Qualities of Light in 3D Animation

Distribution and Intensity

This is one of the prime factors in determining the location of the lighting instruments for a production. Modelling of actors and settings is principally a function of the direction and intensity of the light that strikes them. For these reasons it is essential that you be able to determine the direction and relative intensities of the key and fill lights that are illuminating your image of light if you hope to re-create that image in the scene.

Color

As a visual clue to the type of light source or the time, season and weather being represented outside of a scene, color is incredibly important. The designer needs to pay close attention to the indications of color in his or her image of light. The similarities and differences of lighting colors within a scene will help determine its mood, with more neutral colors giving a more somber tone. It is also a key element in creating psychological atmosphere. Colors have emotional properties. Generally speaking:

Yellow	stimulating, cheerful, exciting, joyful, serene, hostile, unpleasant, aggressive
Orange	warm, happy, merry, exciting, stimulating, hot, disturbed, distressed, unpleasant
Red	happy, affectionate, loving, exciting, striking, active, intense, defiant, powerful, masterful, strong, aggressive, hostile
Green	youthful, fresh, leisurely, secure, calm, peaceful, emotionally controlled, ill
Blue	pleasant, cool, secure, comfortable, tender, soothing, social, dignified, sad, strong, full, great
Violet	dignified, stately, vigorous, disagreeable, sad, despondent, melancholy, unhappy, depressing
Black	sad, melancholy, vague, unhappy, dignified, stately, strong, powerful, hostile, distressed, fearful, old
White	pure, tender, soothing, solemn, empty
Brown	secure, comfortable, full, sad, disagreeable

Of course the meanings of color are constantly changing. Color meanings are influenced by many factors: cultural background, personality, adjoining colors, and individual mood.

Shadow

Shadows play a massive role in describing a light, and this is an area that we will go into in much greater depth in a couple of charters’ time. Shadows add to a scene’s realism, consistency, relationships and composition. It is also very useful for hiding imperfections. So designing shadows is as significant a task as designing the illumination in a scene.

Motivation

Lights can be categorized by how they operate in the scene in terms of their motivation. Lights will sometimes be referred to as logical. Logical lights can represent an actual source such as a table lamp, or they can represent the illumination from outside a window.

The placement of lights can also be motivated by purely aesthetic reasons. The pictorial lights introduce the drama and creates the emotional link with the audience. This is one of the keys to good lighting.

Reference:

Gillette, J. M. (1989). Designing with Light. The United States: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Dramatic lighting effects in 3D animation (2)

Perhaps the most fascinating and rewarding use of light is the possibility of influencing the mental state of the audience. The word atmosphere can cover a wide range of situations. It can mean something as basic as using light to tell the audience shether the action is taking place on an April afternoon or a July morning. Moreover it can also help to control whether the audience feel happy or sad, extrovert or withdrawn, aggressive or submissive.

Almost all of us, in our childhood, have placed a flashlight under our chin and impersonated a monster by shining the light up into our faces in the night. Especially the cold color, like blue light, will create a horror atmosphere. As in lighting design, just as in literature, the concepts of good and evil are often associated with light and darkness. When a scene is lit with dark and murky shadows, most people instinctively react with a scene of foreboding. When a scene is brightly lit, we instinctively relax. Moreover, lighting the face from beneath in the night. It will be a strong contrast between highlight and shadow. Of course it could be used for someone who has a distinct and strong character.

So the light could influence the atmosphere and mood through molding the role. One of the principal ways of controlling such atmosphere is by mixing warm and cool light. Other possibilities include the balancing of light and shade; exaggerated contrasts can induce feelings of claustrophobia, apprehension, even terror.

http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=0&tn=baiduimagedetail&word=pixar&in=28788&cl=2&lm=-1&pn=79&rn=1&di=5457007755&ln=1&fr=&fmq=&ic=0&s=0&se=1&sme=0&tab=&width=&height=&face=0&fb=0#pn331



    warm color & cold color   



http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=0&tn=baiduimagedetail&word=wall+e&in=11923&cl=2&lm=-1&pn=130&rn=1&di=34528778640&ln=1&fr=&fmq=&ic=0&s=0&se=1&sme=0&tab=&width=&height=&face=0&fb=0

Reference:

Gillette, J. M. (1989). Designing with Light. The United States: Mayfield Publishing Company.

