So this is a little bonus video of me breaking down my rendering setup in E. V.
So I had many different inspirations and ideas behind this presentation.
Uh mainly I had didn't really have an interest in a simple clay render or something.
I really wanted to have something interesting to it.
And I really got inspired by some pencil drawings of Angel gone if
who had this, this relief,
nice drawings with some
colorful rim lights painted on top.
And I wanted to see if I can
Try out something like this in three D.
With my sculpts and see if it works.
So one of the first decisions I made for the sliding setup was to choose ET
and
the reason for that is
um in previous years I always had a lighting setup that
I can reuse too quickly skull uh quickly render out my sculpts
and it was always done with cycles and cycles is
pretty slow, especially if you don't have the most powerful machine
and making lighting changes takes a bit of time.
And the big advantage that he has
is that it's a real time run the engine
and especially for the purpose of these sculpts,
it's really fitting since the render setup is not that complicated to begin with.
So I can really quickly experiment and rotate lights around,
create something within a fraction of the time that I
would use it that I would do it in cycles
and overall it's a pretty simple lighting setup.
Um what I usually start with is
it basically it only has um
a setup containing of a single
important key light
and this light is really meant to inform you
of the basic shapes and volumes of the model.
It's not very bright but it evenly lights the
model and give some nights some really nice gradients and
shadows to define the shapes
when I usually add to this
is a little extra focus room lights.
This usually is a lot brighter
and it kind of acts as a green light to give you a focus point on the model.
That might be in the usual case the head or the face
or it might be the main thing that I was sculpting on.
For example the clothing of another model
or something like that.
And the last part part of the lighting are these colorful room lights.
If we look at it,
they are all
pretty small and very close to the model.
You really need to be a bit careful with placement of
these lights And one thing I really wanted to do was
only really light up the silhouette without actually lighting the model itself.
The colorful,
the colorful lights are only really meant as an outline
to separate the sculpt from the dark backgrounds,
they usually in their placement are opposed to the key light
since the key light is creating these dark shadows that really blend into
the darkness and the colored lights really give you the separation and this outline
for a little bit of an extra fill lights.
I also added an HDR I to the world shader.
So if we go into the material editor you can see
there is an
elevator HDR I
for most of these sculpts I have a little hue saturation value note
where I can want to find the actual color
and the brightness of the HDR I which is different from. For every model that I made
usually I try to color
the the world HDR I
in something that works well with the colored rim lights.
Either something in the same colour or similar or
something that gives a nice contrast opposed to it.
At the end of the shader you can see that I mixed the
the shader that is actually lighting the scene with just a very dark blank shader
and mix them together with the camera ray inputs.
What this does is
it makes sure that from the camera perspective for
the view port perspective you always see this dark,
almost black background.
But what is actually lighting the scene is this elevator environment
which is based on the environment texture that I plugged in.
If you look at the
at the light setup and select some of the
some of the lamps. You actually notice
that
if we go into the key light,
this is her entire setup isn't really a single colored so it might look
for the most part like it's just black and
white with this one colorful room light coming from behind
but mostly almost all of them are to have two colors in them,
usually complementary colors.
And this really gives this extra little bit of contrast to the image.
What I also did for the lighting setup is I added this extra
missed object which is wait,
let me actually turn off soft shadows to get a bit more performance.
I added this
mist cube
which is basically just a cube with a volumetric shader
and adding this volume scatter shader
really enhances the effect of the rim lights and adds a nice
gradient across the render because of the volume metrics.
Ultimately it's from the try to keep it rather subtle from the camera perspective
and also because the volume
shader is
such rather low in density and has a pretty high anisotropy effect.
The volumetric effect shouldn't really overblow the image,
which is something really difficult to adjust sometimes because
if you have lights that really light up the
volume from from all kinds of different angles becomes
very easy to kind of blow out the
image because of because the volume gets completely lit
for that. I can really recommend to
try out the custom distance setting for each light
which where you can kind of just define how
far the light actually goes of these area lights.
I also sometimes have it that the key light is kind of
pointing too much towards the camera and it's kind of lighting up the entire thing.
And even a custom distance setting can't really help with
that because you also still need to like the model.
What I can recommend doing
for that is just taking the key light
just rotating it slightly
away from the camera
and more towards the model.
Try to remember that
these area lights are actually
Lighting 180°
of
the direction that they're pointing towards.
They're not spotlights that just go straight forward.
So
try to point them more towards the model
and not towards camera if you're using volume metrics
and
while still being able to get some of that
kind of gradient glow from the volume.
Additionally,
I also added some bloom effect and sometimes also
some ambient occlusion to the post processing and tv
this kind of helps to give this this extra
little pop to the image which is really nice.
Um
Once I kind of figure it out the lighting, I also go in and enable soft shadows
which really just
start sampling all the shadows and gives it
this nice soft feeling and higher quality.
I don't really recommend to have this on
wild lighting since it can really tank the performance
to combat this, you can also try lowering the view port samples but
I usually just keep it off
as a last little thing.
I also added these little grease pencil elements.
So these little grease pencil lines,
they don't really affect the lighting since they are always 100% uh flat, let's
and what I used the most before is to kind of blend them into the colorful room lights.
So they share the same color
and they kind of enhance the room light in some way, adding some nice extra effects.
So I tried out many different styles to kind of cross hatch them or two
in this case add a little bit of for add some liquid effects on fire,
some some dust.
There are really many different possibilities to use them
and it can really
can really recommend to
I can just
I can really recommend to just kind of try out
different styles and just experiments you can use for example
the fill stroke
or
kind of
just have these little drawn lines going to sculpt mode
and add
thickness to them.
Or just take thickness away.
Yeah.
Yes.
So you can just sculpt extra thickness on them or you can sculpt away
the alpha value or just add more offer to them.
Just really experiment, see what you can do.
Mm
grabbing them around, taking them,
pulling them away.
It's really easy to manipulate them and create something out of them.
But also be careful that when you actually
mhm
Be careful when you actually draw these grease pencil lines.
Every
every single stroke that you make creates a key.
So,
since grease pencil is mainly meant as an animation tool
when you're scrubbing around the timeline and started start to draw,
it always creates a new key in the timeline.
So this, you can use this to,
to your advantage to kind of try out drawing
new iterations for every new frame to kind of
keep stuff hanging around to keep different styles and
different iterations off drawing the lines.
But if you're just generally scrubbing around in the timeline
and then
drawing in a different frame and then going back,
just keep this in mind that there might be some stuff appearing and disappearing.
You can find the,
the grease pencil animation
settings
in
in the dope sheet,
under the
under the grease pencil
tap.
So you can, you can, you can find all the keys that you have created
to delete some or merge them or just generally fix
what you're
or just decide on which one you want to use.
But that's uh,
that's basically everything about this.
Uh, this rendering setup, it's basically rather simple. There are some
some careful elements in there,
basically how you place the lights to get this
rim lighting effect and how to manage the volumes.
But the material for example, is also pretty simple.
It's basically just a bit of diffuse and glossy nous on it and overall in a gray color.
But once you have a lighting setup like this set up,
it's, it's really powerful because you can just keep it as a separate file and then
and then import it
once you need to use it
and I did this for all of my sculpts. I kept
using this file
and I already have the lighting setup
completely there and I just need to adjust it a little bit, change the colors,
change the placement of the lights
and it's done.
This ultimately saves a lot of time,
so you don't need to relight everything completely.
And as always, you can find all the files in the assets directory.
So just download one of them, Check out the render setup and experiment with it.
I hope this has been insightful
and I will see you in the next one.