 it's technically not one so the little German me goes a little bit like ah we're not in time I figure it's just not nice to let you guys sit any longer or stand so hi it's great to see you all again you having a great well I mean it's the first day so we'll talk about that later okay um hi um those of you who don't know me my name is Andy Greljik I'm a art director at Blender studio and I'm here to talk about my passion and the most of the stuff that I do from day to day which is lighting on films which is a little bit different from you know the normal type of lighting that you would well normal the type of lighting that you would do in architecture visualization or on on your own fun projects or even lighting for still images because in in a production you're very focused on just being one part in the whole machinery and in the end you're contributing to a film which is a succession of images and all these images blast by so quickly that you it's just really important to make every everything read that is there on the screen and that's that's a big part of it all right so to give you a little bit of context where I come from I my first commercial paid job was actually working with Blender on Elephant Stream in 2006 which was the first the first open movie and it was actually made to test okay well can you actually make a film in this Blender software which at that time Blender wasn't you know so widely used widely widely used as now so lots of people made different little tiny animations and different things but it was never really put together in a in a piece or so I'm stopping to say coherent piece because you can say about Elephant Stream what you want but maybe not that coherent so so for Elephant Stream it was like there were a lot of firsts here like there were like there was some technology in Blender already built in but Elephant Stream for example didn't use ray tracing that much we use Blender internal which was the thing that is thrown out of Blender right now and the ray tracing part was only for the eyes like the the reflective part of the eyes really like all the other surfaces was all good old reflection maps so yeah the the lighting wasn't really that thought out to begin with also so we had many different scenes and almost every lighting scenario was self-contained within these scenes so it's just what it is but it was just the the the foundation of everything that Blender built on so the compositor was introduced back then so the the motion blur is all done in the compositor and there is a lot of post frame adjustments in the compositor as well I'm hoping to not forget anything yeah so the the way that it's lit is also very economical like I've began to realize that over the years because it's it's mostly consisting out of little islands like the characters are mostly just in a little tiny set and they're literally in the void like there's there's maybe one or two smaller room sets or so but it's really just the characters standing in nothing which is super easy to light the next project was Big Bug Bunny in 2008 so in Big Bug Bunny it was more about you know telling an actual story story having fun with it also introducing fur rendering Big Bug Bunny was actually not ray traced at all there were like all the reflections for the eyes we just abandoned that and we didn't do any any fancy stuff so everything that you see in Big Bug Bunny is one ray traced shadow buffer spotlights it made heavy use of the compositor because we had a lot of fast paced action and a lot of fast moving characters and they had to have motion blur and we had to have depth of field the depth of field and elephant stream for example was only was was done with compositing layers and Gaussian blur and stuff and in Big Bug Bunny we had depth of field based on the actual depth information in the scene but also what that meant is that you see the character standing in grass we had to find a way to separate the character from the grass so the compositing setups for for Big Bug Bunny were pretty elaborate by today's standards probably not but every character was able it was be able was was tweakable like all the characters all the sorry all the characters had individual layers and we could tweak the colors of each individual character to make them more saturated more stylized more cartoony we still had a little bit of that eye-lending effect going on because the sets were tiny they were really small most of the time it was just a tree with a little bit of a hill underneath it and then the far background was just layers of textures of hill matte painting basically so still very very economic and very doable um next we had tears of steel or I was on tears of steel so um uh didn't unfortunately didn't take part in Sintel but tears of steel was kind of different because uh it was a vfx project and uh everything that has to be rendered and lit was part of a shot that had to look realistic more or less um and it had to integrate with the realistic elements in the in the shot so there were a lot of constraints um you know how to you know how you can light something because you almost had to in every shot you had to have you had a real element that the lighting had to adapt to um this was the first use of cycles in any real production that we did um it came out like half a year before that um and this was really the testing ground of everything that cycles came to be we had a lot of issues we noticed that it's really hard to light interior spaces with cycles and it's also really hard to have many different lights just by the nature of how cycles was the path tracing algorithm was implemented back then um so lots of slowness going on the um the motion blur was still done in the compositor uh so didn't you really use cycles motion blur i'm not even sure if we had deformation motion blur back then um yeah and and as you can imagine those little elements that we had to compose together those were also almost little islands that we could light uh individually after that uh fun little detour um was coming in this uh Grandi Lama which was a very fun little short story um and uh this was totally different because it was very cartoony