Lighting Characters in a Scene

Golden Yak

I was wondering if anyone here could share any advice on lighting multiple characters in a scene? I'm having a hard time getting results I like.

For example, I have a bunch of wacky creatures like this...



And this is what they look like just under regular non-colored lighting and all.

But then, I want to put them in an environment, like a standard blue-ish grey metal spaceship corridor, where there's some colored artificial lighting going on. Maybe paint them with a bit more shading variation so it's not quite as stark and cartoony. I got blue light coming in overhead and some red behind. But I'm having a hard time picking colors for them that help them fit into the scene naturally.



I've tried this sort of thing before but I never get the characters looking like they belong together in their environment. I was wondering if anyone had any advice or resources to look at that would help me with this sort of thing? My first impulse was to throw a hue/saturation layer over everything based on the color of the corridor...



And then overlay patches of color based on the lighting, but... I don't know, I feel like whenever I try to light characters this way they get washed out and flat. I never feel like I've chosen the right colors to shade them in. Any advice would be appreciated!

-edit-
Threw in some more lighting like how I usually do.

lotet

I actually think it looks pretty solid, I would use harder brushes, to match the style you have on everything else.
but other then that, I dont see anything wrong with it.

maybe ad some more atmospherics and cast shadows to make them  more part of the scene. and some foreground elements, building layers help a lot. there are more things then just lighting to make characters feel part of the world. 

Greg Westphal

There are a few things you can do but they might lose the cartoony effect you have going on. Right now all your shadows are in midtones so you could do an "AO" pass and darken stuff like their armpits and groins.  Another thing is you could have a fall off to the light.  The knees are just as bright as the light hitting their head so having it have a gradienting away from light source could add some life.  Last thing that immediately jumps out is the lack of cast shadows. Calculating out a few of those and dropping them in would help but once again, it might not be the style you're going for.

RN

If you want to be really technical about it, there's a way to make an educated guess of what those characters would look like under a certain light.
The result is a "shading series", a series of tones that you can use to represent the dark and bright parts of the thing you're painting.
It's like building a palette to sample from while painting, or using it with a Gradient Map adjustment after painting it black-and-white as a value scale.

In that first image with the white background you defined the "local colour" of the objects when illuminated by a neutral light (no hue or saturation). This is also a way to represent the albedo of those objects.
If you take those albedo colours and put a flat colour layer (this colour being your light) on Multiply mode on top of them, you're going to get something similar to the reflection of that light from diffuse surfaces that have those albedo colours.
Depending on the light colour you use on that Multiply layer you'll start with a very dark result. That's fine. This is the darkest tone your object will have under that light. Depending on how much contrast you need, you might want to darken the colour of your light even further.

If you sample the resulting RGB from that blending and paint over it again with the brush in Add mode (also known in Photoshop as "Linear Dodge"), you're going to get a gradient of several tones that represent light accumulating on that surface, going all the way up to white (when the RGB channels reach their limit).
When painting you use the Normal brush mode, controlling the opacity \ flow with pressure and always using a colour sampled from that gradient. You can obviously tweak what you sample by changing the saturation etc.

Golden Yak

Thanks everyone for the replies, I'll be taking them all into account for the next stretch of work I do. I did a little bit more work after posting, trying to put stuff I researched on my own into practice.

I tried setting up some shapes and lights in 3DS max to see if that would help with finding the right colors to paint with.


Then I did a bit of painting, focusing on just one character (who has rapidly become my favorite).

Raww

I tried removing the lines and shading to suggest curves that the lines depicted before, as a way to make more believable shading.

lotet said:

I actually think it looks pretty solid, I would use harder brushes, to match the style you have on everything else.
but other then that, I dont see anything wrong with it.

maybe ad some more atmospherics and cast shadows to make them  more part of the scene. and some foreground elements, building layers help a lot. there are more things then just lighting to make characters feel part of the world. 

I feel like the lighting is what I'm having the most issues with, but I'll keep all those other elements in mind, thank you.

Greg Westphal said:

There are a few things you can do but they might lose the cartoony effect you have going on. Right now all your shadows are in midtones so you could do an "AO" pass and darken stuff like their armpits and groins.  Another thing is you could have a fall off to the light.  The knees are just as bright as the light hitting their head so having it have a gradienting away from light source could add some life.  Last thing that immediately jumps out is the lack of cast shadows. Calculating out a few of those and dropping them in would help but once again, it might not be the style you're going for.

