WEBVTT 00:00.210 --> 00:05.670 Welcome to this lessons, where we will discuss lights and the different types of lights, so we've 00:05.670 --> 00:08.010 learned a couple different kinds so far. 00:08.010 --> 00:15.660 We have the Skydome in this scene, which we can see here, and we've also learned about the directional 00:15.660 --> 00:18.540 light and spotlit so. 00:20.890 --> 00:26.740 I'm going to reduce the render settings so that we can see these quicker, so I'm going to turn this 00:26.740 --> 00:36.250 off and go to the rendering tab, go to render test resolution, and let's go even smaller, like 50 00:36.250 --> 00:38.710 percent of the resolution. 00:39.100 --> 00:43.900 And it's going 50 percent based on what is set here in the render settings. 00:44.560 --> 00:49.030 And we've been in this once before when we chose Arnold render review here. 00:49.660 --> 00:54.190 And it's going based off of this number here where it should be. 00:54.820 --> 00:58.120 If it's not so, that's where we can set that. 00:58.120 --> 01:02.410 But I can also reduce the camera, the sampling here. 01:02.800 --> 01:08.140 So I'm just going to crank that down a little bit and I'll explain that a little more later. 01:08.140 --> 01:11.740 But basically, I want to make sure that I'm. 01:12.880 --> 01:19.560 Using the quickest kind of rendering to evaluate stuff that we have here, it's want to play now, it 01:19.570 --> 01:21.310 should be a little smaller size here. 01:22.390 --> 01:23.230 And. 01:24.300 --> 01:32.010 It's taking a minute to render, but basically all we have the scene is a Skydome Dome light, so it's 01:32.010 --> 01:35.820 very directional light and it's not super interesting. 01:35.830 --> 01:38.790 So how do we make more interesting lighting? 01:39.480 --> 01:42.090 Let's look and see what we have at our disposal. 01:42.420 --> 01:49.160 So let's delete the Skydome light and let's just start with the idea of a three point light set up. 01:49.590 --> 01:53.520 So that's in filmmaking, one of the most common lighting setups. 01:53.940 --> 01:58.800 So I'm going to go over to the rendering tab here and you can see we have different lights. 01:59.190 --> 02:04.260 You'll basically never use an ambient light because it is not physically based. 02:04.260 --> 02:07.310 Ambient and light is a cheat. 02:07.320 --> 02:10.290 And so you can test mess around with it. 02:10.290 --> 02:12.510 But I would recommend never using it. 02:13.770 --> 02:16.710 Directional light is going to have no fall off. 02:17.130 --> 02:21.330 So it's also somewhat not physically based. 02:22.320 --> 02:28.100 We can go over here and see the different attributes that we have, which are just very few. 02:28.680 --> 02:36.450 So to be able to adjust these settings, let's open up Arnold, render view and see how we can affect 02:37.140 --> 02:38.070 this object. 02:38.790 --> 02:40.500 So this is pretty flat as well. 02:40.500 --> 02:42.800 And you can see the shadows are pretty hard. 02:43.050 --> 02:47.510 So most lights have this kind of shadows softening effect. 02:47.940 --> 02:50.340 So we're we're using the Arnold renderer. 02:50.340 --> 02:55.380 So we need to go to the Arnold render tab in that light to change most of the settings. 02:55.710 --> 02:58.380 We can change the intensity here, of course, and that's fine. 02:58.860 --> 03:00.450 And the color. 03:00.840 --> 03:08.160 But there's more settings down here, mainly about this shadow kind of silhouette here, the hardness 03:08.160 --> 03:09.420 of this edge of the shadow. 03:09.810 --> 03:12.180 So if we to affect that, we need to increase the angle. 03:12.690 --> 03:16.560 And by doing that, you can see the shadow gets much smoother. 03:17.010 --> 03:20.010 So that's one way that we can affect the lights. 03:20.010 --> 03:21.690 And most lights have this. 03:22.020 --> 03:26.940 You know, of course, I don't think the ambient light has one, but you can see it's very noisy here 03:27.180 --> 03:29.100 and that's because the samples are so low. 03:29.100 --> 03:33.720 So we get to increase the samples and that just increases the render time, but it takes out all that 03:33.720 --> 03:34.010 noise. 03:34.010 --> 03:37.350 So now that's a lot smoother and there's no kind of grainy noise there. 03:37.830 --> 03:42.860 You can also see that it's still sharp where it is closer to the ground. 