and very very expressive um it was a very simple show because it was mostly just one lighting scenario for everything um nothing really changed except for that shot maybe which was just one one little shot um yeah and then the night time but um there was not a lot of variation in it and you can see also it is it is also kind of an island so we have the foreground and then everything in the background is just matte painting texture um motion blur still vector blur still done in the compositor as a post adjustment um we tried to use motion blur and it was really really super slow we so we didn't um next on was cosmos laundromat um i was fortunate enough to do some lighting on a couple of shots and most of the time i was delegated to do the tornado because um it had a tornado in it and some someone had to do it um so cosmos was a little bit more ambitious because it was part of a bigger of a bigger project um it was supposed to be a full feature film and this uh the this episode of it was just the beginning of the whole thing um so it had to fit in that grander piece um at the same time it was it was really one of the first project where we didn't have a lot of that islanding going on because we had a character in a full environment and the environment had to um you know the conditions of the environment had to affect the characters and they couldn't just be lit as one little piece so it was a lot more demanding in that um also the number of shots and of course we had fur and and that damn tornado so um there was no motion blur in that film because it was really really really slow to render i think shaggy you remember when we rendered yeah there was there was one or two shots and then it just the render time just exploded because yeah it's just really costly to do um and uh after that fun little detour coming on this lamigos which was uh just another completely well completely different thing than the one before was very cartoony very fast paced action very uh you know very very fun like a lot of a lot of different scenes three different lighting scenarios we have the the scene in the end where it becomes kind of moody and a little bit sad and uh it was it was very fun to to do this um and the environments weren't as big as cosmos laundromat so a little bit more lower budget right so smaller islands of environment still we did have some scenery stretching into the far background there was a lot of problem with render noise like those berries that you saw that uh i remember doing the rendering that last shot before the premiere and we had some noise on the berries and we couldn't get rid of that freaking noise on the berries uh lots of lots of fun little issues like that um next up agent operation barbershop slightly different again um this time it was all interior lighting so um we had exterior we had the outside we had the inside of the barbershop and then we had the basement environment to light and um this was kind of a deviation from from everything like except for cosmos and and tiers of steel everything was very cartoony and very stylized the lighting was very bright and uh you know you had to really focus uh on the character and uh getting that appeal right on the agent it was all driven by cinematography and by the practical lighting situation in the set so um we had to do two things the characters had to look good but at the same time everything had to be very grounded very physical because uh you see those lights there they had to they had to have an effect on the character and we placed them in a way that uh in every shot of the whole thing we could kind of cheat a situation where there would be interesting appealing lighting uh going on great project first film that we actually used motion blur in cycles in so that was great because uh Sergey um Sheridan he made sure that we can actually render shots with with motion blur without waiting 10 days let me just check my notes i'm just gonna give a little rundown of this and then we're gonna do a practical demo right away um mostly using the the the shots and sprite flight um there was spring which was uh which was more bigger environment we had lots of you know the lots of sets stretching far into the distance and the characters had to be uh seemingly part of it and they had to be integrated into it um at the same time we had volume rendering we had fur and everything just had to be um yeah that that were to describe it earthy everything had to feel tangible the lighting had to feel like it was natural like it was outside and uh and you just we had to feel the the elements of you know of the scenes um sorry i don't want to forget anything smoke is noisy yeah of course i don't know why i wrote that down yeah um so coming back to that islanding effect uh just just to say is that this project uh had a little bit of that going on because we had sets that were made in such a way that you can like you can only see so far but um but you still had a lot of expensive environment so uh very uh very tricky and a little bit costly to like that kind of stuff um this project we also did denoising in uh in post because we rendered everything in multi-layer open xr with passes cryptomad and everything and then we uh we piped through the compositor to denoise it which was back then still a new thing now we can all do it and it's fun um so let's let's come to this project that we're talking about today uh sprite fright was a little bit of everything um and it was also a kind of ambitious because it was one of those productions was one of the most complicated production we we we tackled up to this point we had lots of characters we had effects we had variations for those characters so they had to go through different stages and of wear and tear um and uh the whole story was centered around the characters at the same time they uh it all played in a very you know in a forest set the forest had to have a character and Matthew uh Matthew Lund the director and Ricky and never the production designer they wanted this forest to feel like a real forest um but at the same time the characters are stylized the shape language of the set is stylized the colors are stylized um so