http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=0&tn=baiduimagedetail&word=pixar&in=28788&cl=2&lm=-1&pn=79&rn=1&di=5457007755&ln=1&fr=&fmq=&ic=0&s=0&se=1&sme=0&tab=&width=&height=&face=0&fb=0#pn331

http://image.baidu.com/i?ct=503316480&z=0&tn=baiduimagedetail&word=wall+e&in=11923&cl=2&lm=-1&pn=130&rn=1&di=34528778640&ln=1&fr=&fmq=&ic=0&s=0&se=1&sme=0&tab=&width=&height=&face=0&fb=0



Dramatic lighting effects in 3D animation (1)

Generally speaking, if there is a lighting effect being kept within a whole animation, it is boring.

Animation is different from film and TV programs whose characters would be anything the designer hope for, even not existing in the real world. So it has more space for designers to develop their imagination and creativity. They can use some special lighting effects according to storytelling, which would not only attract the attentions of audience but also achieve some dramatic effects and artistic accomplishments. 

First of all I want to talk about selective focus. Selective focus means directing the audience’s attention to a specific area. The lighting designer can selectively focus attention in a number of ways but frequently does so by increasing the intensity of the lights on the desired area of interest. When this happens, all areas that are less brightly lit become of secondary importance. A common example of the use of selective focus occurs when the lighting designer reduces the intensity of lights on one area of a unit set while simultaneously increasing it on another. Instinct literally forces the audience to look at the brighter area. A more subtle use of selective focus can be seen in the lighting designs for most interior settings. In these designs the lights are usually brighter in the major acting areas than they are in the upstage corners of the set.

It is similar to the focal length. For instance, there are role A and role B having dialogues in a scene. If there are lines for A and the director want to attract the audience' attentions on it, A should be focused on by the camera focal length, which will be looked clearly whereas the rest are dim. Vice versa, if the lines are for B and then B is a key role. The focal length would focus on B, then B is clearer than A. Instinct literally forces the audience to look at the clear area. So the audience will easily put more focus on the key role' expression and psychological activity. It is helpful to understand the story.

Reference:

Gillette, J. M. (1989). Designing with Light. The United States: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Heys, D. (1989). Light on the subject. The United States: Proscenium Publishers Inc.

Basic three-point lighting

The convention of three-point lighting is one that is firmly established in cinematography, and has become one of the main foundations for CG lighting and this is the method and one of the reasons for this is the technique helps to emphasize three-dimensional forms within a scene using light.

Key light

The key light is the dominant light, or the one that casts the most obvious shadows. (For instance it could be for night time indoor shots, sunlight for outdoor work or sunlight entering through a window for daylit indoor shots). This defines a scene’s dominant lighting, giving the biggest clue to the location of the presumed light source.

Fill light

The job of fill lights is to model the indirect lighting that is produced by direct light bouncing off an environment’s surfaces. Generally its position is on the opposite side of the subject from the key, where it opens up the lighting on the side of the subject in shadow and reduces the density of the shadows.

Backlight

Helping to separate the subject from the background, the backlights give a scene depth. Its position is at the back of subject and in doing so they create a subtle glowing edge to the subject, which helps to create definition.

Of course the designers could create more lights according to their aims and in my opinion we could make it just like painting.

Richard Cadena has ever said that light is like paint, and lighting a set is like painting a canvass. Then we can make the following associations:

a. abare lamp is like a bucket of paint.

b. a luminaire or texture that the lamp goes in is like a paint brush or air compressor and air gun.

c. the beam angle is like the width of brush stroke.

d. illumination is like the thickness of the paint on the canvas.

Definitely, such a lighting method is totally different from Global Illumination and HDR(High Dynamic Range) images, which is more flexible for artists.

Reference:

Cadena, R. Focus on Lighting Technology.

Brooker, D. (2003). Essential CG Lighting Techniques with 3ds Max. Oxford: Elsevier Ltd.