03:42.870 --> 03:49.320 So you can see its sharp shadow down here and more soft towards the head the further away from the ground, 03:49.320 --> 03:50.100 the object is. 03:50.490 --> 03:52.950 So that's one way to effect directional lights. 03:53.670 --> 03:57.750 And let's just make this a little more, three points. 03:57.750 --> 04:02.400 So the idea and three point lining is you have a key light and it's usually your one of your brightest, 04:02.400 --> 04:03.300 if not the brightest. 04:03.990 --> 04:08.550 So let's use that and get it fairly directional on kind of a three quarter angle. 04:08.970 --> 04:15.510 I'm going to reopen the Arnold interview and make sure that's the correct kind of direction we're going 04:15.510 --> 04:15.870 for. 04:16.870 --> 04:24.130 And I'm just going to go to the light settings and say this is kind of like a sun light, so I'm going 04:24.130 --> 04:25.870 to add a little color to it. 04:26.440 --> 04:30.040 Now, let's go to learn about another light called an area light. 04:30.550 --> 04:34.960 And an area light is kind of like what it sounds like. 04:36.100 --> 04:37.750 It's almost like a soft box. 04:37.750 --> 04:40.360 If you're familiar with photography. 04:41.290 --> 04:45.520 The only thing with area lights is they're very expensive at render time. 04:45.520 --> 04:51.460 So everything is about to slow down a lot and you can change the size of them. 04:52.690 --> 04:57.970 So it's very nice to use, but you're going to pay for it, render time. 04:58.240 --> 05:00.430 So I use these very sparingly. 05:01.240 --> 05:07.640 And also whenever you're lighting, it's good to isolate different lights. 05:07.680 --> 05:10.870 You can see what they're doing, something to hide the directional light for now. 05:11.410 --> 05:15.070 So we can see only what that the area light is doing. 05:15.580 --> 05:16.840 So you can see it's doing nothing. 05:17.590 --> 05:25.510 And area lights, like most other lights, besides the directional work on this kind of quadratic scale 05:25.510 --> 05:25.900 here. 05:26.200 --> 05:30.310 So we need to increase this intensity by quite a lot. 05:30.880 --> 05:36.430 We can also go to Arnold and increase the exposure here, which would help us out. 05:36.940 --> 05:40.480 But you can see it has a lot of fall off, like there's no light back here. 05:40.990 --> 05:46.080 And that's about how physically based renderers work. 05:46.510 --> 05:54.920 So if you know about the physics of light, you know that they have a I believe it's a quadratic fall 05:54.940 --> 05:59.890 off and you can say change the decay rate here. 06:00.250 --> 06:02.590 So typically we're using a quadratic. 06:03.430 --> 06:04.660 You can change it to linear. 06:05.020 --> 06:10.780 But I believe because we're using Arnold, it's going to ignore all of that because Arnold is a physically 06:10.780 --> 06:11.530 based ranger. 06:11.530 --> 06:18.950 So it's assuming all of the physical attributes of quadratic fall off and everything for you. 06:19.330 --> 06:22.450 So, again, you can see the samples here. 06:22.460 --> 06:24.220 It's very noisy in the shadows. 06:24.520 --> 06:28.690 So we can increase that to make those shadows a little softer. 06:29.230 --> 06:34.060 The other thing we can do is the other thing we can do is just turn off cast shadows altogether. 06:34.450 --> 06:39.940 If we just wanted to cheat this light and use it as a fill light, which is another term of light, 06:40.060 --> 06:43.240 we had the key light with a directional light and now this is going to be the fill. 06:43.690 --> 06:47.470 So depending on how you wanted to use the light, we could say cast no shadows. 06:47.470 --> 06:49.810 But of course, that is definitely not physically accurate. 06:50.170 --> 06:52.540 You know, we don't get all the self shadowing in this ribcage. 06:52.540 --> 06:54.010 It helps to find that area. 06:54.250 --> 06:55.540 So I'm going to leave that on for now. 06:56.020 --> 06:59.140 And instead of using color here, I can also use color temperature. 06:59.410 --> 07:00.910 And this is just more accurate. 07:00.910 --> 07:03.340 It's based on Kelvin temperature. 07:03.340 --> 07:06.640 So that basically just means warm or cool. 07:07.000 --> 07:13.570 So I'm going to make a cool feel light here and I'm just going to reduce the exposure a little bit. 07:14.500 --> 07:16.540 And then I'm turned back on the directional light. 07:16.540 --> 07:22.270 So now we have our fill and we have our key light, the directional being the key light. 