I have a problem with lighting - which of course means that lighting has a problem with me. Whatever scene I use in Blender which I then render - the lighting always looks off. And I mean off as in there’s no ambiance or my already poor material’s skills are shown up by the lighting making everything look plastic.
So my question is this - what sort of lighting setup (one that’s pretty generic and won’t up rendering times) could I use? Normally I just have one lamp (which is ray-traced) and a hemi light (with a small energy value)…
I have to disagree. People didn’t make the effort to learn the Blender basics after we got raytracing. Now they raytrace everything, get ugly shadows, try to compensate by usinf AO and get ugly pics with massive rendertimes.
Not that AO is bad, but I think it stands at the opposite end.
People didn’t make the effort to learn the Blender basics after we got raytracing. Now they raytrace everything, get ugly shadows, try to compensate by usinf AO and get ugly pics with massive rendertimes.
Hm… 3 point lighting. I bet there is no 3 point lighting in Project orange.
At least for me, it never worked.
My lighting is even simpler:
Determine where the light sources are (windows, fires, sky…)
Place a lamp there.
Why would I want it more complicated? The only thing CG artists have to consider is the buoncing of lights, so a white wall can be a light source as well.
The problem with 3-point-lighting examples is that that they are often taken of of a context. So when you only have an apple or face to light, it does make sense to place 3 lights ‘somewhere’. But I don’t think this technique applies to a full scene where the light sources are bound to the objects in the scene.
there are some misconceptions regarding 3P lighting and there are also many people who doesn’t like 3P lighting. We can have endless discussión about that, anyway I think that lighting are like assholes…
The most interesting thing about 3p lighting is that, if there is a way to get people started in some serious lighting, that way may be why not 3P lighting. Besides I thind that behind more complicated lighting setups there is in fact all the 3P lighting concepts (key, bounce, rim)
Don’t understimate any of them, for example rim light is heavily used in movies and CG films. Look at any film, you may guess the lighting setup in any scene and in non-daylight scenes the most of the times there is an artificial rim light.
In my pursuit to not suck at lighting I’ve been reading a lot. It seems to me that most of what’s been written about lighting (that I’ve read) seems to apply to stills. How does one apply 3 point lighting (or whatever) to animation? Are there any techniques for if one is rendering a moving subject? Or if the camera is going to move from in front of the subject to behind?
well, I suppose that in that case you comment, lighting from still sources must not move, and I suppose you can make new lights to appear an some others to dissapear or fade out, always connected with what’s going on in the scene and what camera does.