Hello,
a new artist started working at the blender institute and he is a lighting artist, and i’ve been wandering what are the different task that a lighting artist do ? I guess he will light different scene but everybody knows how to add a light etc, what does a specialist do better ?
You should really look it up on youtube or seomthing. Here is one. Think again if you think it’s about adding a light and relying on bounces - there will be tons of faking and tweaking going on, using lots and lots of lights - even for an outdoor scene. Lighting artist doesn’t “add light” to the scene, he makes (/helps) the elements of the scene and composition stand out. You have a lit scene, and you have a greatly lit scene. Anyone can light a scene, few can make it look really great.
Look also for photography and cinematography lighting, incl post processing and grading.
That’s really a good question.
And as one of our community members said, it’s much more than just adding lights into a scene. It kind of demand a very broad skillset from such an artist, specially in a CGI pipeline.
I will just touch down one of the key aspects that a diligent lighting artist would work upon (and you could see a small preview of that in the YouTube link you have posted itself). It’s the creation of the Contact Sheets, analysing them and finally fixing all the issues that arises.
So for a particular Act-Scene, there would be some “n” number of shots. Main job here is to get the visual consistency of the values among all these shots. This workflow actually comes down from some of the finest editors in actual motion picture films. They would also very much consider what lens is used, what are the different cuts and transitions happening between the shots, and what kind of lights have been used by the gaffer(s) to help and elevate to tell the story in much better and meaningful ways.
Here is one from Inherent Vice (courtesy: Vashi Nedomansky’s blog), and try to observe the pattern you get to see.
So first of all, just so you know I’m not some rando dude, I actually work as a lighting artist at at Encore VFX in Burbank. Ive only worked on TV stuff (Flash, Supergirl, Titans, etc) but it can be pretty cool just the same. Okay now that that’s out of the way… :}
A “lighting artist” or “lighting TD” or as we call them, “LnR artist” is someone who assembles all the different assets of a shot, adds lights, breaks out all the individual elements into their own passes and renders the shot. In VFX Your usually adding CG Elements to live action footage so you have to match the shots original lighting as closely as possible. usually those assets include, animated digital doubles, destruction effects, volumetric smoke and fire, particle effects, vehicle and set replacements, etc. So LnR is kind of the last stop for 3D assets in the pipeline. To be honest there’s not entirely that much creativity as the real artistry is matching a look as closely as you can. I should also point out that there is one more step in the pipeline and that’s comp. they reassemble everything that we painstakingly separated out for them and add further 2D effects, color correction and sweetening.
So yes, most of the time a lighting artist just assembles a shot, places a bunch of lights, breaks out everything into passes and sends it off to the farm. Sounds easy enough right? It can be. It can also be a lot of redoing everything over and over because of changes, or having to update a character model and then having to go back and spend time rebuilding a bunch of passes. It’s kind of rare that things just work totally fine the first time so there’s a lot of time spent diagnosing render issues and optimizing. Also, setting up passes can be a huge data management issue all on its own.
So, that’s what a lighting artist does.
@CarlG Thanks for the link ! i liked every second of the interview, and the questions from the live were really interesting. Also i guess lighting in real time is different than lighting with a raytracer, as a RT can do easily the indirect bounces but in the real time you have to perfect the baking and fake a lot of indirect with direct ones to get a good result, and also manage the run time lights etc …
@Arindam it’s the contact sheet thing that had my curiosity because i didn’t know that in a sequence we have to match the light in every shot ( but it sound kind of logical )
@Indy_logic so you’re saying it require more a technical skills than an artistic one ? ( i guess it depends of the project, if it’s for games or vfx movies or commercial shots )
- when you say lighting TD the " TD " stand for technical director ?
- lighter needs to have coding skills ? the one in the blender institute have a window of python open in his screen , can you give an example for what a lighter would need scripting ?
Thanks guys for your replies
Yeah, TD is Technical Director. And yeah, in many studios a TD does scripts and tools for the studio. But as a more broad, general term, a TD is anyone dealing with the technical side of the production. I’m not sure where that term came from. I’ve never worked anywhere where I was “Directing” the technical side of things but they still called me a TD. Where I last worked, a TD was just anyone other than an animator. It works that way a lot in commercials. There are some studios where tools people are called TD’s. But I’ve even heard lighting artists called Backend TD’s because they’re not really just dealing with lighting, as I’ve already said, it’s more about scene assembly and rendering.
As far as scripting for lighting, it wouldn’t be so much about lighting as it is about pipeline. Again, getting all the different data sources together in one program. There’s a lot of scripting involved in that.
I guess what I’m saying is that every studio calls them something different.