Electric Image Animation System 7 Tutorials
Lighting / Basic Three-Point Lighting pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Electric Image Animation System 7 / Lighting / Basic Three-Point Lighting pt. 1)
Understanding lighting is critical to making your 3D look good. Good lighting can turn a good scene into a great scene. Logos can become exciting instead of just bland extrusions, so the next few lessons are going to focus on the different lights in Animator and how best to use them. First we'll discuss some lighting basics. If you take a video class in school, one of the first things you'll hear about is 3-point lighting. All that means is that you have three lights aimed at your subject to give it basic illumination and definition. In this project we have a sphere, a camera, and three lights. Two of the lights are in front of the sphere and one is in the back. I've named them in the Project Window and they are: Key, Fill, and Rim, which is also known as a Backlight. I'm going to turn off the Fill and the Rim lights for now by clicking off their visibility boxes in the Project Window. Now we can see just the Key Light and how it works. From the Camera View you can see that the Key is lighting about three-quarters of the front of the model. It is slightly higher than a camera so that if we enable shadows in our render they would fall downwards. Let's double-click the Key Light. It's Info Window opens and I want to click the Properties tab. At the top are Light Color and Intensity. You can see that the Intensity for this Key Light is set to a value of 1. If you're creating a basic 3-point lighting setup then you should base your other lights' values on the intensity of your Key Light. If you like what you see so far with your Key, then you can move on to the Fill Light. Let's turn off the Key and turn on the Fill. Its intensity is also a value of 1. Let's change that to 0.5. The Fill Light fills in the darker areas not touched by the Key, but the Fill should not be as bright as the Key, but a fraction. Right now the Key is twice as bright as the Fill, which is referred to the Key to Fill Ratio of 2 to 1. Let's turn off the Fill and turn on the Rim. The Rim Light is behind the subject and is there to help define the shape of the object and separate it from the background. In TV lighting, especially for news shows, you'll often see the Rim Light as bright or brighter than the Key. This often blows out the edges to a white color. Let's turn on all the lights and take another look at the Fill Light's Info Window. I want to draw your attention to a couple of these check boxes to the right of the Light's Properties tab. Every light can either illuminate the scene or create specular highlights or both. What do I mean by specular highlights? Specular highlights are the reflections of the light source simulated by Electric Image on the surface of the model. Think billiard ball hot spots. Let's render a Snapshot. As you can see, each light is creating a specular highlight on the surface of this sphere Ð here, and here, and here. Their brightness is a function of the material of the model, but if I don't want one of the lights to create a highlight we can turn off this checkbox. Now you won't see a change in the Camera View but when you render Ð let's make another Snapshot Ð that highlight is gone.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Electric Image Animation System 7 |
| Author: | Scott Simmons |
| SKU: | 33996 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-45-9 |
| Release Date: | 2009-06-01 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 102 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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