07:22.330 --> 07:30.280 I think the key light's a little strong somewhat to reduce that down, just a touch and maybe even rotate 07:30.280 --> 07:31.270 it a little more. 07:32.260 --> 07:35.110 So with directional lights, it doesn't really matter where they are. 07:35.440 --> 07:38.110 So I can move this around and it's not going to affect anything. 07:38.140 --> 07:44.410 It only matters when I rotate it because a directional line is basically like the sun. 07:44.800 --> 07:48.250 So if you can imagine the sun, the rays are coming from a long distance. 07:48.730 --> 07:53.110 So where it's positioned point wise doesn't really matter as much. 07:53.800 --> 07:58.270 So we're also getting a ton of bounce light off the ground for free. 07:58.540 --> 08:00.370 So that's kind of acting like our film lights. 08:00.370 --> 08:06.130 You can see we're not getting you can kind of see some of the blue color here in the shadows on the 08:06.130 --> 08:06.880 scapula. 08:07.360 --> 08:09.940 But so that's basically the key in the film. 08:10.720 --> 08:16.900 And then the last thing we can do is add a rim light and just for demoing purposes, I mean, he's a 08:16.900 --> 08:18.400 spotlight, which we've already used. 08:18.880 --> 08:21.400 But I want to go ahead and use it again anyway. 08:23.020 --> 08:31.800 Because as a rim light, it's kind of nice because we can direct it exactly where we want it. 08:32.500 --> 08:40.330 So it looks like I'm going to need to isolate these two first lights and turn them off so we can see 08:40.330 --> 08:42.670 what the spotlight is actually doing. 08:43.150 --> 08:46.590 And it looks like we need to increase the exposure like we did. 08:46.600 --> 08:49.170 And now you can start to see part of the skeleton. 08:49.720 --> 08:50.950 So increase the intensity. 08:52.100 --> 08:57.280 And or it's really starting to work, and that's actually kind of a cool image just by itself. 08:57.710 --> 09:03.500 So one other thing we can do to place lights, especially the spotlights that I like to do, is we can 09:03.500 --> 09:06.800 go to panels, look through selected and it's upside down. 09:06.800 --> 09:13.070 But basically we're using the light as a camera now so we can use all the same things that we've learned 09:13.460 --> 09:17.060 to be able to position the camera and point out exactly where we want it to point. 09:17.510 --> 09:22.160 And then we can also see the cone angle here so we can increase the cone angle so that it shoots over 09:22.160 --> 09:23.030 a wider area. 09:23.590 --> 09:26.780 Now you can see that it's actually hitting all of our model. 09:27.080 --> 09:28.430 It's also hitting the ground here. 09:28.430 --> 09:33.080 And the shadow, the light is very hard, the right there. 09:33.080 --> 09:38.180 So as we learned in the directional light, we can adjust that by going down to the angle. 09:38.180 --> 09:39.800 But you can see we don't have the angle here. 09:39.800 --> 09:40.850 We just have the radius. 09:42.530 --> 09:44.030 So that's not the same thing. 09:44.060 --> 09:45.070 Always look for angle. 09:45.080 --> 09:47.120 So here up top, we have no angle. 09:47.120 --> 09:50.090 So as we increase that, you can see it softens that shadow. 09:50.420 --> 09:51.830 And of course, we can go past 10. 09:51.830 --> 09:55.280 We could say like 15 or something, and it makes that a lot smoother. 09:55.700 --> 10:00.760 So now we have this very hard light coming, rimming this object. 10:01.040 --> 10:05.810 So now if we turn on these other two lights, we have our three point lighting setup. 10:06.170 --> 10:09.170 We have our key light, which is the directional light. 10:09.590 --> 10:14.210 We have the area light, which is the FIL over here, which is giving a little bit of a blue color. 10:14.540 --> 10:18.530 And then we have our spotlight, which is giving us our rim, which is adding a lot of highlights here, 10:18.530 --> 10:20.030 including this big one on the skull. 10:20.540 --> 10:25.370 So you can mess around with these and adjust them like you want to have them. 10:25.760 --> 10:28.100 But that's basically those lights. 10:28.370 --> 10:30.770 And real quickly, I want to discuss mesh lights. 10:30.800 --> 10:35.330 So I'm going to delete all of these lights or just hide them, at least for now, because we might use 10:35.330 --> 10:35.840 them again. 10:35.970 --> 10:40.100 I close this and mesh lights are something. 10:40.490 --> 10:41.600 I'm still in the spotlight. 