Welcome to this lessons, where we will discuss lights and the different types of lights, so we've
learned a couple different kinds so far.
We have the Skydome in this scene, which we can see here, and we've also learned about the directional
light and spotlit so.
I'm going to reduce the render settings so that we can see these quicker, so I'm going to turn this
off and go to the rendering tab, go to render test resolution, and let's go even smaller, like 50
percent of the resolution.
And it's going 50 percent based on what is set here in the render settings.
And we've been in this once before when we chose Arnold render review here.
And it's going based off of this number here where it should be.
If it's not so, that's where we can set that.
But I can also reduce the camera, the sampling here.
So I'm just going to crank that down a little bit and I'll explain that a little more later.
But basically, I want to make sure that I'm.
Using the quickest kind of rendering to evaluate stuff that we have here, it's want to play now, it
should be a little smaller size here.
And.
It's taking a minute to render, but basically all we have the scene is a Skydome Dome light, so it's
very directional light and it's not super interesting.
So how do we make more interesting lighting?
Let's look and see what we have at our disposal.
So let's delete the Skydome light and let's just start with the idea of a three point light set up.
So that's in filmmaking, one of the most common lighting setups.
So I'm going to go over to the rendering tab here and you can see we have different lights.
You'll basically never use an ambient light because it is not physically based.
Ambient and light is a cheat.
And so you can test mess around with it.
But I would recommend never using it.
Directional light is going to have no fall off.
So it's also somewhat not physically based.
We can go over here and see the different attributes that we have, which are just very few.
So to be able to adjust these settings, let's open up Arnold, render view and see how we can affect
this object.
So this is pretty flat as well.
And you can see the shadows are pretty hard.
So most lights have this kind of shadows softening effect.
So we're we're using the Arnold renderer.
So we need to go to the Arnold render tab in that light to change most of the settings.
We can change the intensity here, of course, and that's fine.
And the color.
But there's more settings down here, mainly about this shadow kind of silhouette here, the hardness
of this edge of the shadow.
So if we to affect that, we need to increase the angle.
And by doing that, you can see the shadow gets much smoother.
So that's one way that we can affect the lights.
And most lights have this.
You know, of course, I don't think the ambient light has one, but you can see it's very noisy here
and that's because the samples are so low.
So we get to increase the samples and that just increases the render time, but it takes out all that
noise.
So now that's a lot smoother and there's no kind of grainy noise there.
You can also see that it's still sharp where it is closer to the ground.
So you can see its sharp shadow down here and more soft towards the head the further away from the ground,
the object is.
So that's one way to effect directional lights.
And let's just make this a little more, three points.
So the idea and three point lining is you have a key light and it's usually your one of your brightest,
if not the brightest.
So let's use that and get it fairly directional on kind of a three quarter angle.
I'm going to reopen the Arnold interview and make sure that's the correct kind of direction we're going
for.
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
to add a little color to it.
Now, let's go to learn about another light called an area light.
And an area light is kind of like what it sounds like.
It's almost like a soft box.
If you're familiar with photography.
The only thing with area lights is they're very expensive at render time.
So everything is about to slow down a lot and you can change the size of them.
So it's very nice to use, but you're going to pay for it, render time.
So I use these very sparingly.
And also whenever you're lighting, it's good to isolate different lights.
You can see what they're doing, something to hide the directional light for now.
So we can see only what that the area light is doing.
So you can see it's doing nothing.
And area lights, like most other lights, besides the directional work on this kind of quadratic scale
here.
So we need to increase this intensity by quite a lot.
We can also go to Arnold and increase the exposure here, which would help us out.
But you can see it has a lot of fall off, like there's no light back here.
And that's about how physically based renderers work.
So if you know about the physics of light, you know that they have a I believe it's a quadratic fall
off and you can say change the decay rate here.
So typically we're using a quadratic.
You can change it to linear.
But I believe because we're using Arnold, it's going to ignore all of that because Arnold is a physically
based ranger.
So it's assuming all of the physical attributes of quadratic fall off and everything for you.
So, again, you can see the samples here.
It's very noisy in the shadows.
So we can increase that to make those shadows a little softer.
The other thing we can do is the other thing we can do is just turn off cast shadows altogether.
If we just wanted to cheat this light and use it as a fill light, which is another term of light,
we had the key light with a directional light and now this is going to be the fill.
So depending on how you wanted to use the light, we could say cast no shadows.
But of course, that is definitely not physically accurate.
You know, we don't get all the self shadowing in this ribcage.
It helps to find that area.
So I'm going to leave that on for now.
And instead of using color here, I can also use color temperature.
And this is just more accurate.
It's based on Kelvin temperature.
So that basically just means warm or cool.
So I'm going to make a cool feel light here and I'm just going to reduce the exposure a little bit.
And then I'm turned back on the directional light.
So now we have our fill and we have our key light, the directional being the key light.
I think the key light's a little strong somewhat to reduce that down, just a touch and maybe even rotate
it a little more.
