Character rendering lighting set up?

RE3456

hi guys, I'm at the last stage of rendering all the characters that I built for my portfolio, it is all real time characters. I'm just wondering what kind of lighting set up do people usually uses to light up their character when doing a 360 turn around of the character rendering? especially in maya. Please share your set up with us since I have little to no knowledge with lighting set up in maya.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

IceWolve

I think 3 point lighting is the most common.

RE3456

thanks for the reply, so just point them as in triangle?

aesir

I was wondering about this same thing. Do most game companies frown upon people using GI in their renders for their portfolio?

Sean McBride

Typicaly I don't see anything wrong with using a GI render for your beauty render. I'd also contain the texture flats, and a fully self illuminated shot off to the side. Just in case an artist wanted to see if it was just the render he could see otherwise.

As far as the three point light system Re3456 this is the first thing that came up on google. I read over it really fast and it seamed to contain some details that may help you.

http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html

When i'm rendering high poly objects sometimes I throw in a skylight as my fill light but tone down the skylight a bit so it doesn't wash out everything. Everybody's got their own style. I don't see anything wrong with a particular style as long as it looks good in the end.

Having said that, PLEASE! Don't render out some unskinned models with some silly GI renderer... It's way to over done in the mod community. It may work on the mod fanboys but it won't work on anyone in the industry.

Daz

High resolution models I think often warrant GI or ambient occlusion, since it really shows off the detail in the model by getting those darks in the nooks and crannys of the model.
It's definitely a bit pointless on game res models though. I never really got that.

Game models dont tend to shade too well, so I tend to not even render them at all, but screengrab big and downsize to act as aliasing. If you're making turntables however, I guess you have to light them. If so, keep the light levels low, and give your materials 50% ambient. Gives a nice midground between 100% illumination and nasty black triangulation artifacted shading.

Faucet

3 point lighting all the way!

The way I do my orbits in Maya:

Make a camera, set up your 3 point lighting, then group them all. Set a key for the rotation of that group at frame 1. Figure out how ling you want the orbit to be, go to one frame past the last frame of your orbit. Rotate the group by 360 in the Y (assuming Y up) and key it. This will allow you to position your camera as you please without worrying about its motion. It will also keep your lights in a good position relative to your camera.

One note about shadows, though. If your model is designed for bright ambient lit engines (HL2/Quake 3) then You may want to consider leaving all but maybe the key light's shadows off. Or really, just do a hardware render with multipass for AA and motionblur.

If you've got game models meant for zero ambient light (Doom3) crank those shadows up.

If it's a high poly model, you may want to consider using GI as your fill light. I wouldn't recommend just using GI, though as it tends to make for dull renders. Key and kicker lights give it a little extra spice. If you find GI takes forever to render, you may want to consider baking out the GI lighting. Though if your character is animated, this is probably a bad idea.

Happy rendering!

MoP

To avoid typing the whole lot again, I'll just say that I'd do exactly what Faucet just said.

malcolm

Here is the basic concept for a 3 point lighting rig.

http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html

e_x

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3 point lighting all the way!


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I set things up just like this, only rotate the model instead of all that other stuff. Just easier and simpler for me.

Faucet

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I set things up just like this, only rotate the model instead of all that other stuff. Just easier and simpler for me.

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Yeah. rotating the character is easier if it's just one character.

Rotating the camera is nice if you want to be able to quickly switch out models and keep the same motion with the camera. If you've got a modelling reel with 5 or so models turn tables, animating rotation 5 times gets annoying.

Rick Stirling

Link the model to a dummy/helper or hidden object, then animate the object rotating.

You can pull in an out as many models as you want, linking each one to the rotating helper.

At work I have a few light scenes, and a script. I load my model, then run the script - I choose the lighting I want and it merges the camera and the lights and the rotating helper and links the model to the helper.

I have a scene with just 3PL, and one with 3PL and about 50 spotlights on a low setting to fake GI.

This method keeps all your renders consistant, even over a period of time.