Maya Tutorial: Lighting for VFX Part 2 - Adding Lights to your Shot

[Applause] [Music] okay so in this video this is going to be kind of a part two to the first HDRI based lighting video but we're going to look at lighting to a plate so in the first video we covered how you can grade and set up your HDR in a scene so I've actually done a render so if you've seen the videos before we took we took an HDR from the very base so not in the correct rotation you know slightly bright and needed grading and rotating and then we slowly refined it we color graded it in Photoshop and then we did a bit we had to did an AI color correct into the hypershade between the HDR image file and the light the HDR so now with the geometry turned on it looks something like this and so you can see what's going on I've left on the shadow casting geometry so when we come to separating render layers we would have to turn off primary visibility for these particular objects these these brown sorry gray ones you can see in the front we do have extra CG on the left-hand side but this renders just incredibly dark at the moment but as explained in the previous video it's our primary interest was setting up the HDR just to look like this one below so we know it's going to give off the same sort of colors and reflection as was taken in our plate I know not everyone has this but this is the process were followed because we have the HDR if you do not have an HDR I guess you'll just have to look your plate and then decide you know what HDR from on line or or if you create your own you know what HDR will give you a base amount of lighting and shadows you should keep in mind that your HDR should be fairly dark I mean we've got the reference here but HDR's or sky domes are expensive to render so you want to keep them darker so they're just gonna give you some nicer shadows and global illuminations your scene before you start adding in the lights okay so moving forward we've done the HDR so mm-hmm with your play I guess before you start adding in lights you might want to just assess where the lights are coming from if I didn't have any other reference for example with this particular project I do as reference I have the onset preference which was this I have the plate and then I can also look at the HDR and work out what was on set for those of you that don't have an HDR you will just have to look at the play and try and work it out or if you've got a sequence of shots that was that were filmed in the same same location then you just have to do it that way so I've put an adjustment layer on my plate and added the contrast just to try and work out a bit more what's going on so I can see we have a bit of lights coming from this left-hand side so I know there's gonna be one light there so we call that one there's a bit of lights coming in these windows but I believe that's related to there as well so I'm gonna make the assumption that there's probably a light there it's a spotlight or something and I'm just going to change the color and the next light we can see this little baby Jesus or whatever it's being lit by some sort of spotlight because we're seeing this fall off this circular shape so that's probably gonna be higher up somewhere somewhere up here coming down just out of shot we can also see I'm just gonna change the color again we can also see there's a bit of fall-off and fade here so there's probably a similar spotlight but with less spread sorry more spread so there's a greater fall-off compared to here and I'm going to make the assumption it's probably in a similar position just high high above the actors but out frame pointing upwards so that'd be three lights you know excluding the HDR but that is our main our baseline what else I can see there is a lot of lighting here but I believe this as this well just looks a bit lighter because there's there must be some larger lights just picking up this area so I think there's probably just gonna be some I don't pick different color there's gonna be some other light going on to pick everything else up cool so let's just assume there's some other light hitting that area and it's probably out of out frame it's probably a larger soft light during that way so that being said we've got one two three four and then the HDR so five so we've probably got five we can slowly add these bits in the fact that they've used spotlights has made it easier to work this out because I have an HDR from set then I actually check in my HDR and see if I was I was right so I'm just gonna quickly draw over these but you can see on the left so it's a bit weird we're looking at the 360 image but it's flattened but as you can see in this side pathway we have a small spotlight and that is casting light onto this doorframe but not really onto the set just this door frame it's also highlighting the this window there so we could probably put a light in my in that particular area we also have these so that would be like one and then we've got a spotlight at the back this sharper one which I believe is lighting the baby and the actors and then of course lights number three which it could be a spotlight I can't really make out but that will be number three and I believe that is lighting this this house bit that's on on these stands and then number four we can see in this HDR that what they've done is they've got a light and they're they're hissing this light against this big white sheets which will just create this ambient diffuse lighting you know which pretty cool so we could put polygon plane in Maya with a white surface on however doing things like that will remove contrast and just remove the saturation as well from textures so that's something to keep in mind but we can see the lights here anyway so we've got one two three four and then HDR so looking at my my drawings on top of the plate I think that's about right although this light number four that I drew out I guess that would be this generally large diffused white sheet cool so going back into Maya what I've done is I unhinge all my geometry so I've got some objects in there which of shadows as I said as I mentioned before but I've put them in so I can start to position some lights and I'll have a better reference point of where they should go so what I'm going to do now is hide my spheres I'm just going to put them on your mm-hmm on a different display layer so I've selected them then I can click this button here which is add selected objects to it display low I'll rename this HDR bits because that's that's all I was really using them for although this this one will be useful this on set reference okay so so what we could do to start with is we could put in put in one light so let's go to Arnold tab we could put in these spotlights start with so I'll go to area light and go to my perspective and let's lift it up so this scene is set to pretty much real world scale so for example this door archway there that's about 7 7 foot I think so maybe 7 to 8 foot so it might be slightly larger than real-world scale but I was not there for this so I don't know great okay so I've got my my area light in there and I can angle it down a bit what we might want to do is change the shape so it is more like a spotlight okay so I'm just I'm kind of just doing a rough position of where that might go then I should look at my plate again just to check okay so it is quite a specific circle so not sure if it would be hitting the edge of this sign but we can I guess that would be artistic interpretation okay so we'll change the light shape to a disc and then we can up the exposure so I'm just going to take a guess and put 10 don't change the intensity just change the exposure and what else the a/v light group if we ever want to separate these in the future it might be worth changing them now so we've great this light so what we could do is because we know this was on set we're going to keep this one so I can call it spotlight one and then I could also change my UV light group on that light to be called spotlight one so I know okay this is the light which is aimed at the baby before I do any other changes I'm gonna do a quick render and to see see if it's actually appearing so I might need to up the intensity sorry the exposure so this is the render that I've ended up with so the lights pretty bright now so that was before and after I actually forgot that these these pieces of these stairs were turned off and it looks like I'm missing one or the floor is slightly lower than it should be so you know just I'm putting it out there for the moment but when it comes to creating shallow layers sorry when it comes to my shadow pass I'm only gonna use the floor and this wall on the side but in fact I'll probably use another piece of geometry that I've got but we could