Utilise lighting to enhance your character renders
Learn how to illuminate your scene in Blender and make your characters stand out
Diana David, the artist behind our adorable cover image, demonstrates how to effectively light your renders to make your characters pop
Something that took me quite a while to figure out during college is that a 3D image doesn’t need to be very complex, but it needs to look good. The very first time I applied this idea to my image, my work got published by a magazine. This was how I understood that lighting is one of the most important stages during the creation of an image. Initially you might think that it is just a light source to make something visible, but any cinematographer can tell you that lighting is so much more than that. Lighting is one of the key aspects that separates professional-looking images from amateur ones. With a proper lighting set the artist can convey emotion, ambience, lead the viewer’s eye through the image, and show or hide details. In the end, to light is to tell a story.
If you have been following the other tutorials I wrote for issue 266 and 268 you are now capable of creating a character like these in Blender. And in this tutorial you will learn how to light your character, what are the best places to position your lights sources, and what kind of sources you can use. In addition you will also learn how to render your character separate from the background using collections, and how to get inspiration from real life to create your lighting.
01 SET UP YOUR SCENE
When you open a new scene in Blender you’ll notice that you have three objects already created: a cube, a camera and a light. To better understand what’s happening select your preferred render engine (Eevee or Cycles in Render Properties) and go to the Viewport Shading. You’ll see that the cube is lit, and if you create a plane below it you’ll see its projected shadow as well. However if you turn off that light (closing the little eye on the Outliner) you’ll see that your scene is still lit, because you can still see the objects. This is because on the World Properties there is a light source activated. Change its value from 1.0 to 0.0 and all remaining lights will turn off.
02 TRY OUT THE LIGHTS
The light created by default is a Point light, but if you go to the Add menu you can choose a different type: Point, Sun, Spot, Area and three-point lights. Create one of each and experiment with them. If you select the light you can go to its properties in the Object Data Properties tab. There you can change its type, and also play with the power (its intensity), colour and radius (make the shadows with sharper or softer edges).
03 TYPES OF SETUPS
There are various types of lighting setups. There is a one
point light setup, which consists of only one light source. For example, when you have a character in the dark looking at the computer monitor, the only light source will be the computer screen. These kinds of setups can convey smaller spaces, scary moods and evoke curiosity in the spectator.
There is also a two-point light setup. Usually this setup is for displaying pieces in a turntable showreel for example. The twopoint light setup has a main Key light and a second light (the Fill light) that will give some soft shadows to the object.
04 THREE-POINT LIGHTING
This is the most common setup, and is the one we will start with in this tutorial. This setup can be used for displaying 3D artwork, but can also be used in animation to help tell a story.
There is a free addon called Trilighting that will create a standard three-light setup that can facilitate setting up the light positions. Each light will have a different function: one will be the Key light, the other will be the Fill light and the last one is the Rim light. The intensity values of these lights are usually too low, so increase the power of each one according to your taste. After creating this setup, hide all and turn on just one of them. You’ll be working on each one at a time so you can better control the lighting.
05 POSITION THE KEY LIGHT
The Key light is the main light and it’s used to light your character.
Create and place your camera. The Key light is usually positioned at 35º/45º in relation to the camera, but for this example I felt it looked better if the light was positioned at a smaller angle from the camera, in a way that we could still see some interesting shadows. Notice that this light should not be in the same spot as the camera, or the image will look flat.
You can place the Key light anywhere you like, as long as you have in mind the purpose of what you want to show with your image.
06 POSITION THE KEY LIGHT II
Here are five of the most common positions for the Key light:
1 – Put the light right in front of the camera, and you’ll see that there will be no shadows on your character; this is the most simple setup you can do, and is mostly used in commercials, in a packshot for example.
2 – Bring your light from the last step a little higher and you get this Paramount lighting style. This name comes from the way Paramount used to light up their female characters in the early 20s. This is the position I chose for the Key light of this image.
3 - Bring the same light a little to the side, and you’ll see the nose shadow change position, this is the Loop lighting. This is used for longer faces to make them rounder. 4 - If you continue to move it to one of the sides, you’ll notice the
nose’s shadow will connect to the cheek shadows, creating a triangle of light on one of the cheeks. This effect is called Rembrandt lighting – as you can guess, this painter used to paint his commissioned portraits with these kinds of lights and shadows. Usually if you want to take advantage of these kinds of shadows, you should move your camera to the side of the character’s shadow to create more interesting and mysterious images. 5 - Go even further by positioning the light completely on the side of the character, creating a split lighting effect by putting one side of the face completely in shadow. If you want to create the impression of an evil or a mysterious character, this is the way to go!
For this image I used the Paramount lighting style, along with an Area light with a slightly yellowish colour to give a warmer feeling to the image. For the Key light you can also use a Point light or a Spot light.
07 ADD THE FILL LIGHT
The Fill light should have a mirrored position of the Key light. It’s usually -35º/-45º in relation to the camera. Usually an Area light is used, but for this particular project
I felt the Sun light did the job I wanted. I created a Sun light with a blueish colour with the strength of 1.5. If you have both lights turned on you’ll see that it looks like it’s almost night-time.
08 SEPARATE FROM THE BACKGROUND
Rim light, Back light or Hair light are all more or less the same kind of light, but its name varies depending on the exact position. Its main function is to separate the character from the background. A Rim light is positioned more on the side, so the character has a bright light contour. A Back light, like its name, is positioned behind the character and the Hair light is positioned more above the character, near the hair.
