Lighting and Rendering Shots for Demo Reels

what's up everyone welcome back to how to become an animator I'm sir Wade and we have a lot of new people joining us on the channel we went from 2 to 11 thousands and like a week so welcome everyone in case you haven't seen many of my videos before the way this works is a quick intro like most people try to keep it short we do the meet of the video and at the end if you're able to stick around is where I usually ask for questions or if I'm trying to figure out what to do next on the channel if I have ideas I usually bring them up towards the end so if you want to vote for new things to come stick around till then but anyway today's video is at the request of a friend of mine from animation mentor joy this one's for you sorry I took so long this video is how to light your shot if you just animated something you're trying to put it on your reel and you just want that little extra level of polish maybe you don't just do a play blast you light the shot I'm gonna show a couple different methods today on how you can let your shot with different amounts of time and effort as always if you have questions drop them below and if you don't want to miss more content like this don't forget to subscribe and with that we are ready to jump into Maya here we go we're gonna do this video in three pieces the first for anyone who's just kind of interested or doesn't know what lighting in 3d looks like I'm just gonna show you an example a quick demo of what it means to light in 3d the second piece is gonna be a quick demo of the different light types you have in Maya what they do and how they work the third piece is gonna be the least amount of effort and that's gonna be just tips for play blasting with better quality so that you don't even have to worry about really lighting or rendering your scenes alright here we are on Maya just a quick example this is a scene I've created and it's based on another video that you've probably seen we have a camera and on the right I like to keep the camera view that I am gonna be actually rendering from and on the left I keep my my actual 3d space that I'm gonna be moving around in now if I'm over on the scene there's just a whole bunch of lights he's floating red things and that orb encompassing everything including this light bulb here there's just a whole bunch of different lights I've created that you can you can do all kinds of different things whether you have geometry create lights or you just have these you know just these red disks everywhere and if I go ahead and do a quick render this is pretty much what that scene is going to look like as soon as it's done processing what I'm gonna do here is I'm just going to delete all of these so now that those are hidden if you create what's called area lights that's these are here they are actually just think of them as light panels you can change it it'd be different shapes and sizes if you're using the Arnold ones and you can also preview the lights in mine and you move them around the scale the distance all those things matter direction and you can duplicate them you get all kinds of different and already you're starting to see that the scene looks pretty decent but as you move on you can also change the colors so if you're going for kind of a nighttime look you can go really really dark you can get like a club vibe going either way so what you're doing here is just add more and more lights and say you want to have a really bright light you can put that in the lamp and then you can kind of fake a look as if the light bulb we're doing this so go ahead move this light into the lamp the settings you're just gonna have to play with you can see it's really overexposed and bright to just tweak that move it around and also remember you're just previewing right now we're not actually looking through a render view we're just looking through the actual Maya viewport just to preview so just get an idea I'm gonna duplicate one more light I'm gonna get a TV make it a bluish light as if he's looking at a screen and it's late at night and if I go ahead and do a quick render one thing notice is that the lamp shade looks really nice it's glowing from the inside it's actually gonna look like this when you first try it out if you don't have the settings materials correct so stick around with a third tape and I'll show you how to make sure that that lampshade looks like this and not like that now you understand the general concept of making lights placing them giving them different intensities and colors to give you different moods and buyers with the scene now the actual types of lights that you have at your disposal depend on whether you're using Maya's standard light packages or if you're going to be actually using Arnold within Maya 2017 2018 and beyond I'm focusing on the Arnold lights because they're way better it looked way nicer rendering is faster and so on so some of the lights in Maya that you're probably used to our directional point lights spotlights and so on there's some area lights and things like that as well I'm gonna be focusing on the Arnold lights so area lights sky dome lights mesh lights and there are photometric lights but I'm not gonna get into those now if this sounds confusing don't worry about it because I'm just gonna show you a really quick demonstration of what these lights are what they do and how you can use them in your scene and it's really simple once you get used to it so hang in there so I'm gonna go ahead and create an area light now it's gonna come out default as this tiny little square thing I'm gonna scale it up move it around and I'm gonna make sure that my other view is actually previewing the lights now you have to really crank up the intensity with Arnold lights to make sure that they're