also use these struts we kept in the shadow path so this bit here and the ground and then I'll put in another plane for the wall for the moment doesn't really matter we're setting up the lights so we need to make it look a bit more like a spotlight so when we click on the light you see this option called spread we can reduce the spread to reduce the fall-off so the moment it doesn't look like spot a spot light because it's spreading out so far so as you can see in the render I've reduced the spread from 1 to 0.2 and in my this will vary depending on the size of your light where it is so on so on as I've reduced spread you can see how the light pulls in a bit more we get a bit more of a vignette so we need to increase that even more but we need to reduce it it's what I'm trying to say but we will also have to reduce the exposure you can see before because the spread of the light is greater then we don't need as much sorry we've got a higher exposure so now we need to actually reduce the exposure as the light gets focused in more to a point so I'm just gonna tweak the exposure a bit and probably reduce the spread a bit more and I'll see what I get okay so I've tweets the light a bit more so I had to reduce the exposure down I put my spread to 0.05 which is pretty small so we've gone from this which pretty blown out - now this quite targeted spotlight which is pretty soft you know it's adding a bit of a bit more ambience you might say anyway if we want to easily compare the plate what we can do is we can load in a background or foreground or you might want to do both so to get this menu on the right hand side of your render you would press this cog here you get the settings so we're in display settings right now we could go to background image and then sometimes you'll get a folder there it might be because I'm rendering no sometimes you get a folder there sometimes you don't you know that's that's the game you play so we can actually copy it up just copy and paste it my the link to my sequence so I have my footage in Nuuk in there so I was viewing it earlier I just copy and pasted that entire link into Maya into this background bit so hopefully when our next render it knows exactly where to go to get the plate if you just want the first frame of your sequence you would remove the hash hash hash hash so the first frame of my sequence would be let's say you know 10 10 51 but I think if we put the hash hash hash in then it should load it should load the frame of the sequence to wear every mmm wherever we go so if we decide to do some test test frames 10 frames instant sequence then it should load that particular frame so I'm just going to hit render again to see if I get my background popping up okay it's a recap so what I've done with my scene just to speed up the rendering because I was rendering I still I had textures and shaders on to set up these lights faster because these renders take a little bit of time even though there's not much going on I've created a separate render layer so if you're not sure how to do that I was in me I was rendering in the master which by default this is your render layer and I've got all these other ones that I created I just clicked on this button here to create a new render layer I called it lighting setup I like right clicked this and did create collection so this creates a group and in this collection I selected everything in my scene pretty much apart from other lights and I added it to the scene so that there's everything in my scene and after that I just wanted to change the shader that was on them to make it gray just like a start lining up my lights so I right clicked this and went to create material override when you do that then you'll get another option and then you can add in your shader there'll be a checker box here and I picked a lambo just you know I went to on the my bit it says favorites at the top so I picked at Lambert so so I did that one other thing that I did was in the HDR the SkyDome liked I didn't want it I had it on for visible to camera so as you can see on the right hand side this is zero which means our HDR is not visible because it does affect the alphas of your render so if I go to my renders actually if I load up another one you can see there's like a giant face there and that's from my HDR it also effects the Alpha as well so everything's white which would mean the background images would not be visible but now I've got my background image loaded in and it's visible and it's fine one last thing to mention I just so I did put the the image sequence in the foreground as well so I can I could do that I turned off apply color management because this footage at the moment the way in which I'm using it is srgb I think it's a cheap it's a JPEG sequence RGB it's not linear so I'm turning off the apply color management because otherwise it will linearize the sequence okay so I'm gonna turn off the foreground for the moment so this is this is where we're at so I could hide some of this geometry if I feel it's getting in the way but I'm just going to quickly compare so [Music] to where the lighting is so I think I need to angle my my light a bit more so I'm looking at the spotlight area so I need to angle it up a bit more to hit where that baby would be and increase the intensity slightly so I'm gonna go back into Maya and just do that now okay so I've rotated the light but I'm not so not so keen on doing this light rotate back and forward it just seems a bit bit tedious like I think the location of the light the spotlight is probably fine I just need to pick somewhere in between so what we can do is we if we like weather spotlight is we can actually create some sort of minor control to aim the spotlight because I know approximately where it should be and I ideal world we would probably do this with you know when you create a spotlight when it's at the origin then I would say just drag it in one particular axis and you want it to be exactly facing only a locator in order to do what we're about to do create a locator so to do that hold space go to create two locator and you'll get an object that looks like this if I could see it tiny I can't actually see my scene I was because it's not in the render layer so to add it I go to a render editors render setup I can add it there still can't see it good doesn't really matter it's just a point in space so anyway what I want to happen is I want this spotlight to be constrained to this locator by default the locator will be created in the origin so if I go to the channel box with the locator it's at zero zero zero everything so what I could do is I could actually reset my scale first for this for this light so in order to do that to make it sort of one with the locator so it will be aimed exactly at this locator we can constrain it now but what will happen is this light is pointing somewhere towards this sign so if we constrain it to where the locator is it means it will always have this offset which might be more annoying than anything so what I'm going to do to fix this is I'm going to move this spotlight underneath the locator in my outliner well not underneath I drop the spotlight on top of the locator and it becomes a child of the locator then I'm going to zero out so I'm going to just highlight my translates and rotates of the spotlights and hits zero and it now moves to the exact position of the locator which is our origin of Maya now that I've zeroed it out I can minimize drag it away from the locator so it's not a pair it's not a child of it anymore and what I'm going to do is move my spotlights slightly away from it and rotate it round because I want this line which is the direction I want that to be facing the locator I'm just going to rotate this spotlight by hundred eighty degrees and why so I've just moved it in one axis and then moved it out of the way okay so now that's fine so then what I will do is I will select the locator and then control select my spotlight hold down space go to constrain and go to aim constraint and I'll just reset settings so I think I need to keep maintain offset on from a test that I was doing earlier so I'm going to turn that on and press apply so now when I move my light it should be pointing towards my locator so that's pretty useful so that so now that that works I can move this locator to approximately where the baby should be in my scene I'm just going to turn on wireframe on shaded so I can see the scene better so the baby is approximately there so now I can move my light wherever I want and it will be following that particular location so now I don't have to worry about the rotations because you can see on the top right hand side in my channel box of the spotlight it's now linked so I should probably rename this locator something