10:41.940 --> 10:44.600 You always want to be careful with that. 10:44.600 --> 10:48.080 And see, we lost the outline here of the cone. 10:48.320 --> 10:50.720 I think it's because it's too big beyond where we are. 10:50.720 --> 10:55.160 So, you know, the way that we can tell is says spotlit one here based on what our view is. 10:55.730 --> 10:57.680 Hold on, spacebar, click and get a perspective. 10:57.680 --> 11:04.850 You so I've unhidden this group here called Mesh Lights and it's basically just I just took a bone from 11:04.850 --> 11:09.740 the leg, scaled it up and put two of them back here, rotated at forty five degrees. 11:10.370 --> 11:13.940 So metabolites are something specific to Arnold. 11:13.940 --> 11:16.880 So we need to go to the Arnold lights. 11:18.090 --> 11:25.800 Option here, and I'm going to select both of these and go to mesh light and you can see it only that 11:25.800 --> 11:26.100 one of them. 11:26.110 --> 11:29.490 So I need to hit that again and do that one as well separately. 11:30.240 --> 11:32.730 So let's see what we get just out of the box. 11:32.730 --> 11:34.140 They're going to Arnold interview. 11:36.790 --> 11:37.480 And hit play. 11:39.800 --> 11:42.450 And similarly, you can see nothing is going on. 11:43.010 --> 11:49.060 So what we need to do is go into the light, which we can get to from the outliner. 11:49.070 --> 11:54.020 We can also selected here, but basically it has the same properties as anything else. 11:54.380 --> 12:00.080 And like everything else that we've seen so far, we need to increase the intensity and the exposure. 12:01.610 --> 12:02.830 So let's just crank those up. 12:04.280 --> 12:08.330 So now we get a pretty cool light, except we can't see it. 12:08.330 --> 12:12.700 So to get the bone to actually be visible, we need to turn on light visible here. 12:13.130 --> 12:17.900 So now we have the bone outline and we need to do that for both of them. 12:18.230 --> 12:19.780 So let's look at the intensity. 12:19.790 --> 12:23.020 We have a 10 and 10 on intensity and an exposure. 12:23.360 --> 12:30.050 So I'm just going to add those same values here on the other bone and I'm going to turn on light visible. 12:30.650 --> 12:33.980 So now you can see we have this pretty cool light set up. 12:34.820 --> 12:38.930 That adds a lot, I think, to this character, Brender. 12:39.230 --> 12:42.260 And like the other lights, we have samples. 12:42.260 --> 12:48.290 You can see it's a very as this gets done rendering, you can see it will kind of try to clean this 12:48.290 --> 12:48.740 stuff up. 12:48.740 --> 12:51.200 But for the most part, it's really noisy here. 12:51.680 --> 12:56.840 And this is part of the mesh like it's part because the intensity is still fairly low. 12:57.260 --> 12:59.450 So we can increase the samples here. 12:59.870 --> 13:05.640 And I'm just selecting it from the outliner so we can keep up the Arnold render view here. 13:06.850 --> 13:07.790 Scale this down. 13:07.790 --> 13:08.510 Just a touch. 13:10.900 --> 13:12.750 And increase the samples here as well. 13:15.300 --> 13:22.200 And then I'm going to turn on the directional light shift h and you can see these bones are kind of 13:22.200 --> 13:25.550 acting like a really strong REM light, which is pretty cool. 13:27.230 --> 13:35.930 So the one downside of mesh lights is that there is currently no workaround for it to cast shadows from, 13:36.140 --> 13:37.370 say, a directional light. 13:37.760 --> 13:44.120 So now that we've turned on this directional light, you can see that these lights themselves are actually 13:44.120 --> 13:45.200 casting shadows. 13:45.200 --> 13:50.600 And in other cases, there may be workarounds or there are workarounds through light. 13:50.600 --> 13:56.200 Linking is an option or turning off cast shadows for an individual object's mesh. 13:56.630 --> 14:00.440 But in the case of an Arnold Meche light, there is no workaround. 14:00.440 --> 14:04.370 And you can talk to a solid angle and they'll tell you the same thing. 14:04.730 --> 14:08.330 So that is a limitation of Meche lights, even though they're super cool. 14:09.620 --> 14:11.810 Just be aware that that is an issue. 14:12.210 --> 14:12.800 So. 14:14.090 --> 14:20.870 So in this lesson, we learned about the most commonly used lights for Maya and hope to see in the next 14:20.870 --> 14:25.670 lesson where we will create a rendered sequence for this scene, the next lesson.