actually showing but I can change the size the shape and the direction so I went from a square light to a disk light now you can change the color and you can see that previewing here on the right you can make it kind of warm if you go towards yellows or cool if you go towards blues you can really tend to however you want I recommend just tinting it a little bit but that's an area light now the next day I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create some geometry just a little sphere here I'm gonna move this sphere to the middle of the scene I'm gonna make it a mesh light what I've done is I've converted that from an object to a light emitter now if I really turn up the settings I'm still not gonna see anything even if I move around you notice on the right I don't see the light and that's because mesh lights don't really show up in the preview you need to open the Arnold render viewer I'm gonna pull that up here make sure I'm on the right camera and refresh the renderer and you can kind of see that there's light being generated from where that orbits now if I go ahead and crank that back up with this away now if I crank that up and I have it kind of green-tinted you can see here that the the mesh itself is actually creating light you can even make it so that you can see the actual ball of light in your scene so if I go ahead and move that around I'll show you that now you've got this little all of light that is lighting the scene in 3d super cool turn that off so next up we have a sky dome light and that is basically gonna create this big white sphere around the around the scene and it's gonna give you a really bright white soft light around the whole thing so you turn down the intensity a little bit and it becomes a little bit more natural you can pin tit in different colors and that's gonna give you different moods but just be one big soft light great fur you know product shots at sniffing if you combine it with area lights which is what I'm doing here I'm gonna add some more lights give it a little bit more directionality this is gonna give you a really really quick and easy way to light your scene so I can go ahead and tint this area light in different colors and it's only gonna marginally affect the way that the whole and looked because I've got that big white light affecting most of it and then this is just supplementing giving a little bit of fill now the main use for this environment light is to actually change the white link it to a file and you can create kind of a 360 environment sphere like this dome to use to let your scene just like this so now I've got this blurry image creating this different light setup and you can change the intensity and things like that is it that example I'll grab another in a second but the idea here is that you take everything on the left and use it to light your scene let me go ahead and up the samples just making the quality a little bit better so you can see more of the render so let me actually just jump into this light really quick and I'm gonna tell that little light bulb to be a mesh light so I'm gonna have the actual bulb itself generally light so I'm gonna make sure that this light bulb is actually working I keep turning up the settings the intensity and I'm not really seeing much of a difference so I'm gonna hide this environments for you just to make sure that the light bulb is working and look at that there is some light coming just from the bulb so that's good now I want to make sure this lampshade actually looks right is right now it's not lighting up like it should so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select the lampshade I'm gonna give it a material it doesn't matter what kind i'll give it just a general color now the main thing that's gonna make sure light shows through it is this little setting right here backlighting change that from 0 to 1 and now when you render you can see that the lampshade is actually glowing in the render because light is allowed to pass through it so I'm gonna go ahead and change the image get something better a little more desert II so when I go ahead and rerender it should look a lot warmer a lot more natural like you sitting in the desert somewhere so there that goes and like that you've got blues and oranges already into the render I'll tweak some of the colors of the lamp make it a little bit orange and a match now you can see that environment sphere working that is that image wrapped around that orb and I'll introduce some more area lights and I'm gonna try and match up just to give like shadows or you know it faked the Sun basically you need a more directional light than I had before you can also do snapshots in your renderer so you can kind of toggle between different things you can look at old versions and if you don't have any more you can always delete any versions you don't want and just look between two different versions see which refers me like that so I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this ground plane and just scale it up a scale rotate it that way I have a wall behind him so this is what the render looks like if I just go ahead and leave that as is I'll just rerun it and very quickly you can see we're just a few lights this is a result we get it's a lot nicer than not rendering and having just what was in the viewport but really it just took making an environment sphere linking any 360 photo which you can download I downloaded this image off some website for free so you can do that and then maybe you put an area light or a lamp and already you've got something looks pretty nice pretty natural now here's part 3 the final section that a lot of you've been waiting for if you don't usually have time to render or you don't want to worry about learning the lighting stuff or maybe your