like spotlight one underscore constraint so we know that that is linked to that you could see underneath the spotlight one in the outliner we have this aim constraint there anyway that's good good we have the spotlight so now what I'm going to do is position it again and re-render just so I can get an approximate spot light I think I probably need to put a plane down there so if I had further sets Geo this would be a bit easier to do actually so I might just add in that plane and then do a few rear Enders okay so this what we've got is this updated render I had it in a plane for that area probably should have had at that start so as I flipped between foreground you know the plate we can see it's pretty much hitting the right area but now the the more I reduce spread then the greater the intensity of the light I haven't altered that the intensity I just mean the actual we're gonna have to reduce the exposure of our light that we could see it's hitting there is some burning out in compassion so I think I just need to probably reduce the exposure a bit more and then reduce the spread a little bit more I could just double check what it's at at the moment but the constraint is working fine it's good I've renamed the locator to your spotlight one underscore constraint so the exposure seventeen so when I render again I'm probably gonna put it down to 15 then reduce my spread I'm gonna try 0.03 looking at the plate it's quite it's quite a specific area so I think they but there is a fair amount of fall-off but looking at my render I keep forgetting to change it and turn it off there this this woman here and this woman up here they're not being hit with the spotlight particularly so I might need to shift the locator position or just reduce the spread a bit more so I've just pulled it down a little bit so I'm gonna render that and then take a look okay so here's where we left off from yesterday so we added in the light and this is what the play is like just to look back in so we've added in that first spotlight I think that's the approximate location so the game plan is to continue adding the lights that we believe or unset and then after that then we can start adjusting we can start to hide some of this stuff because there will be a point in time where we need to separate layers and view our lit assets in comp before we continue tweaking them further so we have that spotlight there which constrained I'm going to duplicate this light so I will have spotlight too so I duplicated it and I've got the same constraint so I'm gonna delete that and because the I like the constraint you know the it's pretty useful I'm going to make a new one so I'll create a locator so that create nope okay create a locator I'm gonna call it spotlight - constraint and I put my spotlight - in to drop it on top of the new constraint and in the channel box edits from the right hand side I'm gonna highlight the translates and rotates and 0 the mount I'm then going to move this back out so it's now zeroed in at the same location as this constraint but I need it to face the constraint so I'm just going to pull out my spotlight - a little bit and then rotate it and the y 180 degrees so it's now facing this invisible constraint or locator I should say it's not it's not constraining anything at the moment that's now what I do is I select the spotlight to constraint control click the spotlight to holding spacebar I will find the constrain and in constraint but I'm going to click the option box I really turn this on before but I think by default this is off so click apply and hopefully that's what yep okay I say hopefully because sometimes I do it in the wrong order and then then you have fear locator and moving around the light of something what something weird okay so looking at the plate I can just flush it up quickly I believe there's a secondary spotlight pointing at this area so I'm going to move my locator to this area I'm gonna hold down the V so I can use the snapping just so I can get it nearer to the position I won so I just snapped it to that corner so whenever you tap thee or hold it down you'll see at the very top menu bar there is a magnet to that snapping to vertex so I'm just repositioning this spotlight it's gonna be in a similar location to the other one slightly higher and luckily enough I do have the HDR for reference or brightened it in Photoshop and I can see they are in a similar place these two lights that's pretty useful to have okay now I'm gonna go back and render a frame okay so this is rendered and you can see that's what we've got let's do it before and after that before and after until you notice that this new spotlight is hitting our sign which is the CG Edition so that's okay I mean we're gonna get this sharp shadow across there so we just have to keep that in mind because the plate that were overlaying it to obviously has this quite diffused lighting there so if we wanted to avoid this particular shadow I mean at the moment it's very harsh so we need to soften it so in order to sell that CG object being there we would probably want to I think what I will do is actually angle the light so it's higher and then I'm going to reduce the spread out because this is not harsh that's very soft so even if we have shadow casting from our sign then we don't want it to be incredibly harsh we just want it to be a light effect if that is the case so I'm just going to reduce the spread and possibly increase the size a bit and re-render and come back okay so that's nearer to what we want I think I said reduce the spread I'm in increase it so I keep getting confused with what I'm saying but I just wanted to make it less defined as with this spotlight down here so looking at the plate again we see it's got a nice a fall-off there that's not too bad the shadowing casting from our sign it's not not too bad so these are all things to consider I think I will reduce the spread I my spread it was on 0.03 so now I've taken it to 0.1 to give us this great to fall off so I would probably want to meet somewhere in the middle so I could lower this back down again so I'm gonna I'm gonna just do a quick render of that probably take it to 0.08 so after changing the spread this is the result so let's do it before and after so we're pulling it back in again let's take a look at the plate again I should probably load it into my foreground I realized I haven't done that this morning so I need to reload in the sequence there and in the foreground rather than flipping between the play I turned off the contrast at a brightness and contrast adding in Photoshop just so I could locate where I thought the lights were actually positioned so for the moment I think I'm gonna leave that there if I want to get rid of this shadowing effect a bit more I can just raise the spotlight in my scene as well that's not too bad okay so I'm gonna save a snapshot of that and then for their next light that I will add will probably be this side light we see there's a bit of light coming in here but it's not particularly affecting the scene but we do have these highlights on the windows and doors we're not CG replacing them but it would be worth putting a light in there just so our CG floor will be lit a bit the actress or both sorry there are two actresses that come through this door that I will load up in a bit but we can use them as reference for the lighting of that room but the lighting on them is pretty dark so we should probably keep that room quite dark but I'm going to pop in that light so I've just duplicated my spotlight - it's in our way up spotlight three before I do anything further I need to change the name in case I want a Ovie's which sorry in case I want light groups if I want to separate the lights I just need to make sure whenever I'm duplicating or creating a line I will I need to change the name of this aov light room so it's probably just a good practice to keep doing that even if you don't you're not sure whether you want to separate the lights in your render or not okay so I've changed them so because these are spot being used as spot lights that's why I'm keeping the names like that so so I need to snap this into my room so I was holding V and then I just dragged it into the location now there is a polygon here like a flat flat wall so that's where we can take our own artistic interpretation because we can't see in the play and this particular VFX example is only one shot so we don't have a sequence of shots that you would get when working on a film or a TV show so we can't we don't actually know the layout but that's something to keep in mind if you're working in a you know a short film or an actual film TV show or whatever then you want to probably run what's your raw footage first so you can actually tell like Oh