09 PLACE A RIM LIGHT
Create a Point light and put it on one of the sides, at the back of the character. You want to create a rim of light that will give contour to your model. This light serves to define the silhouette of your character’s pose. Play with its position, intensity and colour to achieve the desired look. Be careful to not create any burned light effects (with spots too bright that you cannot see any detail on the image). Since I have a blue Fill light I gave a more orange/yellowish colour to all Rim lights for some colour contrast.
10 PLACE A RIM LIGHT II
This image needs a second Rim light, and it’s okay to add more as long as you don’t lose yourself with too many lights; make sure that every light you create has a real purpose. This light will evidence the silhouette of the character from the other side and will give a Rim light around the unicorn. For this side I used a white colour to avoid a monochromatic image.
11 UNICORN HORN
If you have an object that should glow in the dark, that in spite of having an emission shader is not illuminating as much as you would like, then you should add an extra light. Therefore, another Point light was added with one of the horn’s colours (yellow in this case) and placed very near the horn to suggest that this light source was emanating from the horn. Play around with the light power and radius to achieve the desired look.
12 CREATE A CYCLORAMA
Next we will be creating a cyclorama, which is just a plane that is used commonly in studio photoshoots. It should cover the ground and go up to the wall without any sharp corners. Create a plane and extrude one of the edges vertically. Add a bevel modifier to smooth the corner and the surface. Give the material a dark colour.
13 STUDY IMAGE REFERENCES
Although the centre of your render is the character, you should also light your background so we can see it clearly, and it can serve to add some further context to your image. However, be careful not to light it more than your character – you should be aiming to use it to your advantage to make your character pop.
Because I wanted an abstract background with some interesting lighting, I went to Google Images to search for bokeh effect images that could inspire me; this is a lens effect that creates out-of-focus lighting in photographs.
14 REPLICATE THE EFFECT
Create spheres with the same size as the blurred lights on the image and place them along the camera view. Give an emission material to the spheres and change their intensities and colours to the tones that work well with your character’s colours.
Experiment with the position of the spheres along the scene. Some can be near the camera and others can be very far away, this way you’ll have the cyclorama lit without any more lights.
15 SEPARATE SCENE FROM CHARACTER
Blender has view layers that can help organise and separate parts of the scene when rendering. For this scene example you’ll need to organise your objects in different collections: one for the characters, another for the background and a last one for the lights.
The way of thinking will be like this: to render the character hide the background collection, and to render the background hide the character collection.
16 VIEW LAYERS
You can do this process within the same view layer, but if you want to be more organised or if you have more collections, it will be easier if you use the layer’s functionally that Blender provides.
On the top of the screen, right on top of the outliner, you’ll see that you already have a view layer created by default. You should create a new one for the background and another for the characters. Then play around with the visibility of each collection, by hiding the floor or activating the
Indirect Only option on its layer and vice-versa.
17 RENDER PROPERTIES
For this example we’re using Cycles as the render engine, because Eevee is not compatible with hair particles. I’m rendering it with 128 samples and with the Denoising activated, this way I feel I won’t be needing to use the denoise node in compositing later on. But in case it’s needed, you can have it activated in the render properties as well. In the Film tab the Transparent checkbox has
been activated so that the character can be rendered with a transparent background.
18 OUTPUT PROPERTIES
The image is set to be 4K resolution, but for the first test render it at just 20% and increase the percentage as you do any changes. When you are satisfied, render it at 100%. You can choose an output path to where your image will be saved after the render is done. You can also choose the type of image; for compositing purposes the OPENEXR Multilayer is better, so select this one.
19 VIEW LAYER PROPERTIES
For the data passes just use the Combined and Z channel (this will be useful for Zdepth if you want to blur the background even more later on) and the Denoising Data. Activate the Cryptomatte for both object and material and activate Denoise at the bottom, so you can get rid of any noise during the compositing if needed. This way you can render your image with lesser samples but with the same quality.
20 PROJECTED SHADOW
Render the character’s projected shadows, without rendering the character or the floor, by hiding any details that won’t be noticeable on the projected
shadow. Go to the Visibility tab in the object properties and turn off the camera ray visibility to all of the character’s objects. For the floor, check the Shadow Catcher box in the Visibility tab.
21 RENDER THE BACKGROUND
Render your images with the Cryptomatte channel activated in the view layer properties. I use the object or material Cryptomatte selection. This way you’ll be able to change the colour of each object in compositing without having to render it again. This will be particularly useful in case you want to change your background lights’ colours, for example.
22 COMPOSITING
After rendering save the three images (character, projected shadow and background) in EXR format. Next, open a new scene just for compositing, or create a new Scene Layer inside the scene you’re already at, and in the Compositor view drag and drop your images there.
Activate the Nodewrangler addon in case you haven’t already, so you can use shortcuts while working with nodes in the Compositor viewer. Combine the background and shadow EXR images using a mix node (search for it using Shift+a), putting the background on the top and the shadows on the bottom input node, and change the mix node to a multiply. Use another mix node to combine the character image with the result of this mix node.
23 COMPOSITING II
Before the mix node, add a denoise node to get rid of all of that noise on your image (if you have any) by pressing Shift+a and searching for the denoise node. Connect the Combined output to the image input, the Denoising Normal output into the Normal input, and the Denoising Albedo output into the Albedo input of the denoise node. You can also experiment with some colour nodes or the Cryptomatte node to change colour, adding a hue node after it.
After that, just render the image again and you’re done!
24 ADD FINAL TOUCHES IN PHOTOSHOP
For the magic light trails that come from the unicorn’s horn, I decided to add more interesting details in Photoshop. With a new layer on screen mode I drew the forms I desired with a soft brush and corrected some details here and there that didn’t look right. You can use the Color dodge tool to exaggerate some colours and use the blur filter to blur the background even more if needed. •