yellow part is a bit metallic and the chrome or iron part is metallic so in this case uh it is not a fully reflective or a fully glossy object it has a bit of specular roughness and there are a lot of breakups in this uh specular so for this asset the contrast of the light rig was uh enough and it was great the render output was really awesome so even uh after that when i tried uh testing the testing the same i said in the in our second hdris you can see uh the light setup uh or the or the shader is working really fine on these uh hdri lights also so the shader was acting as expected on each of the light the sunny uh environment speculars were really overexposed and when i was rendering it on a overcast http the speculars were a bit rough so in this i said the shaders were really accurate and the output was just as expected and when i did a render for the skin the thing i felt was the whole four lights were flattening the overall skin and i wasn't getting enough contrast on the skin i wasn't able to find the scattering feel of the skin with all of those lights and this render you are seeing here is rendered with two lights the key light and the n1 light still i feel like it was missing the contrast that i needed or to have that skin feel so on this asset what i did was i rendered the asset with us only the key light so in this way i was able to get the accurate calculation on the triplers and everything this is not a shader which i have uh created in this light trick this was a project which i have already done earlier and i was just trying to see how the shaders are coming on this particular light trick i wanted to see how the skin shader is coming on this particular setup so for the skin shader i kind of feel like we need a particular contrast higher than our light rig to have that scattering properties to really show up or to be visible more so what you can do here you don't have to change the whole setup or anything because it's just a few simple things that you can do the contrast is getting flattened because of the hdr highlight the the dom light we are using and the thing you can do is when you want to adjust the contrast of that particular light rig you can reduce our environment lights exposure by one stop or half a stop then add how much value you have reduced from the exposure add the exact value into the other lights so that our total exposure will be accurate and the textures of the object will not be underexposed so that's an easy thing that you can do in the in this lighting itself just by changing only the exposure so that was the thing i found out when i was uh trying shading with the skin and the third thing was this car render and when i was rendering this car what i felt was although the whole metal parts are all in a single shader and this is a chrome shader because of this uh grayish environment hdri which we were using as a default some of the chrome parts were coming a bit flat and uh although it has a really glossy specular roughness i was feeling like the environment which is getting reflected onto that part was giving the feel that it is a more rough material and also if you look at the bumper and the glass frame also uh you'll have the feeling that it is a great dielectric shader so the reflections are causing it to have that feel of a dielectric shader than a glossy chrome so in this case also what i would suggest is if if you're rendering really glossy chrome or any metallic shaders if you feel that you are not getting enough that glossy feel for that particular shader it's because the environment which is reflected on the particular object is really bright gray or it is brighter than it should be so try reducing the exposure of that environment light and compensate that exact exposure on your on the key light or field whatever lights you are using so in that way you can uh change the contrast of your light rig so uh if you think that uh changing this uh contrast is wrong there is nothing wrong in it the light exposure will be always accurate you are just creating a particular contrast so that some shaders properties are more visible uh to us so that we can get a better judgment on that particular shader so that's the only thing that we are doing in in this particular cases and most of the cases small uh assets like this chair is not going to show that much problems in this because i didn't feel like i needed to change anything on this particular shader so it was a by default coming pretty good so most of the time you are going to get a beautiful uh renders and also accurate shaders with with this light rig but there are some points which you may feel like this is lacking some contrast or something that's the only thing that you're gonna feel in some cases so this is the solution it's a simple solution you can do this and finally having a good light rig does not going to get you a better results there are a lot of advanced rig setups that you can see in the internet and you're gonna think that those kind of things are going to get better results with those settings but the fundamentals are all the same in any rig it's just they add some extra textures or models into it like a stage it just gives you a better look the look there is not about uh it's not about making the render look better it's more like making the shaders accurate and that that depends on how good you are in the loop development and how good your observations are how good your knowledge and skill level is so the rig gives you just an environment or a platform to create the shaders so always improve your observations your knowledge and skills it's not rigged that makes good output it's you so i hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you did give a thumbs up and leave something in the comment it means a lot share with your friends who are also interested in lighting and look deaf i will see you with the hulkbuster loop derm tutorial next till then this is swat signing off bye

Channel: Swats tuts

Views: 1,837

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: CGI, 3d, autodesk, maya, arnold, lookdevelopment, animation, vfx, photorealistic, cglighting, tutorial, lightingtutorial, swatstuts, autodeskmaya, autodeskarnold, arnoldrender, pixarsrenderman, renderman, exposurecalibration, colorcalibration, dynamicrange, contrastratio, HDRI, hdrilookdevelopment, Lookdevelopmentrigwitharealights, arealights

Id: YDFElKTs-Qk

Length: 49min 57sec (2997 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021