is there men to be a window here or is it just a wall because then then you can actually light your scene give it an initial lighting setup and then further alter it on a shop basis okay so I'm angling this bit down I might want to add a constraint I'm gonna do that there for the moment I'm not going to change any setting so it's got the same settings as spotlight number two and I'm gonna hit render and just kind of hope for the best I am quite a fan of using the constraints so I might just have to add that in a minute but I'll just see what it looks like first okay so this is where I'm at with the render sort of popped in the light nice result we're getting so let's compare it to the plate as you can see the this this wall it's not exact for what we have but it's good good sort of reference point so the only thing I'm really concerned about is well not the only thing that's what I'm particularly interested in would be this this lighting of the floor there so when we look in the play we can see we have this highlight here which I believe is coming from the light we can actually see it in the HDR as I've shown you before so there I believe that is actually affecting this and this bit here because we're getting a very light sliver of light coming through from that area so so what I would like to see is just a bit of like our cg floor as you can see it's going to start there this gray floor has a lot of shadow up on it at the moment because of its it's not actually at the right height at the moment can't remember if there was a reason behind that but yeah our rendered CG floor is just this bit so I just want the light to be coming across and hitting this door and a similar fray and in a similar way just to reiterate this door frame is not being rendered just this Beth okay so that being said looking at the plate where's place yeah I just need to probably have a litte more like and I was a bit deceiving because this green screen is being lit with a light for pointed at the green screen in a similar way to this whoops in a similar way to this in the background so we can't actually see it well you can kind of see some spill lighting here because they've got just some big are slight point points to the green screen so when we look at the plate it's a bit confusing to see but we need the bare minimum lighting for of ground would probably be this brightness level so think I'm gonna have to reposition it because we're seeing a bit of this curve I want like a bit more of a straighter line and then I can reduce the exposure of it and then what I'm thinking is everywhere else in this room can be a bit more artistic interpretation so we're doing this bit we're doing these first few lights to more to set the scene in a similar way to the lights of the set and then after that we can start you know putting a snap come together and then doing our own artistic interpretation so I'm going to just pull my spotlight back a bit and then aim it a bit more towards the floor and reduce the exposure a bit just so I get a bit more of a faint light across just this area really and then I'll come back so as I've been doing some test renders of this of the scene I should have wrapped double-checked this in Nuuk because it's I'm going to look to the plate since yesterday but what I've noticed is as I run through we see these these actresses on the left-hand side so they walk into the spotlight that we've got but the lights that is on the doorway is actually being cast from one of the spotlights so that being said whatever we add into this room our reference point for that would actually just be the lighting of the girls as they're in the room so we can just have this lighter ambient light in the room and as long as it doesn't you know we could have some stronger lights in there for things like fire you know for example but as long as it's not like too extreme where it would spill out into the plate so we want it to be plausible but the moment now that we can see that as as they get in the way they're shadowing onto there because the spotlight is actually casting this light then for the moment if the whatever light we put in there should just be this sort of light level so I guess our ground should just be the lit in this little way at the moment so that being said I could show you the render that was playing around with so as I was doing this area because I'm you know this doesn't matter anyway so what I'm going to do is I'm going to move my spotlight to a higher point and just slightly angle it towards the door but I'm going to keep it a bit more faded so the moment that's the positioning I had for it because I had the initial understanding that the spotlight that can see in the HDR was pointing down I thought it was casting that light in the door but now I can I could see that that's actually coming from one of these lights here so that's worth noting because then we can change the spread of one of these lights like if we received you changing this archway in CG then we could take take note of that and then adjust our spread on one of these lights or possibly add in another light because we'll get a slightly different result doing all these lights in CG so we're just trying to get it you know as close as possible so at the moment just to light up this side area I'm just gonna it's not directly angled down we want some sort of shadow casting you know with our with our brickwork and stuff but we can't see too much going on if that is our kind of reference because this girl the two girls there I believe they're just hid right behind this set wall so that they're not stepping in the spotlight of the green screen so they are pretty dark so I guess as our reference lighting this lady there which is is very faint from her left hand side so that's all I'm thinking about at the moment so I'm going to just position this and I guess I can now increase the spread a bit Mark's is pretty low so maybe I'll just for that for one default and reduce my intensity and I'll see what I get and then tweak it further than from that okay so here's the update of the lighting so it's a very light very subtle I should say but we can see it's starting to define our blacksmith this is blacksmith furnace and an anvil and that wood sorry not word these stone floor tiles so I would say it could possibly be reduced a little bit more all I've done is I changed the exposure to 13 and changed the spread to one so that before that's when I started adding in that light and then after so just looking at the plate just gonna stop that save a snapshot looking at the plate you know as I said before I'm kind of looking at this lady here so she's got these it's very subtle highlights it's a nice bit of ambience and then I guess the only other reference would be at that floor area I guess around here it looks more like bounce light that is affecting here because it looks a bit green that we can but you know we're not gonna see G replace her so we just have to use that as reference so I've saved the snapshot I'll show you the positioning you know just up there just change the spread and exposure whoops just up there and then we can look into adding maybe a small glowing fire light in there maybe animator okay the next light in the scene let's look at the play would be I deleted all that drawing that I did but from the HDR I can see is this so we can create a very diffuse area light to get this similar result to that and that should hopefully pick up the rest of our assets that are in the scene actually it's the sign sign and hopefully these back walls so we need to create another light so I might as well just duplicate another one of these lights because I'm gonna change it anyway change the shape so I'm just gonna pick one of them so spotlight one I've picked now I need to just remember that to take a few constraint I'm going to rename this to it's not a soft sub box but I'm just gonna call it this off marked one and change the a/v light group to solve the box one I guess it would be more like I've got the word for it I need to google it I'm gonna change the spread back to one so that's the default change my shape to be a quad and I'm gonna change the rotation to make it flat again because it's still got the the information from the other light so I'm just going to zip initially zero out my rotates on the light so that's the default we get then I need to rotate 180 degrees in the Y I'm just gonna roughly pick a size and scale that I think is fairly in keeping with what we have in the reference just as a as a you know starting starting line they keep in mind as you scale your lights in so if you scale with ways for example compared to horizontally you will get yours you'll be stretching the light so you'll get different reflections if you've got