So with directional lights, it doesn't really matter where they are.
So I can move this around and it's not going to affect anything.
It only matters when I rotate it because a directional line is basically like the sun.
So if you can imagine the sun, the rays are coming from a long distance.
So where it's positioned point wise doesn't really matter as much.
So we're also getting a ton of bounce light off the ground for free.
So that's kind of acting like our film lights.
You can see we're not getting you can kind of see some of the blue color here in the shadows on the
scapula.
But so that's basically the key in the film.
And then the last thing we can do is add a rim light and just for demoing purposes, I mean, he's a
spotlight, which we've already used.
But I want to go ahead and use it again anyway.
Because as a rim light, it's kind of nice because we can direct it exactly where we want it.
So it looks like I'm going to need to isolate these two first lights and turn them off so we can see
what the spotlight is actually doing.
And it looks like we need to increase the exposure like we did.
And now you can start to see part of the skeleton.
So increase the intensity.
And or it's really starting to work, and that's actually kind of a cool image just by itself.
So one other thing we can do to place lights, especially the spotlights that I like to do, is we can
go to panels, look through selected and it's upside down.
But basically we're using the light as a camera now so we can use all the same things that we've learned
to be able to position the camera and point out exactly where we want it to point.
And then we can also see the cone angle here so we can increase the cone angle so that it shoots over
a wider area.
Now you can see that it's actually hitting all of our model.
It's also hitting the ground here.
And the shadow, the light is very hard, the right there.
So as we learned in the directional light, we can adjust that by going down to the angle.
But you can see we don't have the angle here.
We just have the radius.
So that's not the same thing.
Always look for angle.
So here up top, we have no angle.
So as we increase that, you can see it softens that shadow.
And of course, we can go past 10.
We could say like 15 or something, and it makes that a lot smoother.
So now we have this very hard light coming, rimming this object.
So now if we turn on these other two lights, we have our three point lighting setup.
We have our key light, which is the directional light.
We have the area light, which is the FIL over here, which is giving a little bit of a blue color.
And then we have our spotlight, which is giving us our rim, which is adding a lot of highlights here,
including this big one on the skull.
So you can mess around with these and adjust them like you want to have them.
But that's basically those lights.
And real quickly, I want to discuss mesh lights.
So I'm going to delete all of these lights or just hide them, at least for now, because we might use
them again.
I close this and mesh lights are something.
I'm still in the spotlight.
You always want to be careful with that.
And see, we lost the outline here of the cone.
I think it's because it's too big beyond where we are.
So, you know, the way that we can tell is says spotlit one here based on what our view is.
Hold on, spacebar, click and get a perspective.
You so I've unhidden this group here called Mesh Lights and it's basically just I just took a bone from
the leg, scaled it up and put two of them back here, rotated at forty five degrees.
So metabolites are something specific to Arnold.
So we need to go to the Arnold lights.
Option here, and I'm going to select both of these and go to mesh light and you can see it only that
one of them.
So I need to hit that again and do that one as well separately.
So let's see what we get just out of the box.
They're going to Arnold interview.
And hit play.
And similarly, you can see nothing is going on.
So what we need to do is go into the light, which we can get to from the outliner.
We can also selected here, but basically it has the same properties as anything else.
And like everything else that we've seen so far, we need to increase the intensity and the exposure.
So let's just crank those up.
So now we get a pretty cool light, except we can't see it.
So to get the bone to actually be visible, we need to turn on light visible here.
So now we have the bone outline and we need to do that for both of them.
So let's look at the intensity.
We have a 10 and 10 on intensity and an exposure.
So I'm just going to add those same values here on the other bone and I'm going to turn on light visible.
So now you can see we have this pretty cool light set up.
That adds a lot, I think, to this character, Brender.
And like the other lights, we have samples.
You can see it's a very as this gets done rendering, you can see it will kind of try to clean this
stuff up.
But for the most part, it's really noisy here.
And this is part of the mesh like it's part because the intensity is still fairly low.
So we can increase the samples here.
And I'm just selecting it from the outliner so we can keep up the Arnold render view here.
Scale this down.
Just a touch.
And increase the samples here as well.
And then I'm going to turn on the directional light shift h and you can see these bones are kind of
acting like a really strong REM light, which is pretty cool.
So the one downside of mesh lights is that there is currently no workaround for it to cast shadows from,
say, a directional light.
So now that we've turned on this directional light, you can see that these lights themselves are actually
casting shadows.
And in other cases, there may be workarounds or there are workarounds through light.
Linking is an option or turning off cast shadows for an individual object's mesh.
But in the case of an Arnold Meche light, there is no workaround.
And you can talk to a solid angle and they'll tell you the same thing.
So that is a limitation of Meche lights, even though they're super cool.
Just be aware that that is an issue.
So.
So in this lesson, we learned about the most commonly used lights for Maya and hope to see in the next
lesson where we will create a rendered sequence for this scene, the next lesson.