knife to post a light or your computer's just not powerful enough whatever the case may be if you just need something quick a preview in your viewport and you're just gonna run a play blast and you know upload it as an assignment or whatever you're gonna be doing these are the tips that are gonna help make sure that your preview looks good now everything I'm about to show you up here in any viewer if you click on renderer viewport 2.0 that's just kind of the viewer that you're looking through right now there's an option box over here to the right if you click on that it opens this settings menu and there's a bunch of dropdowns everything I'm gonna talk about is in here so if you need to come back to this there's posit on whatever I'm showing you and that's where you'll find all these following settings you probably notice that when you play blast everything's very pixely this is gonna help fix that so if you go up to renderer viewport 2.0 and a little option box you're gonna find things under anti-aliasing that's gonna get rid of that gross pixel edge that you're so used to that'll make everything a lot cleaner as if you did render it now the next thing is to fake some shadows and that's gonna be under screen space ambient occlusion you can change the amounts you can make it you know subtle or really pronounced but that's gonna give you some nice contact shadows without actual shadows now for real shadows if you make a Maya spotlight so ignoring Arnold if you make a spotlight or directional light there are different settings and everything's you can do I'm just gonna play with some settings here we can make it look a little a little bit nicer but if you make any kind of shadows and Maya using Maya lights viewport can actually generate shadows if you go to lighting shadows and that's gonna have shadows there now it's gonna be super dark for everything else now if you create an ambient light that's just gonna give everything a little bit more light and so bring the intensity down and you'll just get some general light everywhere now if you're looking for how to fix the shadow darkness you want to click on your original light and then there is a shadow section you can just move that slider and it'll make the shadows a little bit less intense so I'll add one more light I'll do a directional light and I'll just move that to kind of fill in some of the darkness I'll move the intensity down and you can turn off the shadows so that you can fully light your scene in your viewport and you don't even need to do a render it already looks pretty good you've got ambient occlusion you've got shadows Duva anti-aliasing and with those things it looks like a render more or less without having to actually spend the time rendering don't work like this because it'll probably slow down your computer while animating but when you're going to do a play blast it's gonna look a lot better and that wraps up the Maya part of the video now we have a lot of new viewers here and I need to get your guys's input what do you want from this channel why did you join why'd you subscribe glad to have you but I need to know how can I best serve you so I want to take a poll in the comments I want you to leave me if you have any ideas suggestions recommendations or ideas that you came here hoping to find leave them below and for those of you who know how this work I have some other videos already kind of in the works that I want to know what do you want to post next we've had a lot of requests for things like constraint videos and other kind of maya tool related things curve editor graph editor that kind of stuff if you really like the interview videos that we did with Ben then I've got a bunch more interviews film we've got topics on time management for artists some geared towards art portfolios and getting hired an interview lecture combo about subtext and personality in your animation a discussion around polishing your animation tips for doing that demos of VR painting in quill on oculus we also have kind of a moving to LA Q&A panel with some animation mentor alumni that I went to school with I have a couple more besides that but if any of those sound really great to you let me know which one to comment so I can make sure to work on those next also on the horizon are some tech reviews we've got graphics tablets to look at I have these actually super cool modular slider things just click together and pretty much whatever configuration you want anyway I'm gonna do a whole review on these these got sent to me from a company called pallet really cool they work with all the Adobe software and I'm trying to find a way to use them in Maya as well so anyway there's a ton of cool stuff to come and I have way more videos in the works than what I just shared with you guys but these are some of the ones that are already in my hard drive just trying to figure out which ones to post next so for those of you who stuck around at the end that's what you've got to choose from anyways thanks for watching to the end vote on the videos you want to see next and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss them thanks so much for joining I'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 59,887

Rating: 4.9612794 out of 5

Keywords: animation mentor, ianimate, goanimate, animsquad, animschool, cgtarian, learn maya lighting, learn arnold renderer, animation demo reel, how to light animation, how to light animation shot, lighting in maya 2018, lighting for demo reel, playblasting tips, playblast maya 2018, how to playblast in maya, animation demo reel tips, best animation demo reel, tips for demo reels, learn 3d lighting, how to be a lighter, after effects, nuke lighting, maya 2018 shadows, 3d lighting

Id: jtTrCT8WPDs

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2018