you know metal objects and things like that so that's worth noting but looking at the reference that we do have from ihdr I can see it's just pretty pretty big a 90 degree angle light so okay so what is the exposure on I predicts that going to have to put the exposure up a little bit just gonna check the exposure so the exposure on spot like one but that's quite focused in with a low spread that's a 14 the exposure probably the one I should be looking at more it's the one in this room so it's a smaller light that's got spread of one exposure of 13 so for my first render of this softbox I'm going to change the exposure to 20 and hopefully that'll give us some nice and nice result so this is what we get with that first pass so the exposure wasn't 20 so if from before and then after so we really pick up a lot of the environment with this larger light it's just adding some color picking up the shadows my enable foreground is now working I had to pick the specific frame for some reason it's not it wasn't happy with the four hashes whereas normally that I think it was working yesterday but if you put those four hashes in it should actually change the sequence so if you move along your timeline anyway looking at the reference I feel it's a good starting point but it might be slightly too bright this pickup light so I'm going to reduce the exposure down a bit at the moment I've not mentioned it but the colors of the lights we can begin to also them because we get this nice orange brown coming off our HDR which is fine but all these lights by default are just white so it's just adding white to the scene and if we're adding a lot of pure white it's going to desaturate our textures okay so I'm just going to save a snapshot of this and I'm going to reduce my exposure and on the right hand side I guess before we add any more lights and we should probably take a look at what what is going on on this right-hand side because we could see that this area we're not replacing this in CG in my particular scene that I have there was no CG here so my main concern is I guess this back bit so this where the green-screen is and then some of this is being replaced with CG elements and the foreground so I guess they're the main concerns so looking at the background I can see this actor there is being we could probably add a light about the scene heading more in this area because we can see this person is actually being a lit from the right hand side I'm just gonna add contrast to this plane okay so when this person is at that distance I can see that they're being lit a bit on both sides so that for the left-hand side this might actually from our HDR what we can see in the render so far is where as the render oh I've got the foreground on we do have a bit of light coming from that direction so that might be good enough for our CG there and then we need to look at okay so this actor is being laid on the right hand side so this is our furthest point of reference this person for that area as this person walks further into shot then they get shadowed by something whatever was oh yeah I would be the well so they're walking I'm not sure if there actually was anything to the right hand side of set so they're walking behind the well so they get obscured but I suppose some of that lights on them is actually coming from this that big diffuse light with her in the scene oh there is another person that walked in but our plate ends around this frame like one one four nine the rest of it we don't need so I'll just be looking at this section so based on what I've seen I think might be worth adding a light to the right-hand side of this particular area or the plate so gonna jump back into Maya I think what I was saying before or is this was slightly too bright so before I do anything else I'm gonna reduce the exposure of this softbox something I called it so I'll just pull that down by one I'm not gonna rear-end her right now but I couldn't duplicate this so now it's called softbox - and I need to just go vaguely move it into this particular area and it's going to change the aov light name to soft box number two okay so with when you're putting out lights in my it's worth keeping them at an angle and bend them I know this one's up your ninety degree angle but will get a bit more intrigue if we actually rotate it downwards a bit because otherwise we're just gonna get a flat lighting if it's just exactly facing the object but luckily we do already have the other spotlights in so they're creating these interesting shapes but otherwise if we just have a 90 degree area light it's just going to be quite flat whereas we want to create a bit of a bit of shape in that area so this light that I'm putting there is fairly big but we probably want it to affect the archway gonna look at the plate again and I keep flicking back and back and forth between there so this this archway is not very good reference because it's just a flat 2d piece of wood or something painted so it just has a bit of like that so based on this actor that's being lit slightly from an angle or the right hand side so using that as reference I'm going to put in my area light at the side at a slight angle and might actually scale up there because I wanted to sort of I was gonna say the latch on but just softly lighten the sides but I want to do it an angle so we do get some nice shadowing from my renderview we wouldn't actually see the right-hand side again but I'll keep this far back enough but I do want to reduce the exposure so I'm gonna pull it down but I guess 15 and now I'm going to re-render so now we can see it before and after so hasn't actually done that much but it does pick up that area on the side a bit so we've reduced the exposure by one on the other area and then added in that other side light so we do we get an overall reduction that's fine I think it's don't want it too intense at the back but we do want it to pick up the shadows but where it was before was just introduced it was just picking up these areas of the back a bit too much for my liking so the slightest side though definitely needs to be picked up a bit more I wasn't sure how much it would affect that particular area but this one at the side I don't want it too much because then we're gonna get this extreme light that spills out it hits the barn and then the barn is going to go from light to dark especially because this archway it's going to impact that so if we do an intense light this archway is going shadow on there and because this area is not in camera then we don't actually have anything there to block the shadows but I guess in reality at this war would continue further along so if push comes to shove we can always put a polygon plane there literally to just block the block the light from here it's in the barn or getting it's very getting the weird single-line shadow from the barn from the archery onto the barn so I'm just gonna render that and see what it looks like I've done tests for and I increase the exposure of the right-hand side like quite a bit I put it to 19 so I think it's at the same as this me the back light but we can see now it's picking up everything a lot the reason for putting up the exposure is so high which just so I can actually see what it's doing a bit more to think I'll have to resize this particular light it is pretty massive I don't want it to affect too much of the scene so I'm going to reel it and scale it down a bit I would like it to affect the archway that area and you know the bricks a bit I think I just need to turn it away if it's too big then it will spill to align to the shadows on that side so based on the intensity of this render I think with the shape change I'm going to render it and see what it looks like because I know and if the exposures not too much actually in fact yeah I'll bring it down by one so I still want to be able to see what it's doing but I just want to not affect the rest of the scene so much so the result of that render we have so that was before and then after so it's darkened down a bear but it's really that's the that's the most recent render and then the before this was darkened down a bit if we can compare it to what we had previously like before actually adding in that light we can see the shadows get picked up so it is kind of flattening that area but we don't want that harshest dark CG shadows so we want to pick up this back area a bit so we might want to pull the light down a bit but it's hard to tell like we didn't we need to put the textures on stuff but for the moment that's fine that can just sit there just so I remember it I'm gonna change the exposure of that softbox like 2:17 I could do a quick test render but for the moment I'm going to leave it because in the moment we're just putting in the different