Outdoor lighting

Will Faucher

Hey, I am looking for a few guides regarding outdoor lighting. I'm going for something a little more elaborate than plain old 3-point lighting. Preferably something more realistic. I've looked for tutorials but most of the ones I've found utilize the 3-point lighting trick.

Can anyone help me out?

Thanks in advance!

divi

being a bit more specific would help quite a bit.
i'll just go ahead and assume that it's for a realtime environment inside udk?
decide on a daytime, pick a corresponding sky. put a dominant directional light in your map, give it the sun's color and give the ambient color in the lightmass thingie the dominant color of the sky.
add any artificial lightsources you might or might not have in your scene and from there on out it's just tweaking. it's all a question of picking the right daytime/weather for your scene. all that's left then is tweaking stuff till it looks right.

renderhjs

daylight system in Mental Ray!?
Just google for it

AnimeAngel

yep daylight system with a final gather and gi solution is the way to go. It does beautiful and realistic outdoor lighting and no need for any other lights.

frubes

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/770/Outdoor-Lighting

this is an excellent dvd to invest in. I disagree that GI and FG are the best way to go. They are far too render expsensive and rarely used in production for exterior scenes. They are mostly used for interiors. Knowing how to light properly by placing bounce, rim and key lights will give you just as good a result as GI will and will give you a much better understanding of fundamental lighting theory. Using a light dome will also drastically reduce your render times and give you a finite control over the colour of the GI.

Anyway, all this is explained in that DVD and i thouraghly recommend it for games or vfx.

SimonT

I'm also always looking around for free environment lighting tutorials. My steps would be the same mentioned here before:

- ambient occlusion / light dome or GI
- nice 3-point light setup + ambient light

Maybe this helps you: I joined the Unearthly Challende 09 and had this WIP thread where i played around with lighting and got some tips. OK, it 's an indoor scene but have a look on my thoughts and the tips i got, maybe it helps you:

http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showpost.php?p=78451&postcount=61
http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showpost.php?p=79272&postcount=84
http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showpost.php?p=79928&postcount=93
http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showpost.php?p=80335&postcount=102

Ark

Daylight systems are really easy to setup to get good results fast.

Or you can go with the traditional approach of using a directional light with fill lights.

If you have some spare cash laying around then http://www.3drender.com/

The book is really well worth doshing out for. His videos are really good aswell, but the book as all kind of tips and tricks.

It covers everything from lighting to framing and composition to basic colour theory.

chronic

1 directional light for sun & shadows
add hdri env texture run through 'diffuse convolve' filter & map hdri to ambient color
add ambient occlusion (technically you only want to multiply AO by the ambient hdri)

done

p.s. super secret - the pros do a bent normals pre-pass to make the ambient hdri lookup even better