Make Your Animations Look Better in 5 Minutes or Less

hey there how's it going good to see you again and if you're new here hi I'm sorry today's video is going to be kind of a quick tip something that I don't think a lot of people are doing but it's very very useful something I do pretty much every time I open Maya at this point and it has to do with lighting because a lot of the time when you're an animator you're told that you shouldn't really worry about lighting and that's mostly true you shouldn't worry about props and landing and modeling and all the other parts of the pipeline if you're trying to be an animator usually you want to specialize however there is also an argument to be made about you know selling your shot and having it look good and that's fine too but we're not talking about lighting for rendering we're not trying to make our shots look pretty for the demo reel at this point this worked for that but this is more about you working actively in your animation this is going to help you be able to see what you're doing to make better decisions about your characters about your poses things like that so let me just show you what I mean this is a rig I download this for free this is the link rig there's a Zelda one I'll review them and talk about them on the channel much more this is what link looks like what he comes in without the textures he looks like this you turn on the textures looks like that looks great however he's very dark it's very hard to see pretty much the other side of his face something that this video is gonna kind of tackle one of the problems of Maya is that as a surface wraps away from camera and the surface becomes more kind of parallel to the view focal angle as things wraparound towards the edge they turn black if you look at links face here his hair his face it just gets very dark this happened all across his body his arm does it it gets very dark very black which is not always as much of an issue some rays are worse than others it just kind of depends on how they were set up however it's not helpful to you as an artist to see it this way when instead you could see it like that so they just go back and forth you can now see that there's a pretty significant difference if you were to be working with this character you can see them a lot better so you're gonna have an easier time making decisions and your audience is gonna have a much easier time seeing what's going on and it's going to become even more important when you have environment when you have props or when you have a character with a darker complexion because of Maya's default behavior to fade edges to black any details on darker tones are gonna get harder to see especially if your character is starting to face away from camera that's putting their face towards the edge where it's going to start to darken features of the face that you you want to be in focus so if we jump over to the data and David Riggs who I will be reviewing very soon on the channel I'm checking out right now you can see it before and after of without lights and with lights so let's take a look at the Dana rig right here her hair is a very dark tone and her skin is a different color however when you look at the left they kind of blend into each other and it's hard to see that separation because Maya is darkening the side of her face which is then blending into the hair but if you put a light on them the line between those shapes becomes much clearer and just in general their clothes are nice bright colors but on the Left Maya is just darkening everything so it's harder to see props characters environment all of it if you don't add lights so with that let me show you how to light your scenes for animation this is a five-minute process it's very quick and easy I'm going to show you some really helpful tips hopefully so here we go so let's start with link now some hotkeys you should be familiar with five six and seven if you hit five on the keyboard it's your geometry six as textures seven turns on the light if you have no lights becomes a silhouette which is very useful if you're posing your character and just want to see silhouette so I'm going to show you two different workflows on how to do this one it's just kind of the basic Maya way and then one is a slightly more efficient I think a better way to do it but just requires one extra step so let me just show you with link we'll do the basic way I'm going to open the outliner and I'm going to go up to create lights and we're just gonna use Maya's basic built-in lights if you want more information on lighting in 3d what all these lights do how it all works I already have done a video on lights so you can check that out if you like I like to start off with an NB a light now this sometimes doesn't work at all with the certain kinds of characters we'll get to that in a minute but if I now hit seven on the keyboard you'll see that with this character the ambient light starts to work pretty well so I gotta jump over to my actually editor and you can see that I can dial up the intensity I can go just a little bit or I can blow out the character entirely and you can also use this color thing if you wanted to make it feel like a warmer day you could add a little bit of orange it's gonna feel more summer you could go to a cool blue you'll feel more wintery if you go a lot of blue it'll feel like he's underwater in the water temple because we all know that water temples so much that the intensity or you could make it go to green and then turn it way down and it'll feel like he might just be in a forest so you can use the colors to help sell your environment but in this case we're just gonna go back to