Environments 2

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Environments 2 - Synced to students

Week 01: Lighting and composition

Summary

Don’t disregard your lighting and composition. Even if you have the nicest models/materials, you can make it look very bad with the lighting and comp. For light and comp there isn’t 1 magical recipe that works for everything. It depends from scene to scene. Lighting and composition go hand in hand to draw the viewer’s eye. We need both to make ass-kicking environments. Blog about lighting, composition, color, etc in CG. Also very helpful for us:

Chris Brejon - Blog

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Composition

Composition is something that already exists for a very long time. There are different types of compositions:

Rule of thirds

Golden ratio

Pyramid/Triangle

Symmetry

Full frame

Leading lines

etc...

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Link:

Composition Rules

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These are guidelines, there are many, to help you get a strong composition.

Composition step by step

Step 1: Define focal point

Your focal point can be anything. This is where you want to draw your viewer’s eye towards to. We can use the following principles to help us guide THE EYE:

High contrast

Saturation

Camera Focus

Motion

Faces/Figures

Guiding lines

Framing

Geometry

Step 2: Guidelines

TIP: Make sure that your guide lines don’t lead the eye out of the frame. Below you can see how we block our guiding lines going outside the frame.

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Step 3: Balance

Make sure that your scene is in balance, which means if one side is your focal point then make sure that the other side adds some counterweight to it. In other words, avoid giving the feeling that your image is going to tumble.

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Once your elements are placed correctly overall, we can start making our composition stronger by adding light to our scene.

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Lighting

Skylight: Big fill light

We start off with adding our skylight which will act as our big fill light. We will put an HDRI into the skylight so that our reflections are realistic and we have already some interesting variations in our shadows. With a plain skylight your scene/asset will look very flat. Below you can see the difference.

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Skylight without HDRI

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Skylight with HDRI

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IMPORTANT: an HDRI is not your finished lighting. The only case where this can happen, is in VFX, doing IBL (Image Based Lighting). Also, you want to have more control over your lighting, then just counting on your HDRI.

Keylight: Strongest light

After the skylight we can add in our key light. With our keylight we want to highlight our focal point and have some nice contrast going on. Below you can see three different light situations of the same scene but the keylight just has a different position, angle and intensity. Also notice, how the mood and feel changes per scene because of the lighting.

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Rimlight: Pop out silhouette

Then finally we can add rimlight(s), to pop out our silhouette(s) from the background. Look at the rimlight at the top of the skull, popping out more the shape of the skull.

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Environment by Derek Bentley

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Examples composition and lighting
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Important note: We will be lighting scenes for games and for archviz. The goal and approach on how the light them is different. More on that later.

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Last year examples

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Exercise

Take a shot from a movie/game → build an environment with downloaded assets → Then try to recreate the lighting and color grading. This way you analyze and test out how lighting is built up for different scenes/environments. See image below.

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