light just for that we can see our onset and then once we do some test renders and put it into nuke then we can actually tell what it's looking like for the moment I'm just gonna quickly check the reference to see if there's any other particular areas of light that I've missed so we can see there definitely is a spotlight pointing down in that window so I suppose this specific light is affecting those windows but in the Maya sorry with for this version of the project I'm working with these windows actually being boarded up so we don't need to think about that but if we were to change this window then that's when we can then we would have to consider that more air light if we had glass there or for example these aren't glass windows but we would probably after lights whatever's behind there in correlation with that reference like this because we do have the reference there so that's something to keep in mind so what I'm going to do is I I'm gonna swap the render layers sorry go back from my the one that I called was it lighting lighting setup again so to recap this was just a lighting just a layer with everything on the scene and just with a material override which was the Lambert the great Lambo so now I'm going to go back to the master layer and I'm gonna hit render and then I'll come back and see what it looks like okay for this next bit what we're gonna do is this is where we left off so I just hide the foreground oh wait that's where we left off so I went back to my master layer to take a look better it takes a little bit longer to render so this is the result I've got the moment I should probably begin to hide the shadow geometry and you know one because I've got this base lighting in place what the plan is is I'm just going to add a shader to this shadow geometry and then what we'll do is we'll break this up into some render layers and get it into nuke because although we do have the plate in the background here it might be easier to take a first look so now we've done like a first pass for the lighting and then we can take it from there we'll probably need to add some more objects for shadows or reflections that sort of thing but firstly I mean this is this is alright it's probably darker than it should be however it's a bit deceiving because some of the lights and shadows that we are seeing we're looking at these gray shadow objects and at the moment they're spilling out and so like reflections that you'll see in objects such as these tankards are going to be coming from this gray Lambert floor which is also going to make the render have less contrast as well so on my master render layer so I'll jump back what I'm gonna do is select all the shadowing geometry so the stuff that I'm not gonna render it should all be in a group but this one isn't so I'm just going to rename I added this later down the line so I'm gonna call this shadow and scourge ear so this geometry was useful for the for lining up once I track the camera and it's also going to prove itself useful in terms of the reflections as well because at the moment we are reflecting the HDR which is great that's the main the main thing but also we need to reflect the floor so what we're gonna do is reproject our footage onto the floor and also anywhere else where it needs to be okay so these are camera so here's the theory so we create shader and we create an AI camera project and we put our footage in it and then we shoot it onto this so I'm gonna make sure I've saved a snap a screenshot of the render don't know I've gotta have another and then we could take a look and see what the result is and then if if it's improved the result which should do then we can hide this shadow geometry and then start to look at render layers and that sort of thing okay so let's open the hypershade with these shadow objects selected I'm going to assign a new shader so I right click go to assign new material hit the Arnold tab and I'm gonna add actually now this should work fine with a surface shader and I'm going to call this projection shader so this is just a very flat shader as you can see there's any four settings and two of them are black so they're not doing anything anyway okay my hope shades I'm going to press in and out connections actually that does nothing so I'm just gonna go to my materials and search can't actually find out I just call it projection shader there is so I press in and out connections so here we go this is our shader so in order to get the plate in the positions so the goal is to apply everything just realized I'm missing some of the geometry I'm just going to quickly check that I'm on the master end alone okay and whereas the shadow geometry okay so alright okay so I lost the objects there for a second I think I must have deleted them or something I was just applying shader and then everything disappeared right some on the Mossler let's go back to the hope shape so I'm going to just select one of the objects and do in and output connections to get to my projection shader again now I need to project it from the plate sorry from the camera I want to project my footage exactly from the render camera so in the tab for the search tab you can search for what I was searching for you can search for things by hitting type in the pipe shade as well so this is and we're looking for an AI camera projection so I'm just going to drag this nearer so in here we need to link the camera so we're going to pick the render cam and then in projection color we can search in here for our plate I think that well the plate should already be in the scene so it might be up here as well I'm just gonna take a look I can't you see up there so I'm just gonna reload the plate okay so that's in there that's JPEG sequence which is fine for this purpose so now you can see we've got this new file note that it created so I'm just gonna change it to the plate it's fine cool and then so the cameras linked in the projection nodes and we've put our footage in and now I can minimize drag into the surface shader and hopefully when we render we'll actually see something so I'm gonna stop the recording and then do a test render okay so after applying the shader and the render looks something like this so what's happening now is our shadow objects that I'm calling them they're actually they actually should be called light blockers really these objects are now they have to essentially the plate the footage projected or unwrapped just straight projected from our render camera onto these surfaces and if i zoom into a particular area just to see the before and after so now these metals for example will be reflecting the plate in that specific area so that's pretty cool as you can see before even in the wood because our light blockers just have this white material on then it means they're they just give off white before but now they're actually reflecting what would be the plate in that particular position you know the pros and cons of doing that is if you want to do it and have the best result you should ideally have more of this geometry in the way in our scene as you can see here we just have a few stairs and this bit and then a floor which is fine I suppose but let's look at this back wall so you see this CG wall we want to render this but in the footage as we've seen before actually it's really dark in the footage we have this Hut that's staying in the play whatever this is the shed if we jump back to Maya and look at the render after applying this effect I'll go before it was like that before and then after we're getting these clothes which looks interesting but it's actually coming from the actor and this well here and that's because what is happening is from our camera view if you can see we're projecting this the plate exactly the same size as this camera from this camera so anything that would be here which would be the actor and in the well it's actually being projected onto the floor which is not great so that's why we get this particular result so it looks like we've got the plate just in our footage so it looks like everything's lined up fine but we need to actually if we wanted to get a better result with this would actually need to put some other things in the way so this current this works but also you know not so great mm-hmm in this instance what I could do to avoid this happening I could resize this ground plane because I don't in future when I do my shadow pass render then I think the only objects I need a shadow pass for are these ones in the foregrounds because these will be on top of the play with no other CG everything else is pretty much fine so what I'm going to do to get around this for the moment is if I just rescale my ground plane I'm just going to see how that looks okay that's fine it's further away from this surface