how do I add additional lights to highlight my character?
Everything's set up great so far except I want to highlight my character. I have predatron's essential lights and skies installed. But I want to increase the lighting on my figure without losing the nice look and feel of her skin.
Can you suggest how to do this?
Thanks.
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Well, I don't know anything about the essential light kit.
Are you talking about how to add a spotlight to the figure? Or something else?
At a glance, I would say that the figure looks kind of flat to me, and I would probably try to add some rim lighting behind and to the right of her, via a spotlight, but I am far from a lighting expert.
Also, I feel like the green dumpster in the background is too bright against the nearly black shadowed wall on the right side of the image (to her left). I think the dumpster should probably look like it is in shadow, given that the light angle seems to be coming from right to left (based on how bright the wall on her right is). The dumpster looks like the light is hitting it from behind the camera -- but if so, then the wall next to it should be brighter. Also, the fence looks too bright to me in the background... it seems like there should be some shadows on that too.
Again, that's just from what I see in the shot. I have no idea how the lights are set up in your scene.
you're right about the flatness but that is because I did a snap shot of a pre- render screen. It's just the viewport. I didn't bother showing a full render yet. Since you know how long that can take :) Instead I am curious to know how to illuminate a character only in an already lighted scene like this? Maybe it is a spot light or two or something else? I don't want to sacrifice the quality detail of the skin, which I can tell you shows up when I did render the whole scene. Except that the figure was a bit dim. thanks for mentioning about the green bin. I changed it.
Oh, if it's the preview window then all bets are off. I thought this was a render.
As for just lighting the character, again, I am no expert. The way I, in my novice techniques, would do it, would be to use a spotlight and make it very narrowly focused on the character so it doesn't light up anything else. Now, that can be a tad hard, because the character is not a circle but the spotlight is.
Another method would be to render the character against a transparent background, and render the scene separately, and use GIMP or Photoshop to composite them together in layers.
You can also render the character in the scene, and then just the character, and composite, and use things like a linear dodge or one of the other layer types with the right opacity setting to bring out the character's 3 dimensionality without doing anything to the background. I do that a lot.
You did give me an idea. I could render just the character with a lighting pre set I have. Then merge that character into the scene preserving the lighted effect. I wonder if that is possible or not?
If you do Create a new Light from the Menu it ADDS a new light you will need to hand set up. OR you can do a RIGHT click on any light and do MERGE to ADD it to the scene for set up. Either way you will still need to Move and set up the Light you Add to the scene.
First, though...an actual render would be much better than a screenshot.
The simple fact is, there is an immense difference between the OpenGL preview and 3Delight when it comes to the way lights are handled.
Also, things like specularity, will change the appearance, a lot. And OpenGL and 3Delight do not do specularity the same way, either.
This is a light tutorial showing you step by step how I lit a scene, it is the basics of using spotlights, etc but is well documented so you can get some ideas. This is from thread 1 of my Art Studio thread (am on thread 4) and lights are discussed throughout the threads.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/19756/P435/#352224
Also, I tested lights from separate products (NOT light sets) as did several people, and the Jason lights, Violet lights, Angkor Wat lights are all good starting points for lights and to add to them.
What many brand new users don't realize, that if you select the light in Scene, and then go select the light in the view (aka where you see Perspective, you would select the light) you are MOVING THE LIGHT. It is NOT a view anymore. That is the fastest/easiest way to move a light around.
And here is are light sets tested with the same figure, positioned at World Center. Another thing newbies might consider- leave your figure at World Center and move the SCENE. That way if you have lights that look good at World Center, when you load your figures (which come in at the 0/0/0 World Center coordinates) you know the character will be lit well.
Lighting Reviews From World Center
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/28138/#418508/
The basic thing to consider is when you add lights, if you want to maintain the sheen of the skin or "look" of it, all you need to do is go in the Surfaces tab and play with the specular setting :)
Here is what I usually do. I have no idea how wise it is, but I like the effect.
First, I set up the whole scene with the character in it, the lights, and the camera. When that is all done, I do a full render of the character + the scene. I always save as .png, so that I can get transparency in the background if I want (so I can add sky, etc, later if I want to).
Next, I use the scene window to turn off the character, and I re-render the scene with just the environment and props. I usually don't use this one, but I make it just in case.
Finally, I turn off all the props and environment and just have the character standing alone in the empty world, with the lights on her but no other props etc. I render that to a third png file.
Then I shut down DAZ, and open up Photoshop. I load the first image (character + background). Then I make a new transparent layer, and load the character-only into that. Since it was a PNG file, the non-character parts come in as transparent. This overlays the character directly on top of the original one in the environment, and does not mess with the environment.
Once that layer is on top, I then mess with the settings on the layer list to change it to a different kind of layer, rather than normal. Ones I often like are screen, add, subtract, and linear dodge. Sometimes I use some of the others. I pretty much try them all at different opacity levels until I get a combination I like. Once I have that, I can merge layers, and now I have the picture the way I want it.
If you want to do separate post-work on the scenery but not the character, then the scenery-only layer comes in handy, although frankly I rarely use it and I've recently started skipping that step.
THe first image is right after rendering with just the lights that came with the scene. The second image i had added a liner point light to highlight the model since she was too dark. But that is where I think I lost her nice skin. Its too cartoonish. And loss of shadow lines at the elbow etc.
I simply wanted to illuminate the model , as if she had a diffuse flash from a camera light her up .
Finally, I added a spot light to test out. It was placed on her right side and the color changed to simulate sunset.
First, I don't think she's 'too dark'...I think there's too much brighter 'background' showing so there is a contrast imbalance.
I hope you don't mind, I borrowed your image and used it to do this....
Basically, cropping out a lot of the background and adding a little DOF (depth of field).
Both of which can be done in render.
Perhaps you're right after all.
Framing the shot has a lot to do with the final look...and a frame with a lot of bright sky is going to 'darken' everything else in the scene. Adding extra lights to that will just do things like wash out the main focus of the render...the figure (or 'toonify' it), because you end up actually 'overexposing' things. That's what was going on in the point light shot. To balance it out, you would need to play around with all the levels of the individual lights, to bring them back into balance, without over-exposing anything. And with that much sky, it would be hard to do...not impossible, just hard. While framing a bit differently and adding some DOF puts the focus where you want it...on the character and pushes the sky into the background, where it belongs. And that will make the character 'pop'...