using a white light so I'll leave the intensity at one but I never stop at just an ambient light I don't recommend you do either the reason for this is an ambient light brings out the diffuse layer if you haven't seen my video on textures and surfacing this is a good kind of intro to this type of stuff but even if you haven't seen it what the ambient light is doing is just kind of bringing out the color in the materials but it's not doing any specular highlights it's pretty much not giving you any directionality to that light it's just giving a general omnipresent everywhere liked which isn't very natural but it could help just kind of brighten everything up so I'm going to go back to create lights and I'm going to pick directional you could do spotlights but directional lights are just easier and faster so I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with those here directional light now I'm going to quickly zoom out you can scale up directional lights you can move them around it doesn't affect the light at all the only thing that affects them is rotation because you're just changing where are they pointing that's all the direction like cares about is where are they pointing at so at this point all you need to do is just move it somewhere to where you can see the character and just start spinning it until you see what you like and you'll see that you can actually give him kind of a little eye highlight as well and then you can also dial up intensity so it's a bright day we can really crank that up you can go way too far and now there's some kind of explosion happening if you really wanted to sell that again you can add some color to feel like how there's fire or something whatever the idea here is that you're going from this to that because here you may not be able to tell where that corner of the mouth should go here you can see the full face right now let's jump over to Dana and David and I'm gonna show you a better way to do that starting from scratch I could do the same thing or check this out if I go to windows rendering editors light editor don't be intimidated by this menu what we can do is you can create modify and just simplify your light building experience but for now I'm actually just gonna move it off-screen so we don't need to see it for the moment I'm gonna do the same thing I did last time but watch the difference I'm gonna create lights and I'm gonna pick an ambient light however notice the difference of how these rigs behave with this light let me turn off the intensity a bit so you know they almost look 2d or so Shadid they don't look 3d anymore which is interesting and that's just the way these rates were set up so if you are looking to stylize your work you can actually use this technique with certain rigs to get a more I don't know 2d looking shot which is cool but that's not what we're after so I'm gonna keep going but that's part of the reason that I pretty much never stick with an ambient light sometimes it's the directionality of the light and sometimes it just doesn't really work the same so I'm just going to turn this to no no we'll go to default value let's have it intensity 1 not doing a whole lot so what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna bring back the light editor now to show you that when we create a light it now shows up here you could name it and just call this so we'll just well we don't need to rename it but you could rename it you change the color you can change the intensity and all those settings are right here so you don't have to go through your outliner you don't go select the light and find it you just have it here in front of you this will get better as we go so next I'm gonna pick this little arrow Direction light and that creates a new direction light as you'd expect so just move it out of the way so do the same thing I'll scale it up and I'll just start spinning it and you can see on the Left how its behaving with our scene so what I'll look at here is I'll just look at at dana's eyes and actually what I'm seeing zoom in here is my 2d camera pen tool if you haven't seen you know my videos these have a lot of great tips but I'm a moving this around and you can see that her eye light is actually being created from this light so I like that I'm gonna leave that be and then I'm just going to duplicate that light and spin it some more say where do I want this one to go I'll put this one behind them and again it like this is looking very messy on the right we'll clean that up in a second and what I'm liking here is two things one on his chest we're getting a nice light to separate the form of his chest from the rest of his body and also on her hair it's giving a nice rim light so if we have a background behind her this is gonna help separate her hair from anything in the background especially if it's a darker background we now have that little bit of light separating the foreground of the background layers finally what I think we need in this shot is just more light on them in general so I'm just gonna point that straight at them from the camera more or less and I can dial this up I'd say all right we can see them very well the problem with this light in my opinion is that they're now very shiny you know the light is now reflecting or bouncing off of their their skin and it's just a lot it's a lot of distraction because now we're not focused on their expression it's we're focusing on more of like the skin and light qualities as they interact which I don't like here's what you do on the right for this direction light if you are in the if you're in your channel box you just take control a or go your attribute editor and that's where all