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Tutorials LightWave 3D 3 Point Lighting Setup and Light Layer Compositing Qua Jan 26, 2011 2:38 am
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| by Policarpo, Visual Designer |
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| Download source files here. |
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| So you want to learn about lighting? Well, I'll try and show you a thing or two about what I know. But first, let me give you a little back story on what kind of setup I am going to talk about. What I'm going to be discussing is your standard 3 Point lighting setup. With this setup you can pretty much light anything and everything, from product shots to surreal objects on an alien landscape. I find that 3 point lighting is a really nice way to set up my still images when I really want to add a sense of heightened drama to my final render. The setup consists of 3 Spotlights. They are:
Okay, that's enough background...let's illuminate our Scene. I typically use Spotlights to do all my three point lighting, but feel free to experiment with the other powerful lights you have available in LightWave®.  Downloadthe ZIP file at the top of the page and open the file entitled, child_1_light.lws. I've taken the liberty of including the full 3 point setup file as well. Select the Light in the scene and hit "p" to bring up the Light Properties Panel. I've set the color of the Light to a light yellow, and I've Highlighted the graphic with the values I've attached to the light. I generally use Intensity Falloff with my lights because I like the visual affect it has on images. Go ahead and deactivate this function if you like your lights to illuminate at full blast.  Thenext thing you'll want to do is click on the button in this panel entitled "Global Illumination"  Nowthat we have the "Global Illumination" Panel open, let's make sure our Ambient Light intensity is set to ZERO. Okay, go ahead and close this window and what you should now have open is your standard Light Properties window. We need to add a couple more lights in our next step, and we can do this one of 2 ways. The first way I find to be really easy. Select our Key Light and hit CTRL+C to clone our light. When prompted, elect to clone the Key Light twice. Now you just need to manually reposition these lights and rename them in our Scene Editor window (which can be accessed via CTRL+F1 if it isn't already open. Just right click on the cloned lights and select rename from the contextual menu).  Theother way we can add lights to our scene is more of a manual process. Under the Items Tab, click on the Add button,  andselect Lights and select Add Spotlight. When prompted with the naming field, just type in Fill Light. Repeat the process one more time and name the 3rd and final light Rim Light. Okay, as opposed to talking about these next steps, I'm just going to show you how things should be set up. Key Light Setup and Values   I generally position my Key Light to the left or right of my camera and have it shining down on my subject. I also use Shadow Maps because they lack the edge hardness we typically find in Raytrace Shadows. The larger you make your Shadow Maps, the more refined our edges will be. Also tweak the Shadow Fuzziness until you end up with a fuzz you really like. Fill Light Setup and Values    My Fill Lights are located opposite and lower than my Key Light, and are set to half the intensity of my Key Light. I also turn of Affect Specular and turn off the Shadow casting capabilities of these lights. Rim Light Setup and Values    Now with my Rim Light, I position it behind my subject matter, and the Light Intensity levels will change depending on the scene, but for this setup I just left it at 50 percent. I also uncheck Affect Specular on the Rim Light, but I do allow it to Cast Shadows. That's your basic setup for the 3 Point Light Rig. Hit render (F9)and tweak the lights until you are happy with the end result. The next little bit of this tutorial will discuss rendering in layers so that we can tweak our individual light files in Photoshop or some other type of compositing program. Typically I am quite happy with my LightWave® renders, but as of late I've wanted more control over my images. Good Photoshop skills will get you a long way, but what would you say if I told you that I could save you from having to re-render your images all the time just to adjust the intensity or color of your lights. If you're like me, this sounds like an intriguing proposition. Here's a shot of your standard LightWave® Render of the Scene above. Standard LightWave® Render of 3 Point Light Setup  Thekid doesn't look too bad lighting wise. Normally I'd be happy with it and do a little color correction and Photoshop manipulation to make him look a little cooler. But here's something cool you can do. It's old school to some of you, but darn it, it's a very powerful thing. Turn off the rendering capabilities of your Fill and Rim Lights but deactivating the check mark as shown in the graphic below.  Key Light:  Afterturning off your Fill and Rim Lights, hit F9 to render, and save this image as a .TGA file and call it Key_Light.tga. It should look something like this. Fill Light:  NowTurn off your Key Light and your Rim Light and turn On your Fill Light. Hit F9 to render and name this file, Fill_Light.tga. It should look a bit like this. Rim Light:  Cool.Now we just have to render out our Rim Light by turning it on. Turn off the Key and Fill lights and hit F9 and save this final file as, Rim_Light.tga. It should look a little something like this. Layered Lights with Fill and Rim Lights set to Screen Mode:  So....whatthe heck are you going to do with these, you're asking. Open these three files in Photoshop and copy the image of your Key Light and create a new document and paste this item into it as the first layer. Name this Layer 1, Key Light. Now copy the Fill Light and paste it in as Layer 2 and name it Fill, and finally copy the Rim Light image and paste it in as Layer 3 and name it Rim. So what you now have is a Photoshop file with 3 layers of your individually rendered lights, but it still looks like the Rim_Light render we did last. Don't worry, everything will make sense in a second. Under the Layer Mode drop down in your Layers Palette (it usually read Normal) set your Key and Fill Lights to the layer mode of SCREEN. What you should now see is something like this. Individual Lights Color Corrected and Levels adjusted in Photoshop:  Itlooks pretty close to our original you might be saying, and you are correct. There are a few subtle differences, but the thing we can do now is tweak the Hue, Saturation, Lightness and Levels of our individual lights on a layer by layer basis. In a matter of a couple seconds I was able to tweak my Layered Light file to look like this. Standard LightWave® Render with Color Correction and Levels adjustment:  Onthe other hand, my standard LightWave® Render ended up getting blasted out when I applied the same tools to it. See here. Well, that pretty much wraps up this little tutorial on Lighting. I hope that you learned a thing or two and I hope that you will investigate the power you have when you render out your scenes in layers like this. It really gives you a lot of play when you have to make subtle color changes that would normally require you to render your scene. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments about this tutorial. |
