Archive for February 2010
How to use the 3 point lighting
February 8, 2010
Lighting. It´s a wide subject. In fact, dreded by many to be the most difficult aspect of 3D graphics. There´s a saying: Lighting will either make or break your render.
Since this subject is infinite, we´ll be better off staring with something simple. The 3 point lighting is the most used lighting set up by professional photographers. In fact, it´s a standard lighting set up and a good starting point for portrait renders. It can be further expanded into 4 point lighting or simply using unlimited lights to suit your various needs.
So, why three lights and where to put them? The three lights are called: Key Light, Fill Light and Back Light. The names suggests what they do, so let´s break them down:
- Key Light
Key means main. Its job is to cast the main light onto your chatacter. In the real world, we´re used to having lighting coming from above. If we go outside, the sun always comes from above and so does the sky, which acts as a secondary light source. Well, unless you live in China and everything is upside down! Seriously, the sun will always stay on top.
Indoors, we´re mostly having lights in the ceiling or at least higher up on the walls. This is to simply mimick to what we´re used to outdoors. So, this suggest that our Key Light should come from above. And it does! Now, having it completely above the character would not lit the face. So that´s the Key Light often is set at an 45 degree angle. Having that done, it would now come from behind and above the camera, hitting our characters straight in the face.
Not pretty! We want some variations in the face. Therefore, again – the poor Key Light is moved 45 degrees to one side of the character. The final position would be, above and on one side of the camera and 45 degrees on both the X and Y axis. The Key Light intensity is often 80-100%.
- Fill Light
Having the Key Light positioned on one side of the camera, creates some nice variations on the face, and some dark shadows as well. The Fill Light has only one job: Fill in the shadows! It´s placed on the opposite side of the Key Light. Often coming from a 45 degree angle above – sometimes midheight. So, both the Key Light and Fill Light are positioned behind, above and on each side of the camera. The Fill Light is often much weaker than the Key Light. Around 25%-50% is usually a good intensity.
- Back Light
The Back Light, is the final light in the 3-point lighting set up. It has a single job: To cast a strong light coming from behind and from the side of the character. Why from the side? Well, here´s the thing with the backlight. It separates the character from the background and craetes a silhuette effect. If we were to put it straight behind our character, it would not be visible on the caracter itself. So, again – 45 degrees behind and above the character. The backlight can often be a lot stronger than the Key Light, because of its steap angle. A value of 100-200% usualy works good.
And that´s it! You can add a 4th light to the mix – a secondary Back Light on the opposite side of the first one. So you would end up having two Back Lights – both from behind and above the caracter – coming from each side of the character.
If you like, you can also add a 5th light, a so called Bounce Light. I often add one to get a sense of light bouncing off the floor. This light is often placed at ground level, infront of the character facing up. Usually very weak in intensity, around 10-15%.
Now, get out there and have fun!
You can download a free Basic Light Set for DAZ Studio and Pose that uses the above techniques:
https://www.dream-lounge.com/dreamlight/downloads.htm
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Vue 8 Infinite
February 8, 2010
Vue… The name of the game when it comes to CG nature. Does it stand all the hype? Sure does! Vue is in many simply oustanding. Breathtaking! The results speak for themselves. But what´s under the hood?
Less good user interface. To me it feels cluttered and unlogical. Things are literary scattered around like spilled cola on the floor. Very slow and poor Open GL preview. Sure, it tries to preview complex scenes, I know – but even simple scenes look horrible. Take a look at the outstanding Open GL preview in DAZ Studio, and you know what I mean.
How about render times? Unless you have a 64 bit monster machine with 8 cores, 16 Gb RAM – don´t bother. And even if you do – the render times will not impress you. It´s just THAT slow. To make something really cool out of this incredible software, you either need a render farm or rent one!
Overall, Vue is very impressive – but difficult to use, with a horrible user interface and poor Open GL function.
To read more about Vue 8:
www.vue8.com
Poser
February 8, 2010
Ahhh… Poser. Don´t get me stared! This was the software that started the story with figures, outfits and content in an easy to use package. Wait a minute – did I say easy to use? Aw, must have taken decaf coffee!
I´m sure Poser was good at the time it launched, compared to other stuff back then. But today, it´s just doesn´t cope with the competition. The user interface is one of the most unfriendly I´ve seen, completely unglocial and difficult to understand. I´ve built plug ins and light sets for DAZ Studio for five years now – and I´ve used Poser for some of the sets. And I won´t do that again…
Sure, it has some cool features, but the user interface is what´s between you and the software. It´s your pen when drawing on a piece of paper. And guess what, in Poser the pen slips through your fingers all the time!
Terrible camera controls and slow rendering. Not my game, but again – it dates back a long time – and there´s lots of people used to it and loving it. For sure, it can produce some outstanding renders – but that is not good enough for me.
What´s even worst, it that is has been sold several times to various owners, that simply don´t care about it the same way the DAZ people care about DAZ Studio. That hurts. When you buy a software, you really want to make sure it gets updated and taken care of. It´s sad – as Poser has the potential of being something really good.
To read more about Poser:
http://store.smithmicro.com/productDetails.aspx?pid=10430
Carrara
February 8, 2010
Carrara is trying to stick out and it has lots of great features. The user interface is somewhat hard to use. It feels cluttered and unlogical. The share amount of functions and features are outrageous. And that´s a good thing. But the cluttered user interface makes it hard to use.
Compared to DAZ Studio or even Lightwave, the Open GL preview fails to do it´s job. It´s slow and doesn´t produce a good preview. The render engine is also slow. Radiosity takes forever and even DAZ Studio renders much faster and is more easy to use. Compared to Lightwave, this is a turtle.
