Simple. Because that way, you can have more in-the-scene light (such as visible lamps) in the scene without affecting the background the same way (if you don’t want it to). Case in point:
The lamps on the walls light the interior of the saloon (thus they need to have enough power), but the wall material is toned down because at the normal material settings, the light cast on the wall would be too bright (it’s already pretty bright, but it’d be even brighter without the “cheat”).
So, in some cases, it can be an alternative to excluding objects from illumination the way you mentioned, for example when you don’t want to exclude them completely but just turn the illumination down. Let’s suppose Tim had a fire in that scene, you would still want it to illuminate the background a little, but perhaps not quite as much as the characters and objects in the foreground, and this approach would allow you to achieve that.
As with so many things in CG, there is more than one way to skin the cat.
The lamps on the walls light the interior of the saloon (thus they need to have enough power), but the wall material is toned down because at the normal material settings, the light cast on the wall would be too bright
I personally don’t see that value in restricting myself to “practical lighting” which is why
(when I am not doing NPR stuff),
I almost always use HDRs to globally
base layer light my 3D scenes.
Thus I would not depend on those lamps to light the scene at all but just sit up there and glow while I selectively light areas of the scene geometry with
point, area spot lights and a Global HDR source
I am more of a sci fi guy.
in this first low sample EEVEE image you see a sci fi environment with one glowing torus object over the “hand scanner” station. but its way too dark as my HDR sky strength is at zero and you have no clue what those blue lights on the left even are.
Here to add more of that “sci-fi mood” I added a volume
atmosphere to the scene and turned my global HDR light source DOWN to .25 so you can just barely make out the
stair with the blue lights leading to the other passage on the left.
But this is the typical lighting when the “alien/creature/bad guy may be lurking hunched in that left passage
All of these adjustments are seen in realtime as EEVEE is effectively just a Game engine.
but great for quickly setting up lighting before switching over to Cycles.
But ,as you said, there are many ways to approach lighting depending on your render engine being used.
Well, different strokes for different folks, I guess.
I don’t use HDRis for interiors (I don’t want to see anything in a reflective surface that I did not specifically put in the scene). Interiors are mostly lit with area lights, occasionally with the odd spotlight or two. Exteriors may have a sky HDRi, but that is it. As I said before, any non-sky background elements are geometry. That is just my preference.
As long as the scene (or its lighting) looks the same after switching from EEVEE to Cycles, that may work. If it does not, then what’s the point? (For Redshift, the RT and Production renders don’t look the same; the preview for Redshift RT is not really any faster than for the regular one; so, no reason for me to use Redshift RT as far as I can tell.)
BTW: I can see adjustments in the lighting or material settings pretty quickly in the RS preview (unless the scene is quite complex, then it may take a few seconds).
That is true, when possible, but unless I surrounded my characters with candles in this case, having practical lights wouldn’t work, and even light from the fire would have thrown the dwarf’s moving shadow on the faces of the other characters, since he’s standing in front of it for the whole scene. Obviously, you still need to light a character so that they don’t look artificially lit in the scene, but my overall point that I have learned over time not be a slave to the “real” light in the scene. And, thruth is, you can really push it for dramatic effect if you want–the original Star Trek did this all the time.
Powered recliners with cup holders! I even went to one once that had a little tray table, and a button so you could call a waiter to bring you a drink. LOL
I don’t want to be a slave either, it’s more a guideline than a fixed rule for me.
That said, maybe my lighting is just not good enough, but I have noticed that the more I “cheat”, the less realistic the entire scene looks. In fact, I had Grok analyze a few still renders of mine for “realism” and the feedback was that the too-even lighting was indicative of CG…
The “dramatic” lighting style in the Kirk images you posted is not really my cup of tea; I think they may have felt it necessary to overdo it a little at the time, so it would register on people’s small TV screens; a little like theater actors need to overdo certain facial expressions or movements on stage to still register at a distance or 30 or 50 feet; the same expressions or movements would be overkill if a movie actor used them in a close-up.
Let’s take the how-to video you linked as an example. The HDRi shows a gray building on the left; can you use the HDRi without that building showing up in the reflections but everything else? I don’t think that is possible without removing the building from the HDRi in some image editing software.
The HDRis that I have for “interior” use may contain “objects” as part of the image that I don’t want to see; so I would have to edit these HDRis which I don’t want to do, either. I’d rather set up the lighting manually which also gives me more flexibility (using an HDRi may be a faster workflow, but I’m in no hurry).
That is exactly what he did @1:25 of the video
The building
baked into the HDRI image vanished from his shiny reflective sphere MESH
but his a blue monkey head 3D mesh still reflected as it should.
The entire HDRi disappeared from the sphere, not just the gray building. The point is to keep the street, trees, sky, etc. (i.e., everything except the building) in the sphere’s reflection.
The only thing still being reflected in the sphere is the monkey head (which also no longer reflects the trees, etc. of the HDRi). Now this just looks like a dome light without a texture (the HDRi) illuminating the scene.
True, in the scene in my example (I’ll repeat it here for convenience), even lighting would have looked artificial, so I added lights to the extreme left and right of the character to create variation, pull the character out of the background, and to keep the character’s contours defined–note the shadowing on her face closest to the camera–even though technically I can’t really “explain” the light sources. But I guess that’s one of my points, that I don’t really have to because in a world where every movie and TV show does this, nobody is going to jump out and call me on it, or even notice it unless it looks bad.