I'll try all those, I'm actually looking to move away from the cartoony style. Currently, my style is more cartoony/cell-shaded oriented - that style is what the professional work I'm doing requires, and I've been drawing that way for a while. But it's mainly been concept art and straight images, for example stuff like this.

It's fine and fun, but it's not really the art I want to be doing. I want to move towards something more heavily rendered - I guess a good example would be like this Torchlight II cover - still stylized, but more realistic in terms of lighting and shading.

I did the characters in toon-shaded style just because it was quickest for me, I put these images together in half-an-hour specifically to make that post, I'm hoping to use this project to help find a system for working out lighting before I tackle something else.

RN said:

If you want to be really technical about it,

Oh, I do.

RN said:

there's a way to make an educated guess of what those characters would look like under a certain light.
The result is a "shading series", a series of tones that you can use to represent the dark and bright parts of the thing you're painting.
It's like building a palette to sample from while painting, or using it with a Gradient Map adjustment after painting it black-and-white as a value scale.

Thank you for the image, I think it's going to help me a lot. I think I have a hard time accepting that a colored object could have its color so thoroughly overridden by a colored light, and that makes it harder for me to choose the right colors.

lotet

OK, so just to make sure we are on the same page, your not really talking about lighting, but rendering.

this is probably the best tutorial out there for understanding rendering and how surfaces work, its definitely worth checking out.
its long and technical, but goes through pretty much everything you need to know and more.

RN

Golden Yak said:

I guess a good example would be like this Torchlight II cover - still stylized, but more realistic in terms of lighting and shading.

Check out the work by @Vando_01, they shared their process and I think the style is similar to what you're after.
- http://polycount.com/discussion/169887/lissandra-and-ziggs-surprise-birthday-party-skins
- http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2426597/#Comment_2426597

Golden Yak

Thanks @lotet and to @RN those links have been helpful. I've done a bit more work since to practice lighting and painting.

lotet

Looks nice!
personaly nr 3 from the left is my favorite.

RN

I was looking through my ref folder and found this, it's a real world example of how lighting affects what you see:


Taken from here, there's more images:
http://www.artinstructionblog.com/color-studies-part-3-the-influences-of-the-environment-on-color

Golden Yak

lotet said:

Looks nice!
personaly nr 3 from the left is my favorite.

Thanks! It's actually a progression from left to right - the middle one is where I'd gotten the painting to a point I liked. If I were doing a standalone character design as detailed as I could, I'd aim for that level. The 4th and 5th faces are my trying out different lights being shone on the head - a single red light on #4 and an added yellow light for #5. I think 4 looks alright, but 5 needs work.

RN said:

I was looking through my ref folder and found this, it's a real world example of how lighting affects what you see:
[img]
Taken from here, there's more images:
http://www.artinstructionblog.com/color-studies-part-3-the-influences-of-the-environment-on-color

Thanks again RN. The more resources I have the better.

lotet

Golden Yak said:

Thanks! It's actually a progression from left to right - the middle one is where I'd gotten the painting to a point I liked. 

Yes, I understand that maybe I should have been a bit more clear on what I actually ment.

on the 3rd image you have reached a pretty good point where your skills align with a consistent style and look. up to that point you are actually improving your work with rendering and such, but after that, its starting to digress.  this is most likely because you dont really know what your doing after that. Im not saying that to point out that your bad or something, what I mean is your skillset up to this point is pretty solid and you only really have to practice the last two steps (which is actually the same step but with different colors).

I think the main issue is you stop thinking in form after that stage, and start adding just lines of light rather then looking at your image as a 3D shape and shading accordingly. I also think your loosing some of your own style, for some reason you start using big soft brushes instead if your normal painting style.

you already have shaded your object, so you clearly understand the 3d shape. what I mean is you already have a shadow area in the 3rd version, if you want to ad a red light from that direction, make everything you had in shadow dark red instead, and if you want to ad a warm key light, make the light area slighly more yellow.

you dont have to paint light ontop of your shading, light IS the color of your already existing shading.

lotet

Made a quick example.
also remember: the glow in the eyes wouldn't change color just because light shines on it, the glow is light as well. Light doesn't multiply, it ads.
It would mostly become brighter rather then change color that much.

note that it might look a bit strange now, since its only one object. but if you apply this to a whole scene it will look a lot more coherent, and not just like the skin color changes.