I think is this in my shadow group no just gonna double-check okay well this wall should be in my shadow group but it's not but that but this wall I would need to keep in mind that if I include it in my shadow group actually no no sorry I don't need to do a pass on that but I might if I want to project on this I just need to be aware that it's going you know whatever is directly in front of that area so of the plate actually let's look in my my render layers stone on the foreground footage okay so to the left of this wall we have another wall somewhere here so if I project if I turn my shader and project onto it it's going to be probably this section which is not exactly right we want this brick wall material that sort of thing on this back wall that using this projection technique would not work I think we can get away with it for a few assets like these foreground ones so when it when it comes to actually putting this background area on this on a separate render layer then when I put this in as a light block I should probably put on some form of texture just because when the light hits this even though it's not visible and render it's going to bounce off and give some sort of color information much like you can see in the example that I was just doing this is particularly noticeable in their tankard if you see so that before we're getting it sort of washed out gray then after it's it should be reflecting this Brown mount a bit more otherwise I suppose we could generate textures using the plane because that's all we've got like particular areas like this floor ground plane we've gotten mire we could use Photoshop clone stamp a version of this ground just onto a tileable texture but yeah I think for this example you know it's gonna work fine but you could see the difference is pretty cool like the amount of color change you know having this projected shader so the next thing we'll need to do so we've got these basic lights in so that's pretty much it for lighting I'm gonna say at the moment obviously this is just like the base point this is kind of how it looks you can actually see what's going on here which is not great so again I should probably talk about that so you can see what's happening this room's meant to be dark but because I'm applying the shader to this wall and this object it's really affecting this room back there so this room on the left-hand side is going to be separated on render layer so what I'll need to do is if you want to do techniques like this like this surface shader we probably should have just used it for this these foreground assets so these foreground assets we should put on a separate render layer and then create a collection for the objects that we need to block the light so for these foreground objects like hankered assign the word we would create a collection for those so just to go over that so you would create a render layer so new render layer call it foreground and right click create collection so these objects like the sign stuff like that they would go into here and so this collection would be render objects for example and then we were to create right-click create like another collection so a collection is pretty much like a group then we would have the shadow objects sorry the light blockers so I'm going to pick the side wall and the ground click Add call these light blockers and then what we would do is right click and create material override then we could add our surface shader to that but because we've done on the mask layer it means now all these objects will have a surface shader on when we should probably only use it for the foreground for this room on the left-hand side as I was saying you can see the devastating effect it's having so what we'd probably want to do is just put some form of brick texture on the other side of this wall or even up the bare minimum just to color because at the moment it's reflecting because the surface shader doesn't have any it's just the pure color so it's very bright as well I was just thinking we could possibly as an alternative if we did one if we did like the color stop being introduced I guess problem is we're projecting the plate which has been lit so if we still want this color information to go onto here we'd probably have to make another surface shader to do this camera projection just for that room and then we could maybe color correct I'm just gonna open up the hope shade that could work as well maybe in fact I might just do a quick test render to see how that works out so she can save a snapshot and then color corrected this plate because you know if you can get away with doing that sort of thing then that that would be pretty useful it's a quick way of improving the lighting and the reflections and overall lighting of your shot for the effect okay so this render so what I've done is where was it okay okay okay so we have this surface shader render and now we have this one which essentially is the same I think I accidentally shifted a few frames before I hit render but it's pretty much the same thing but what I did was in my hyper shade I did a color correct of the healthy surface shader so the reason you can see the plate here as I mentioned before is because that's now being projected out to the geometry there you'll notice the wall on the right hand side we fixed that problem because I was saying that this actor and this well are being projected onto the floor that is our shadow geometry so we moved this we scaled down this ground plane so now if I look in the perspective you could see that it's further away so it's not affecting this wall there at the back and because our room on the left hand side was being affected greatly by this surface shader because if you think about it these actors here with the baby they're being projected onto this wall on both sides so in this darkened room suddenly there's a flash of light because it's a surface shader so it's just a flat color and that was spilling and being reflected by the metals there so as I've reduced the exposure down we still get a bit of light from it but we just really want their reflection information I mean in a in the most realistic scenario like we would just have a repeated brick pattern of this so we could make that in Photoshop we could try and make some simple tiled pattern for example or something of a similar color palette to be reflected there but by using this projection method it's just a quick way of getting some nice results as well so what did it look like before so it looked like this and now it's like now so so this is just with the the render with the shadow objects so this these objects with the great renders on and then if I look at it now so I've turned off primary visibility on the shadow objects just because now I just can hide them out that way but they're still affecting the scene so if we just look out there we can see a bit of reflection I pull the exposure down of this projected texture to about about minus five to quickly take a look at the tank it's as well so it is pretty much the same render as this one but the exposure down not don't too much of a difference between these two ah because I've scaled the ground I think that's slightly affected that so we would probably have to look at these render layer separately at the moment I've just been doing this as an example in the main master render layer but for each specific render layer that you end up creating you'd want to separate you know you could make bespoke surface shaders for those different areas like for this blacksmith room this current render that I've got so the shadow objects have that surface shader on it that we created but if then it's got the AI color correct I'll just see if my hunch shades up nope okay and just need to open up the hive shades so all I did was in between this is my footage there and then I just dragged the out color to this input of a a I color correct so you hit tab search a I color correct or search for it in the left hand side probably in the utilities I put that in and then went to exposure how to play around and -5 was a bit more in keeping with the plate but it seemed to work better so just remember we're sending up this bit you create the AI projection node and you load in the footage into protection color and then in linked camera you just search for your render camera so this render camera is the tracked camera we can see and then this projection ai camera projection is just a middle mouse dragged into a surface shader which you can create in the my favorites tab very basic shader it's just a flat texture so yeah so for that blacksmith from that's yeah I've just darkened to the projection shader for this project I think we can we could get away with that sort of thing so in terms of rendering I