Sta.sh
His job is to take the directors vision and make the movie look like it. He's making compositions and helping the story to better read. If you've ever talked to me on DA for three or more posts, you might have heard me blab about my major and what I'd like to do. I'd like to do into Lighting, animation second. I just don't feel my skills are as suited for animation, even though I really enjoy it.
Before they start lighting, they work on color Keys
Color Keys are painted works that are used to indicate:
time of day
mood
Key/Fill ratio
Key/Fill color
Hard/Soft light
Atmosphere
When you're lighting a piece in 3D ask yourself, "What would I do if I was painting this from scratch?"
There's
logical lighting
An actual source of light
the viewer can SEE it
or it's implied (practical source)
Then there's
Pictoral lighting
This is lighting set up to make the picture pretty.
Like light coming from imaginary places.
Until recently, this was how ALL animated films behaved. Film like How to Train Your Dragon
decided to start using a cinematic approach. Instead of rim lighting everything, they let places fall into shadow. That's what gives it that natural feel.
Movies like Kung Fu Panda had a more graphical sharp feel because of the stark contrast between lights and darks and the way it used light.
Lighting is cave painting (telling a story)
Lighting is Illustration
Lighting enhances mood and drama
reveals character personality
Lighting tells the audience how to feel
What helps the composition?
Controling saturation and exposure is another way to bring out your focal point and direct the viewers eye.
See here how they allowed the darks to get dark? They didn't throw a rim on both sides of him. You can see on his arm how the background darkness pushes his form forward. The simple shapes in the background keep your focus on Stoic and Gobber. And the light on Stoics face is the strongest, because that's where you want your viewer to look and pay the most attention.
As a bit of fun trivia, can you guess how long an average frame in "The Croods" takes to render?
.
.
.
.
.
8 to 24 HOURS for ONE frame. Fur eats up lots and lots of render time, even at big companies. And they have have small galaxies of machine power; trust me. It would probably take you a year to get that done on your home computer haha
If you're curious what he was like as a person, Imagine Flint Lockwood's hair in real life. Now imagine an energetic guy with a family that plays WOW in their spare time. Seemed likea really cool dude. So no, he's not some intimidating wizard haha
For Dragons they looked at a lot of different movies for reference, like The Village and Jarhead.
When you allow your darks to go dark, it creates a feeling of believeability
For intense dramatic lighting, there's usually a broad single source
For action scenes you'll notice that they'll use big simple shapes, so your eye can follow them. A good example is the final battle at the end of HTTYD. Watch it again if you don't remember and you'll see it then. That and regular movies. Watch them, doesn't need to be animated.
Types of lighting
- Low Key
- High Key
- Low contrast
- High contrast
High Key
Well lit strong sources
Light-hearted
Lots of soft fill
Low Key
sinister, bad guy stuff
What is seen is as important as what is NOT
Low Contrast
Calmness or bleak oppression
low range of shades
High contrast
well lit
strong sources
Hope this was helpful guys C; I left out the technical jargon you might not know as much as possible C: He went on about occlussion in Maya (or any other 3D space) and compositing.
His main thing was:
is it Dark over Light or Light over Dark?
You can't just have it all in the mud. If you need to, lower the shading rate to about 1/8 so the texturing doesn't get in the way of the bigger picture. To you illustration people, blur your eyes, or throw a posterize filter on it. See where your eye looks first.
To maya and other 3D people, Paint over your renders! If you're stuck on what's wrong with it, try a paint over and mess with the Curves in Photoshop.
And always always always use reference! Weather it be other at, or film or real life or photography. Use it!
- ------- As a side note, and as a bonus for reading this far, Bert Poole says his friend in story just sat through the first run through of the entire movie for Dragons II in boards, and the man cried three times. Guys, it's gonna be good, and it's miles better than the first movie already. Also, Dreamworks has a new render setup they're using on the movie The Croods that they only wished they had while working on Dragons. It's going to be amazing people. The first movie switched Directors and story direction three times before it was even out of the gate and it was still awesome. -------
And as another note, if you have any questions about anything CG related, as in, anything you would want to know about animated movies. I might be able to help you out. I have access to tons of resources and people and I forget sometimes that some people don't even know what a character rig is. So I hope this was helpful, because I loved his presentation and it's exactly what I needed to hear, despite the achey flu body haha
On that point of topic, thanks for all the well wishes guys C:> I'm almost better, and Im going to go see the Lady in Black tonight. *yesssssssss* and then I have tons and tons of thesis work to do. I might show you guys once it's more solid and we have more assets, just to get a second and third and tenth opinion lol We've been hiding it for the past two months, but it's getting presentable.