this is you can actually just deselect emit specular and that fixes the problem so what you're doing is you're turning off the light reflection it's not really reflection the specular highlight the other video will talk about that but you can turn that off and you're still getting the lighting see how you know the diffuse aspect of it is still working now you can do this in Reverse as well remember the light that I had kind of doing the eye light that was doing this if I don't want the eye light I can turn that off or if I don't want it actually lighting her but only doing the specular I could have that as well so now it's you know you can see the slight difference I don't need to be now this can start to look a little complicated over here on the right there's just like a lot going on so what I'm gonna do is bring back our light editor and this is what's gonna simplify things so normally you have your outliner and you have your lights and you might search through them here and grab them in the in the 3d viewer and that's a lot childress grab the light editor bring this in and then I have all my lights and I can just say alright what's this one doing and what's nice about this is when you have it this way there's one thing in particular that I want you to see it's that you can solo and mute layers if you're not familiar with tools that have those those options it's to isolate select just say like okay is this direction light shaped - what's that doing by itself you can solo the layer and you can see oh that's that's all that lights doing it's subtle or you can mute it and say how does this look without that with without with without though I like it with until you can kind of troubleshoot and say why am I having this this this highlight on our eye I can try it a oh it's this one because I turn it off it goes away and so you can try things very quickly and you can very easily just be like I think you know what what's this main one doing like maybe it needs to be brighter maybe I want to try putting them in a forest and I'll go with like a green color like no I don't like that but it allows you to iterate more quickly and so back to our ambient I can turn off the ambient say do we want the ambient light I kind of like it is it enough too much and it's very quick and easy to just dial these settings in and out when you have the light editor open you can also create a group of lights so if you like all of this stuff and that's for the characters you can group all of that and if you had stuff for your background you could have you know other lights in the scene and you can have things affecting different things and you can just easily group things solo them mute them and try stuff out very quickly so if you were going to actually let your scene groups are gonna be helpful to organize where you put stuff because you can get a lot of lights very quickly but in our case this looks great this is before and after and the final thing is just cleaning up everything over here on the right all these lights kind of get in the way they can be you can select them by accident you could just just a clutter so to get rid of them don't select them and then try to hide them or turn off visibility because that will actually turn off the lights once you hide them they they go away so instead just go up to the show menu and deselect lights and all that's going to do is turn off the visibility of those shapes on that panel and you can do that for multiple panels that's how I also turn off the curves and like all the NURBS shapes on these characters so I can just see a clean view of the geometry it will add a little bit more processing time it'll pull a little bit more resources from your computer to do the light so you can choose whether you want them on all the time or some of the time or when it's useful or not but it is important to know that that is there and available to you as a tool to be able to make better decisions with your animation with your posing with your motion but if you are going to an animation school or regular school and your mentor your professor your your teacher your peers whoever it is looking at your work they are going to be able to see your work better just like you will to give you better notes and critique some feedback because what you have put into your work will be more clear and it's not bad that it actually will just look prettier in general so there's that if you found this video helpful hit subscribe and ring that notification bell so you don't miss out when I post new videos and if you find my video is helpful and you like what I'm doing here consider supporting on patreon its platforms like that that allow me to increase the frequency of how often I upload the the videos I make so links for patreon and everything else I do down below including twitch where we do a lot of this stuff live if you have questions you wanna come in and chat three times a week hit me down there as always thank you for watching all the way to the end I appreciate it and I will see you guys in the next video [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 66,539

Keywords: maya animation, 3d lighting maya, maya 2019, maya light editor, animation shot help, improve your animation, animation in 5 minutes, better quality animation, professional animation, high quality animation, how to render animation, maya playblasting, maya playblast, maya playblast tutorial, maya viewport, maya viewport tutorial, animation tutorial, animation demo reel, link rig 3d, zelda rig maya, maya dana david rig, dana david rig, dana rig, david rig, animation, maya

Id: KDdbeF64kHY

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2019