I know very little to nothing about lighting. I need a lighting set up that will make it possible for me to tell if I am texturing correctly, particularly on the blade of the knife. The blade doesn’t look nearly scratched/worn enough, and I want to be sure I’m lighting it correctly before I try to texture it correctly.
I have a softbox, and a fill so that I get the glossy reflections on the blade. I also have a blue and a yellow light shining from opposite sides at roughly 90 degrees from each other. I’m not sure if these are the correct terms though.
Although both the knife and the horn handle are well-modeled, and although I understand that you have not yet addressed materials or textures, there is no clear and prominent separation between the image and its background. Aside from the fact that there are now two strong shadows, the gray shadow goes directly underneath the horn, therefore effectively disappearing altogether. Also notice that the right-hand branch of the horn casts no shadow.
Generally speaking, the shadow-angles of an object should be mostyl oblique to the angle of the object itself, not generally parallel to it as seen here. The light sources should be to the left and to the right of the camera POV, with the fill light coming from above-and-behind in the classic “three-point lighting” setup.
Do not have two sharply-delineated, different-colored shadows. The shadow-defining light should come (IMHO) from one direction/source only. If you wish to have other colors (and I do recommend this), consider that these sources don’t need to cast shadows.
If you do put a softbox in here, it should be directly ovehead, but in [I]CG I would dispense with it. You don’t need “direction-less” lighting here: IMHO, you need direction.
Incidentally: Sometimes, in BI, a “shadow-only spotlight” is your best friend … based on the realization that (in my humble but limited experience) what you often need from a “directional ‘light’ source” is actually just its shadow. A shadow-only spot will tell you where the shadow is, and how dense it is, and you can then tint the shadow etc. during compositing, after all the rendering is through. (The “shadow situation” can also be deliberately simplified, both to reduce render-time and for compositional effect. The audience will probably neither know nor care.)
What can really help for physical materials is a background (perhaps an environmental one) that the object can reflect (otherwise you might have flat shading).
Also, you can definitely do more than the classic three point setup if you take into account the ability to make the light in Cycles bounce around.
Thanks a lot for your advice, guys! This is exactly what I was hoping for. It’s really hard to find good clear advice on this kind of thing, and so many people hold back criticism for fear of offending.
I might try modeling a quick pedestal or something for knife to sit on, and see what happens when I plug an HDRi in.
One more observation: a blade is defined by the specular highlights, and “textured things” (like horn handles …) are defined by the “bumps.” (Bump maps …) For both of these things, it’s extremely important how and where the light goes on its route from the source to the lens.
One professional photographer that I knew, who made his living from still-life setups, would turn the lights in his studio mostly-off and carefully maneuver a flashlight which he had taped to a microphone-stand. He had an ordinary picture-frame matte taped to another such stand. And what he would do is to maneuver the flashlight(s) and go back and, from a few feet away, look carefully through the matte. In this way, he could visualize where the light was coming from and how it would look from the camera’s point-of-view. He generally considered the setup of one light at a time in this way. He did the work slowly, thoughtfully, carefully, methodically.
You could certainly do a similar thing on any table-top. It was “as low-tech as it possibly gets,” but (therefore) I thought it was brilliant.
Every time I try adding in an HDRi (top image) it feels like it washes out all of the detail coming from the normal map. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just stick with actual lights so that I can keep the shadows hard. When I get a look that starts to feel right on the knife, it looks shit on the plane.
If you haven’t added real materials and textures to things yet, then all images so-far are “incomplete.”
At this point, focus on where you want the lights to be positioned in the world, and the bounce-angles from those lights to the camera lens(es). It is certainly possible to have “too much light” when there are several sources, but, if there are no materials assigned yet, it’s premature to evaluate that.
(Sorry …)