A good example on visual language- Fallen Art

Fallen Art is one of my favorate animation which has ever won the first prize in 2005 Siggraph. It is made by Tomek Baginski, who made "The Cathedral" successfully in 2002 Siggraph. He is so gorgeous!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7HMz1WKkso

This animation is so perfect no matter in visual language or music. Especially in the middle part, in a dark room, the saturation is low and the shade is almost close to grey. At the same time, it imitates the film particles throughout the whole animation, which convey a depressed mood to audience. According to J.Michael Gilletle in "Design with light", the primary goal of lighting designer is to create an enviromental atmosphere which is supportive of the play's production concept. Under such a visual style we can clearly feel the role's contradiction and abnormal psychological activity. When the character turn on recorder's button, music is on and the machine is beginning to run. The camera moves with that machine in a same rhythm. However it is not rigid but vivid since the movement of camera has proper shake just like in a real film which pushes the story line to a new high.


The whole animation is about 300GB althouth it is only 6 minutes. Baginski introduced that this animation needs to render into 35mm movie format, so they have a large task to unfold textures' UV which definitely need a high quality. This is why we can watch the nice details about everything in animation even in such a grey images.


Reference:

Gillette, J. M. (1989). Designing with Light. The United States: Mayfield Publishing Company.

The film is on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7HMz1WKkso.

Solutions of Lighting Design in My 3D Aniamtion

According to my experiences before, there is something troublesome and inconvenient in lighting design of 3D animation making. As pictures of three-dimensional animation are rendered out by computer calculation. In order to obtain a satisfied effect, so many parameters need to be constantly adjusted and a lot of rendering tests are performed, which would obvioulsy consume a lot of time and resources. Especially the final render, it would greatly degrade the efficiency of the whole film making. So It is a major task to reduce the time for rendering as possible as I can.


However, the lighting set is one of the primary elements influncing the rendering efficiency. Generally speaking, the lighting illumination could be divided into traditional triangle illumination and high-level illumination which includes Global Illumination as well as Final Gathering. Global Illumination is through launching photons to imitate the real lighting effect in the world. Such an illumination is a killer for render time as there exists both the refraction and the secondary reflection between the surfaces of objects which would spend a lot of system resources on calculating. Moreover the more numbers of photons, the better effect and the lower efficiency. Apparently, It will take a computer much more time to calculate and to render if you want to use Global Illumination in order to get an ideal lighting effect. Whereas the traditional triangle illumination can hardly obtain such satisfactory effect. How to balance them is what I will focus on in current animation..


" The Ice Age" produced by 20th Century Fox was a good example which has well solved such a problem. The makers got rid of the restriction of high-level illumination, using conventional illumination way created a real and slightly exaggerated effects, which saved lots of time from rendering and made the film lifesome and dynamic. How they could create such a gorgeous lighting effect by the conventional illumination? In my opinion, to obtain a comfortable visual effect on lighting, most importantly, we have to follow the  lighting laws of nature. Animation is a piece of artwork and computer technology is just a tool to achieve. So firstly it is necessary for me to improve aesthetic standard and the master the theory of art. I can treat the lighting design as making a color painting. I will use the Global Illumination as the foundation, but less number of photons. Then to take advantages of complementary color, contrast of warm and cool color tone, create the light one by one according to the art knowledge under the Triangle illumination. According to David Hays( 1989), the book of "Light on the Subject," Colors, like people, will seem different depending on their companions. Clear will seem warm if the other side of the face is hit by cool, or if the background is cool. Clear light may seem cool if its surround is warm." Setting the color and modulating the light intensity step by step is just like painting harmonic color little by little on the canvas. However It will not waste too much time acquire desired effect even though many lights are used. Of course this is just a theory of my analysis and I need a lot of tests to Identify.


The lighting design in Three- Dimensional also has so many advantages over that in the realistic movie. First of all, the intensity of light can be infinitely magnified and reduced. It also could be set to negative number which does not have the lighting object function but can obsorb the light. Second, the brightness of light could be only related with the light position, which has nothing to do with the distance between light and object. Moreover it is flexible that can be set to identify which object need to be light up and which need not. Forth, you can choose whether open the shadow choice, even its shade and color. Most important, object also has the choice whether accept the shadow of other objects. Finally, it could not only simulate realistic lighting effects in reality but also imitate the effects which is not existing in the real world.


Through such a task, it will bring my lighting design and animation making to a new level and high efficiency. Finally I can use light more flexibly and more technically to well express movie themes and my ideas.

Reference:

Heys, D. (1989). Light on the subject. The United States: Proscenium Publishers Inc.