did another video the other day which was something like my tutorial for render layers rendered out Maya and nuke tutorial render layers for controlling lights and so I don't have that exact set up in here but that just included the light groups so in our scene we were naming all of these spot all of these lights we were changing their air being like group name so what I'm going to do is I'm going to load up new because I've got some renders of separate layers and I'm just going to show you how we can alter the likes so to go over it again UV light group on the right hand side for each light change that the same name as the light or at least something that's relevant like fire light for example and then in your render settings you need to go to a OVS in the example I'm about to show you in Nuuk I created I want to rebuild a render but as basic as possible so I'm gonna activate the diffuse so you find it in the left hand side the diffuse is pretty much most of the render apart from the reflections specular is the reflections so I activate these to add them from left to right and then in the right hand side a turn on all like groups you can see we've got our lights in there spotlight to 3 and it should just when you change the name of your lights it should add them into this list if you want specific ones then you would just type them you would just list them out there to avoid an Arnold error for any render AOV so render pass that you want to render like separately with you need to change the driver from this standard EXR with these two symbols to EXR the only a slightly annoying thing that happens when you do this is it will create a separate folder for the liars so in the common tab we turned on merged air beings but these will actually render in a separate folder so we'll get a folder for each file render layers like background and then in there we'll have our beauty render with all these other a Ovie's in there then within that background folder we'll have another folder called diffuse and specular and in that in each of those that's when we will have our exile with our different lights built-in so it means when we come to comp we'll have something like this so the these renders here are actually from the same scene but well just a different version pretty much the same so when you render out you'll get something like this you'll get in your background render folder so in the background render layer it creates a folder when we do a batch render and you'll get a node which is the name of the scene so the scene that I rendered it from was called lighting I 0 0 1 so if I just read that by pressing a number this is the beauty render of just the background and it has now film then so I rendered this probably a week or two ago now and in my diffuse folder so the background render layer folder within there was the beauty and the other ARVs like crypto mats D folk logical at depth the field Pass and then I had this another folder called diffuse passes so this is pretty much the beauty but without the reflections so but this one if we try and read it straight away there's nothing new and it and we can tell that because there's no red green blue like here you see there's red green blue so that means we can read red we can read a color image this has the green dot and the bottom right hand side so if we want to check what's inside it in order to remove things or extract the passes from in there firstly we can view them by using a layer contact sheet so I hit tab search layer contact sheet and then click show layer names on the right hand side and we can see I have a diffuse of just my HDR light a diffuse of my fire light the overall defuse on its own and if we want to shuffle out one of these in particular so I create a shuffle note and plug it in just going to delete this load contact sheet I double click on these shuffle and on the right hand side I'm going to find so we checked what was inside them we can although there's all these other names of different passes we know that in this particular file there's a diffuse diffuse HDR and diffuse fire so I'm going to read the diffuse and I can actually compare this to my beauty so you can see they're pretty similar so this is the beauty and then the diffuse so what we're missing is the specular reflections so looking at this we could tell that if we combine our specular pass and diffuse we can make our render so we can make the beauty so we have to do two here but we can rebuild it and the reason for separating these lights is so that we can then control them so I've already covered this in my other video but I'm just going to quickly saying so the process would be she would get your diffuse renders I've linked them all these renders to that area this area where I loaded in my passes then I created a postage stamp node and linked them over here that's so if I update the renders then I can just change I can update these files and they're already linked over this side so the specular I put here and if we follow down I added a shuffle and you can read that so that's shuffle firelight specular so I created the shuffle mode and picked specular fire I created a merge node from my diffuse render I did the same thing shuffle fire so if I read that it's very dark this particular render so we see this specular fire specular and diffuse sorry fire diffuse and fire specular and emerge them so those reflections need to go on top of the diffuse so combined that you can see the specular slapped on and then once they emerged then I bring them down so I'm creating these lines just so I could get all these exposure nodes together so this bit you know when you do that with each separate light then you can essentially create light controllers so that means when I've done it for every light when I rendered I can now control so I can read from here so I'm selecting here reading so this is the final image but if I want to change just the HDR then I can go into the exposure node change adjust in two stops and then I can just raise the stops and you know it's it's a faster way of working really because you can adjust the lights quickly and then show anyone you're working with and then and then adjust so if I was happy with that end result then I could go I could take that information I've got there so four stops and then I can go to my HDR in Maya and change it to four and then re render you know it's just fast away that's sort of like a lighting TD way of working really anyway I'm gonna leave it there for lighting we've done the basic set up so that's how I would approach the lighting of a shot I think where we ended up with this particular render where was it so yeah we would just need to set up the render layers but I've already come to that in another video previous video so yeah we'll put in their basic lights and then we would need to once we separate these render layers then we need to put it into a slat comp so that is the the route you would have to take moving forward once you've put in the base lights then you put the at CJ and Comp it together and you should get some ink oh my gosh what's going on there so I put in the Lord of the Rings background just for a bit of her laugh but the Lord of the Rings might destroy it Miranda luckily I've got another comp I've got multiple comments so now so once you actually separate out render layers so in this example I've got the background area the room on the left hand side then my plate so the plate goes in the background there's a key light to remove some of the green screen there's some wrote over I already had goes into the mask then my foreground CG so the sign and the tankard so once you've separated to the render layers and passes so I would say like this then you can look at your overall render and then you can tweak for each render layer you could tweak the lights separately without having to sit around in Maya waiting for renders yeah so that was the beginning and I would just keep repeating that process and then add in further lights as needed so I hope that was of use [Applause]

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Keywords: tutorial, animation, 3d, vfx, visual, effects, learning, substance, painter, maya, nuke, film, tv, painting, keyframe, raycast, fx, greenscreen, comp, render, arnold, autodesk, mantra, houdini, modeling, modelling, texturing, sculpt, sculpting, rendering, compositing, cgi, commercials, 3danimation, uv, unwrapping, boolean, bevel, gobo, edge, loop, extrude, effect, texture, games, design, graphics, making, after, motion, pftrack, 3de, equalizer, 2015, 2020, free, training, flipped, normals, pluralsight, digital, tutors, gnomon, legacy, camera, c4d, corridor

Id: iXNJdSW1EOU

Length: 103min 23sec (6203 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020