6. Lighting
More important than the story!! Top of the pyramid, no matter how good your story, if the lighting fails to support your composition...it was all for nought.
Example: Water Colourist Dean Mitchel. Lighting gives you strong contrasts and defines shapes.
- Great compositions offer instant clarity. The observer doesn't need to work in order to understand what is seen. Use lighting to make that clarify.
Starting Point: Strong sunlight and blue sky (shadows)
Tip (Gaffer): Clamp brightness so that the sun information is detached from the HDRI, then add your own sun.
Unifying lighting
Blackbody node into Emission node into Light Output
Afternoon sun:
Temp: 4500
Strength: 14
Tip: Get your lighting start point baked into your starting file.
Soft sky Scenario
Overcast type of weather - because of the clouds the sun information is scattered so shadows are desaturated and soft. Increase the sun angle or you get confusion: Strong sun with soft shadows.
Volumetrics
Be gentle with them as they wash out the good things (colour and saturation)
Tip: Volumetrics can block object selection. Select the volume, on the Object panel go to Viewport Display and select Wireframe.
Tip: Sky should always be a bit brighter than scene elements.
If using heavy volumetrics Add a fake sky to increase brightness:
1. Add a sky card, ensure your camera/view clipping is out beyond the card or it won't render.
2. Add RGB Curves to an emission-active Shader
Night shots
Shotdeck is a fantastic sight for figuring out a shot.
Example:
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| See how adding lighting from the buildings gave the shot its warm fill and strong blue moon cast. |
Rain
"I'd just import a huge PNG overlay to create lots of noise, but in reality, you don't want uniform noise; it's only visible around strong light sources. With a rain/snow overlay you don't get a proper sense of depth with some particles closer to the camera."
7. Shortcuts
Tip: Moving objects around a scene with less iteration and camera movement.
Usually you would copy and object, then move it along the x, then move it along the y. They you've move to verify the object was suitably placed. It's a lot of work!
Instead:
Place your 3D cursor where you want the object to go (Shift+Right-click) Shift+S Object to cursor. It's a little thing but when you are moving hundreds of elements....
If placing cables, you can use the same approach for added cable vertices instead of having to massage them, place them as you add them.
Tip: A quick optimisation step:
Use convert to mesh to quickly apply modifiers on an object.
8. Creating a Layout
1. Not modelling! Figure out the layout for the shot.
2. Place some simple objects. Try to avoid faking distance because it eventually causes things to break in terms of realism.
Tip: SimpleDeform Modifer for quick method of turning a primitive into something interesting.
3. Use instancing to keep your scene efficient. For groups of objects, you can use Collection Instances.
Camera Focal Length
No hard fast rules, Piotr used to have "cruch" focal lengths as as starting point but you need to be looking at your scene and deciding what you need.
Find a focal length that frames your subject.
- Where is the horizon line?
- Where is the subject in the frame?
9. What next?
This is the time that you start building, BUT BUT BUT
Get your composition sorted. If you are trying to change your composition as you also fill your composition, you get overwhelmed because everything can change. If your composition is fixed, then you are not building on sand.
Never start creating assets on an empty space. You'll invest hours on building an element without truly understanding its job in the scene.
Figure out a shopping list of assets.
What assets?
In the example scene:
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1. Big ground mesh
2. A detailed canal wall. Other canal walls will be deformed on the instance. Using simple deform on the same mesh
3. Hero element (scanned factory)
Don't worry about lighting -- for the reason you don't try to do the composition while also building the scene, it gets overwhelming.
TIP: Quixel-style assets are great, but they are super optimised and generalised. Real life isn't made from tiled materials. You need large areas with lots of details that are not built from tiled patterns.
TIP: Take care with displacements, for big scenes they're super-heavy.
TIP: Keep your scene optimised (See ToOptimize Tool)
10. Quixel Mixer
This is now a free, although unsupported, tool for mixing Quixel Megascan textures. Piotr uses it to create the amazing canal mud ground. Note that although it is free it no longer plugs into the retired Quixel service as everything moved to Fab.
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