On the good side? Well, it has really cool features, I have to admit that and a built in modeller. DAZ 3D does a good job updating the software and keeping a pretty good compatibility between DAZ Studio and Carrara. And it can produce some really good renders.
Of course, don´t take my word for it. Every person has a different opinion, and you might actually like it!
Read more about Carrara:
http://www.daz3d.com/i/software/carrara?_m=d
Lightwave
February 8, 2010
Lightwave is a fabulous piece of software. I´ve been using it since version 5.6 during the end of the 90´s and I´m running the 64 bit version 9.6 today.
One of the very best aspects of Lightwave is the rendering speed. Polygons and complex lighting just flying out of the screen. With the live preview plug in Fprime 3.5, and I actually use it for final renders as well – Lightwave becomes so fast its almost ridiculous. You can have a 1280 x 720 render with several lights, full radiosity with 4 bounces done in a few minutes.
That´s ridiculous! No, it´s Lightwave!
Lightwave is a giant. Reliable and used in the industry. It has so many freatures, including an outstanding modeller – that it would take 40 pages to cover them all. I don´t even use all the features. And I doubt anyone does… But it´s massive, and it delivers.
On the downside, the Open GL preview is sloooooow and not as accurate as DAZ Studio. Lightwave is a huge memory hog. It eats RAM for breakfast, lunch and dinner! And it sweaps that with coffee on the go! Seriously, since I´m working with DAZ Studio and Lightwave simultaniously – I see the difference right away. DAZ Studio is much easier to work with. The Lightwave userinterface is cluttered, but managable. Things are not as logical as they could have been.
But again – if you want quality and speed – Lightwave is your choice. And it is my all time favorite!
To read more: www.newtek.com
DAZ Studio
February 8, 2010
I´ve been using DAZ Studio since the early beta versions back in 2005. SInce then, I has matured and grown into a great application with lots of features and speed. What I like the most about this software, is the wonderful team of people behind it. They are truly dedicated to making it great.
Another feature, and I really mean it – is the user interface. Simply the best on the market. I have yet not found a 3D software that can beat the ease of use. Probably the best feature of DAZ Studio, is the out of this world Open GL preview display. Again – the best in the industry.
You can load tons of high rez, and I mean 8000 x 8000 high rez textures and complex gemoetry – and it will display it fast without crashing. On a 4 Gb machine! Try that in Ligthwave… You would probably need 16 Gb or more to even try loading such scenes – and it would still not display as fast as DAZ Studio. It´s really THAT good!
So what else? There´s a great community over at the www.daz3d.com website and they have tons of content at really, really cheap prices. Having that said – without being cheap in that sense. You can find lots of really high quality stuff for peanuts! Ofen below $1.99 when being a paid member.
DAZ Studio 3.0 Advanced has some great feature built in. A fast readiosity engine and a neat clothing dynamics plug in. Even more, the V4 and M4 characters come fully rigged and are very easy to animate. I would say watch out – DAZ Studio is getting serious and it WILL kick som serious ass in near future.
To read more about DAZ Studio, go to www.daz3d.com
How to meet deadlines and staying creative when doing animations
February 8, 2010
When working on comissioned projects, creativity often gets shoved into the closet. We all know this. We´re artists, and we need our freedom to stay creative. But that´s not always the case. Sometimes, especially when dealing with tight deadlines – you need to come up with strategies to stay creative while meeting the deadlines.
When working on the music video “Love”, I only had three weeks. That´s 21 days out of which most of the time was pure rendering time. Here´s the final video:
I had two PC´s literary frying their CPU´s off. One poor older 32 bit PC with dual 3.4 Ghz processors and a fast 64 bit Vista PC with 2 quad 2.67 Ghz processors (8 cores) with at that time 8 Gb of RAM. DAZ Studio, the software I used, was still in version 2.3 at that time, so it wasn´t utilizing the 64 bit structure – and was only running in 32 bit mode.
It´s one thing to have unlimited time for a project. You can then just use whatever you want to. You throw in radiosity, complex effects, large scenes and so on – and it looks cool 127 minutes later of pure rendering time – per frame. But when the clock is ticking – you need to find shortcuts. Especially when working on longer animations, where each second is 25 or 30 frames. The question you need to ask yourself is this: How can I make this look almost as cool, but render in below 2 minutes per frame? Or even below 1 minute?
When working with video filming and editing for a decade and a half, I discovered something called cutting corners. That´s a creative way of cutting down what you need to do, and still make it look the best you can. For instance, let´s say you need eight camera angles to tell the story. If you only have one camera, that means filmning the same stuff eight times. This adds filmning time. And it adds editing time. So, what if you could make it happen with just a single camera angle? Maybe running with the camera and making it look handheld? You know where I´m going with this – cutting corners. Making something almost as good, but with less time.
Same applies in 3D graphics. How can you make things simpler? One very useful trick I used when making the music video “Love”, was to fake a lot of the graphics seen. For instance, for several shots, I rendered a high rez background, and used that instead of the full scenery. DAZ Studio then only needed to calculate the lighting on the figure, rather than the entire scene and it cut down the render time 10 times. For some of the shots, I even turned off the lighting and used the pre-rendered background and rendered using the much faster Open GL render engine. Without lights, nobody could tell it had lower quality. That way, I could use the older PC to produce a lot of material, while the fast machine was dealing with the more complex scenes.
So, creativity doesn´t only mean what you produce on the screen. It can also mean HOW you do it. To find creative ways of cutting down production time and render time, you need to play and experiment quite a lot. Simply run tests. Does this look good? Can this be taken for real? It doesn´t have to be real, as long as it looks real!