I hope you found this lighting information at least entertaining and reassuring, if not helpful. I'll probably go back in any color code different areas to make it less STARK WHITE on black lol (Sorry if some of the images don't load...working on it)
skin by =oblivion00
CGI really shouldn't be working with flat colro and saturation, that's 2d-drawn's job. You guys work with the welles shadows and etc.
I'm amazed how Dreamworks turned around... so much less executive meddling. If only it wasn't so damn mainstream XD
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We all niggers, boy. Some of us just don't know it yet.
-Crazy Moe
Fish! And Plankton! And Sea Greens! And Protein from the Sea!
-Box
DANGER !!!!!!
TERROR HORROR
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FOOL
“No. 202: Only the finest toilet is acceptable.”
“No. 452: You must attend my 5 hour story telling party.”
Yeah, I love how you guys have gotten to ultimate flexibility. (Personally, I think it's already hit the graphics wall and they have to focus on storytelling. For reference to how I think of computer programs, imagine if every five years, animation peg bars changed shape and your pencil started making marks in different places from where you put it down. XD)
Dreamworks is now in its own little wing, Pixar is starting to fall on its face with their MOR placement. Disney is making films that alternate between 'good,' 'awful,' 'juvenile', and 'better than we anticipated.'
Disney has resorted to copying other people...I never thought I'd miss the day when they only copied themselves. XD
Mainstream is good for public image, but encourages hand-drawn as a niche.
Mainstream = Corporations springing up trying to make films. That leads to giant gluts of money, then sticky wages arise, massive layoffs, incredible crash...(Even if you do get a job, you'll lose it.)
(For reference, look at american animation, in the 1990s. More animated films flopped at the box office than ever before...then after Lion King, people came up and put more in and lost more money...the market glutted...awful films...people concluded after Atlantis and Osmosis that hand-drawn was dead.)
And although I'd love all my competitors to slave in the machine, getting twenty feet a year to your name, the product it creates would crush mine in an instant. So I'm a little apprehensive.
--
We all niggers, boy. Some of us just don't know it yet.
-Crazy Moe
Fish! And Plankton! And Sea Greens! And Protein from the Sea!
-Box
DANGER !!!!!!
TERROR HORROR
But don't be fooled with the 3D cover. We're still expected to learn 2D and be fluent at that as well. Same with storytelling. The thing with 3D isn't that the stories have always been bad. It was that the awe factor doesn't exist anymore. it's not just a gimmick, it needs to be properly exploited. Like 3D. The days are gone when you can just slap some 3D on a movie and make it entertaining. People know what shit 3D is and the difference between good and bad animation.
The problem with hand drawn nowadays is the cost and manpower and time it takes to get a film out. Originally Tangled was 2D, but it was scrapped in favor of a 2D 3D thing. It felt like a broadway play to me, and I didn't like it, but I know there are plenty of people that did.
As for a job, I didn't go to Ringling and I'm not spending 40,000 a year for shit. We get recruiters that exclusively hire from here if only because we're taught EVERYTHING. And we're good at it. We know the ins and outs of any program we'd be using and it puts us ahead. That and we've done storyboarding, modeling, rendering, lighting, rigging, directing, pitching, all of it. And for 3D, even though it's all in the computer in te end, about 4 years are spend on art and paintings and vis dev and storyboarding. Only the last handful of months are actually spent making it. We actually have a few 2D animators that work here whose jobs were outsourced a while back. And they were really good; animated Mushu and stuff. More than anything that's what you have to watch otu for, and that goes for any profession.
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FOOL
“No. 202: Only the finest toilet is acceptable.”
“No. 452: You must attend my 5 hour story telling party.”
Exactly! Wheras Tony De Peltrie and et cetera was mostly notable for the novelty factor. Give them something new and they'll look. Give it to them again and they critique.
