Today we learnt about lighting and rendering, these were topics that I hadn’t really thought of before, or had a particular interest in. So going into today’s topic I wasn’t overly interested but I knew it was something important to know for 3D projects.
Lecture
Rendering
First we had a little breakdown about the different types of rendering:
- CPU– Traditional Raytracing Rendering, this is for realistic rendering. This type of rendering is used in Blender-Cycles, Arnold and V-Ray.
- GPU (Newer!)- Rendering with Nvidea Graphics cards, faster rendering but less physically accurate/based. This type of rendering is used in Redshift and Octane.
- Real Time– Renders fast enought to be able to interact with, seen in Blender-Eevee, Unreal, Sketchfab and Unity (This is what I end up using most of the time!).
For bigger productions artists have access to things called Render farms (A dedicated number of computers that have hardware dedicated for CPU/GPU rendering), so that they can get the quality that they need at a much faster time period for work.
In Blender we have access to a couple types of Rendering in the software:
- Eevee- Realtime rendering and fast (what we are using for our short film assignment).
- Cycles- CPU/GPU render- slower but better quality
- Workbench- Basic Viewport Rendering (this has become obsolete now)
Along with these we also have access to 3rd party renders, including: Pixar’s Renderman (free with its non-commercial version); and Redshift, via the Maxon Student License (this does require an Nvidea GPU- so I will be looking at upgrading my PC to include this and think of Rendering for animation), which is something we will end up using more next year.
I will be honest, a lot of this went over my head despite trying to understand it, so I can definitely see myself doing a deep dive to educate myself and get a good grasp on rendering (as well as getting myself some upgrades to be able to manage better quality animation with some help from the internet and my more tech savvy friends).
Lighting
With lighting, I had a bit better grasp on the basics of since first semester Mike had shown us how to set up some basic lighting for our renders of our props and such.
Alec covered all of the lighting a bit more in depth:
- Sun– Infinite directional lighting
- Spot– Directional cone lighting
- Point– Emits light in all directions
- Area– Soft lights emitting from a sur
- HDRI– Lighting environments, great for exterior shots.
He also explained the idea of 3 point lighting, something I learnt about in my A-Levels as well as from Ryan in the other module. I also have an add-on in Blender that I use for setting up quick 3 point lighting (Tri-Lighting), for things like my turnarounds and experiments. The basic idea is using 3 lights, a key (main illumination), a fill (softening and filling in any harsh shadows), and a rim light (helping to separate the background from the subject).
Along with these, Alec gave us a few more tips on how to make our scenes look even better:
- Experiment with Shadow Resolution, higher resolution will make smoother shadows
- Turn on Ambient Occlusion to have contact shadows
- Bloom for on screen lighting and ambience
- Screen Space Reflection will increase the reflection of colours in the scene ( giving realism to objects like glass, plastic and metal)
- Baked Lighting, this will bake the lighting so that the final render will become a bit easier(since the light has already been calculated essentially), but this will only work for static elements in a scene.
- Colour Management, just like in photography you can adjust the colours and how they display on screen (this can be done in Blender or other apps, since this is more Post Production than production.)
As I experimented in my texture practice post previously, there is also compositing you can do in Blender that will affect the final render as well, but this will be explained in next weeks lecture so I left it off the list for now.
This was a lot of fun to learn about the more post production elements, since I as an artist only really make it to the sketching phase or basic colour phase of my projects. I will definitely do more research and experimentation in how to make my objects look more impressive.
Classwork
After we learnt a bit about the different types of rendering available to Blender, and some third party renderings.
With that Alec also gave us a bit more in-depth knowledge about lighting, about what types exist in Blender and how we can get more realistic lighting and use more of what’s available. With this we were given a example file that went through how we can get better lighting. I had a fun look around and then decided that I wanted to go ahead and try replicate the lighting in another file.
For this I went ahead and set up my model, along with 3 versions of Suzanne, one to have the bloom effect, one with the metal effect and then the middle one I decided to make it glass.
I went ahead and set up a subdivided cube and made it red to test out the space screen reflections, and I made sure to turn this on in the render properties. I also went ahead and turned on bloom and ambient occlusion in a similar fashion to Alec’s file. I went and set up the Suzanne heads by using different shader types, emission for the lighted monkey, glass BDSF for the middle and a glossy BDSF. Then I went and set up some area lights for a key and a rim light, I’m not sure why I didn’t set up a fill light, I do set up this tri-lighting for others elements, anyway I then went ahead and looked at setting up this new type of lighting. The baked indirect light was made by setting up a Irradiance Volume Light Probe which I scaled to my set, then upped the resolution and I went and baked this to have some nice lighting on the frame. I also went ahead and increased the resolution of the shadows so that they were a lot smoother and nicer, as well as finding a nice HDRI online that I could hook up for some warmer lighting.
I went and found my HDRI from HDRI Haven : https://hdri-haven.com/hdri/tunnel-road-in-london
Then the last thing I managed to do before class was over, was to render out my scene, I chose to do this in cycles as I thought it would be nicest and I actually like how this turned out. You can really see how from this one class I was able to improve on my understanding of lighting, and it was fun to learn about this new area and the tools available to me.
After Class
I was really interested about lighting so I wanted to have a little exploration and experiment different types of lighting. I wasn’t going to be involved in the lighting for my animated short film, since that was Eoin’s control with his cool torches, but I wanted to learn for future projects how I should approach lighting and how.
The first video I watched focussed on the Irradiance Volume that Alec had used on his scene. This video helped me understand all the components and settings that came along with this particular object, as well as showing off the effects this had.
So I went ahead and set up a scene similar to his, and just basically copied the tutorial so that I could understand it thoroughly. I thought it was really good and I have a pretty good grasp on using it and the effects that resolution has on this as well. Below are the experiments I did
As well as understanding what actually gets baked I went and hid my lighting and objects in the scene and saw the lighting and shadows that were left behind. Overall this is a pretty cool area that Blender has and I can see how it can be used to lower render times and how this can be translated for things like games, so that they have lower loading times and such.
The next video I looked at was how to set up lighting for a whole scene, reflecting the idea that cinematography is essentially painting with light. This is something I whole heartedly agree with, lighting can make and break an entire scene (static or animated). This tutorial in particular was nice, the lighting it explained was quite basic but I think some of the elements he touched on like the colour and strength of lighting, how to build up light and the importance of experimentation were all important and things I noted down.
Here you can see me setting up the basic gradient background. I used my props for the group short film to set up something quick that I could play around with.
With things like the lamps, I went and used my other scene and recreated the same steps to get the bulb effects, this was a pretty cool technique that I can see myself using for string lights and lanterns.
Then this was the final render I ended up with after learning from the tutorial, I definitely learnt how to approach lighting in Eevee better, as well as some interesting tricks on how to find the sweet spots of lighting and how to make it more stylised and fun.
The last video I had a look at was this one more tailored to cinematic scene lighting, also the thumbnail had really nice layouts and style, so I needed to have a look at how these were made.
This was a really nice video on how to use the simple techniques to make some really impactful end results. It was also interesting to have a view on the final model as well as the plain materials, how different they end up with some basic effects.
Learning about lighting was a really fun and interesting area about rendering. I found out that a lot of simple techniques can make incredible looking environments and scenes and I look forward to learning how to shape and highlight areas in animation using light as well as for more stating models and scenes. I definatley have a lot of growth to do in this particular area so it is something that I will make sure to practice in it and have fun learning.