Exactly–the lighting in Star Trek was pretty over the top a lot of the time, but that’s also where context comes into play. Nobody complained about it in Star Trek because the look of science fiction at the time was a lot of saturated colors and dramatic lighting, so Trek reflected that (so to speak LOL). If a director tried that kind of lighting in a 19th century costume drama or a serious biopic they would get laughed out of the academy.
True. I guess my takeaway (and this is for anyone reading this thread) is to encourage people to not make the mistake I used to make and feel like they have to “justify” all the lights in their scenes. Lighting is an art, not a science, so like all art, a little license is allowed if it helps you achieve your goal.
The point is to keep the street, trees, sky, etc. (i.e., everything except the building) in the sphere’s reflection.
Actually the primary purpose of HDRI is to provide a global uniform 360 degree light source not just the skies.
I guess some people will leave (as background filler) whatever random “strangers in park” or trees etc that are in the HDRI image.
But as you said yourself earlier, what if I don’t want these random, out of context, images of fresh green trees reflecting on my shiny sci-fi robot armor in My devastated city scene.
I may just need the global outdoor lighting only.
That is where the light path Blender node in the video , comes in handy and I am nearly certain there is a similar option to delete reflections but keep the global lighting in Maya ,Max & Houdini
or at the very least blur the images as you see with the default HDRI in the Reallusion Character creator viewport.
Lighting is an art, not a science, so like all art, a little license is allowed if it helps you achieve your goal.
Particularly lighting that appears “cinematic”
That is why SOOOO many of those Unreal engine
“Filmmaking” videos on YT are so boring.
Most a using the exact same freebie assets ,unaltered, from the UE marketplace.
Are they “photorealistic ? yes
are they visually compelling & unique?….no
True. I guess in the end, these are all tools, and it still takes a bit of skill and artistry to use them well. This is a UE production I thought was pretty nice-looking. The look and feel of it is very organic. Overall I like the design of the characters having a bit of fantasy creature look–I think that helps stave off a little of the uncanny valley, but honestly I still find their facial expressions a little flat. One of the strengths of animation is its ability to distill facial expressions into something more powerful than a “real” expression usually can, but they seem to hold back a little here.
Actually I had seen this one.
I give them alot of credit for at least having humanoids with regular clothing that needed simulation and not having them hidden behind Sci-fi armor helmets
and Kudos for having a taking animated fur bearing
four legged creature as well but it was made by MPC
that same VFX company that has worked on several marvel films.
Yes, now you mentioned it, I guess the characters’ face could have been a little more expressive. However, as long as you are not Jim Carrey, most people are not that expressive in real life either. But, since they were not going for total realism here, I guess, a little more would’ve been OK.
Yep. That impressed me more than the humanoid characters (animating those has become relatively easy with tools like iClone, but four-legged creature are a different thing and a lot harder to do (especially when talking and adding in the fur).
True. I wonder to what extent this is due to (pretty) high quality CG becoming available for the masses to create, as well as the advent of AI. From what I have read, the VFX houses shutting down have also blamed the bug for their financial woes, but that has impacted pretty much everybody, not just VFX or animation companies.
From all of the articles & videos I have seen ,the decline of the VFX industry was caused by many factors and most common ones mentioned were: underbidding causing impossible deadlines and VFX artist burnout.
Theaters never recovered from the pndmic while streaming services largely failing to justify their costs (except Netflix).
leading to more underbidding to compete for dwindling VFX contracts and more unrealistic deadlines etc etc…
I guess so. Dwindling VFX contracts may also be due to the fact that many of the more recent effects-heavy movies were not exactly super successful at the box office (or for the streaming services).
Anyway, I’m glad that I’m not in 3D animation for the money…
There is definitely very little money to be made as
freelancer either unless you get into that NSFW
filth which I won’t touch.
I have made some decent passive income ,over the years,
selling canned motions in the Daz market for specific
figure generations and taking on commissions from Daz studio users.
And I am making a little money from my graphic novel sales on Amazon.
But I officially Retire in 10 months
Although I have left the “traditional” work force already
so I only do this stuff to keep my mind exercised
which is a good position to be in these days
A Monetized Youtube animation channel can be lucrative if you are willing to put in the grind to feed that algorithm.
Channels like “cocomelon” are earning several millions of dollars per month cranking out mindless eye candy for toddlers.
Well, good for them. I don’t produce content specifically aimed at children. So that’s out.
Well, I sort of retired a number of years ago in my late forties; I won’t get a monthly government check anyway, so why wait for an “official” retirement age? As I explained before, I don’t really have expensive tastes or major financial commitments, so I do OK.
A monetized YouTube channel is probably not in the cards for me: (a) I’m not willing to put in the grind—I only produce content if and when I feel like it, (b) I don’t think I’ll be able to meet YT’s requirements for monetization and (c) even if I did because YT lowered the eligibility requirements even further, I can’t imagine my stuff ever reaching an audience large enough to make me sit up and take notice (financially speaking). After all, the “Brave Creatures” animation, impressive as it was, apparently had only some 20K views, which certainly wouldn’t “pay” for the work that went into that short film (looks like they received a grant from Epic to help with that).