And glad to know you're studying 2d animation. I was really worried for several years. (Just found the 'Art of' book; and apparently my favorite animation in the entire film (a beautifully abstract section of Tai Lung and Shifu's Kung Fu fight) is not only drawn by an Amblin veteran (Rudolphe Guenodon) but drawn first in 2D.)
What? The reason it's so expensive is that CGI guys come from Hand-drawn backgrounds, but the people doing hand-drawn are from live-action backgrounds and have no conception of what works best in animation (I hear it wasn't unheard of, back on American Tail, for Spielberg to ask for additional side scenes of three to five minutes; and everyone has heard the ‘WTF’ stories of Jeffrey Katzenberg casually editing three minutes worth from completed reels.
2D requires that there be people who actually know how to draw, that may be the reason it’s fallen out of favor. There’s still a market for it; if someone appealed to the nostalgia factor for a film and used it to establish themselves as players.
(The Mythical Man-month is quite problematic with animation, I must add.)
Tangled was proposed as a 2D film, management ordered it to be 3D; then Glen led constant experimentations and work for the purpose of capturing the atmospherics of 2D. Lasseter, after the takeover, offered Glen the option of doing it traditionally, but Glen felt that the atmosphere of the film had evolved with the CGI…
In a way, it had a path in the making somewhere along the difficulty curve of Snow White or The Black Cauldron. It does show the results well, even if the story isn’t especially captivating. (Anybody who can learn to cartoon as well as they have in 3D, though, is probably worthy of praise. Cartoony shit looks AWFUL in 3D…)
Tangled was, I believe, the first time Disney is capturing what made their earlier films great; and the pop-culture pastiches are visibly tacked-on. The Broadway formula was what worked for them in the nineties, and you could kinda feel the writers getting comfortable exploring new territory in well-broken-in shoes.
And CGI that was warm, and done by actual animators (not that the others aren't, but with Tangled it was visible)... Disney these days is a little far out of the hand of the artist, but Tangled is a blueprint. I'm seeing Pixar as Paramount, Dreamworks as Warner Brothers, and modern day Disney is the old MGM of Berkeley and Gable and Williams and Goldwyn and Garland; with all the star and spangle to match - 'If we can bring a little joy into your humdrum lives...'
That’s amazing that you’re actually taught all that… I didn’t know there was still a place that taught that shit. 0.e Animation you need a good school for, seeing as how there’s relatively no job options for something serious for which you could learn the basics on the job. You could conceivably animate the Kalevala if talent were available, but who’d be willing to finance or market something like that?
Having a school that gets you your own blank pass must be awesome.
(I’ve never understood what the new fixation studios have with Design and Visual Development is all about. It sucks the time and talent dry for the longest time, with little to show for it at the end. My rule of thumb is that any movie that lists more than three character designers isn’t going to be all that well-caricatured or non-mathematical. I’m aware there’s probably some reason that CGI is different, or that everybody tries to copy Joe Grant’s department; but it just seems counter-intuitive with bringing in a decent film in a decent cost – I’d love to take advantage of that at the same time as I’d like to see the custom die out.
Outsourcing is biting us all kind of in the ass. We were all hoping that Korea would be a good source of Saturday Morning and cheap inbetweens; but any inbetweener talented enough has the potential to be selected by management to save money at your expense.
(Dave Sim is an inspiration…but I want to know how to make the damn things look good, and to do that, I have to pay for a college course, and to pay off the loans, I’d need a job in the machine. Then your wages stick, you lose your job, and you lose the drive that would have let you survive on your own. It’s an evil cycle.)
(TL; Sors.)
--
We all niggers, boy. Some of us just don't know it yet.
-Crazy Moe
Fish! And Plankton! And Sea Greens! And Protein from the Sea!
-Box
DANGER !!!!!!
TERROR HORROR
--
FOOL
“No. 202: Only the finest toilet is acceptable.”
“No. 452: You must attend my 5 hour story telling party.”
--
Believe. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Find my work on Facebook
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FOOL
“No. 202: Only the finest toilet is acceptable.”
“No. 452: You must attend my 5 hour story telling party.”
--
Believe. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Find my work on Facebook