we we had to kind of slip away into into this and make something that that feels right um right um but i'm forgetting anything huh shot count just to mention it i don't know why i wrote this wrote this down but also sprite fright had the most shots that we had until this point we had 227 before that the agent had 74 74 and spring had 100 roughly or so so this was also another another step up especially with our small team so a lot of decisions had to be made to be able to light these shots in in a quick manner um because we only had two people doing the lighting it was me and it was Bo uh who stepped in later in the process so we had to divide the movie into those shots and make sure that we find a way to describe how we do the lighting because not everyone can just you know you can't just make it up as you go you have to make up the language so you can uh you can make a result that is coherent at the end um so let's let's talk about how that uh came to be so in sprite fright it's very it's very much based around the the idea of chunkiness um we're going to talk about that also in our sprite fright presentation tomorrow but um it's all supposed to feel a little bit more like a model not that we're trying to emulate the look of models you know with fingerprints and that kind of stuff but we want to make it look like a like a little toy world because Matthew uh he grew up in a uh in a family in a tradition um they owned a toy store so he really wanted to have that kind of feel and that kind of appeal um and that meant that uh the lighting had to support that um and we also decided that it would be good for all the props and everything that we have we have a very uh medium to low local contrast so within the like within those colors there is there's bump there is a little bit of variation but it's not too contrasty that's what uh what it means so uh you see this object and you can tell what it is and if you look really close you can see the detail but uh the overall shape uh and the secondary detail that's what that's what's count that is what counts um then we had uh to make that make it easier we had to uh we introduced a limited color palette which was actually um uh uh a thing that Vivian our concept artist advocated for very early on and I'm so happy that we we made it work in the whole film um what that means is that uh we don't use you know 10 different types of green we maybe use two to three different types of green um and the characters have uh colors shared among them and the hues are shared so if you see everything on the fine on the screen it all comes together and it's not too too noisy same goes for the environment we uh we try to make sure that you don't have too many different bark textures or too many different colors of bark the green is one shade the ground is one it's the same kind of brown and the mushrooms are the same kind of red so it's all it all looks like it comes together in the get go you don't have to do any of that in grading and what what that helps you with is making the characters stand out more because they're that really the story is about the characters um yeah so uh it's about the characters so the most important thing is appeal for us and you can do like you can do crazy things with naturalistic lighting you can make a forest with you know with fog and depth and dew drops and elements and everything but at the end of the day it's uh it's a distraction it's just there to look hyper realistic to look beautiful um that was more um spring spring was more of that for sprite right we we wanted to have the characters uh you know tell the story and be the central point without making it seem like the background is too simple so appeal was very important for us and uh making the characters dimensional was already also very important to us because the the shapes were all very stylized and beautiful like you have these very nice sculptures almost and our job as lighters is to make sculptures that are in motion look great essentially so um so the language that we used for for lighting these was very simple it's almost going back to the original metaphor of three-point lighting but um the most important thing is is the gradients the gradients along the faces the topography of how you know how those volumes look on screen um so we had a shadow area um which is also the balance so the environment world that's the color there and we have highlights and we have a rim just three different elements and you can play around with these three different elements again that was made because we had to light 227 shots in a very short period of time um and within that you can already do a lot of things for example um if you have a night shot um you can uh for example you see you see the rim is on the side of the highlights here um during the day shots that was extremely important um also to make the scenery not look too fake um in the night shots sometimes the rim is on the backside so it's like highlights shadow bounds and then the rims on the other side um to help the characters separate from the backgrounds um and that depends on the on the scene of course because sometimes you have a scene that is in backlight so the rim becomes the most important light source of the whole thing but uh you still want to have that appeal and the softness and the the nice gradients in the face so you need to have some kind of faked key like key like in the face um to you know to make the character read um so appeal and dimensionality is was very important for us um then value separation was also very important because we did have a very busy background we had lots of leaves and lots of stuff going on um we tried to separate by value as much as possible the characters so in almost every shot there is a clear separation between foreground and background by value um value is you know when you desaturate your whole image that's what you get that's what your brain actually perceives uh when they first look at this frame um your your brain just registers all the values and then all the colors next so we tried to make sure that the action always happens in the areas of biggest contrast suddenly became very quiet okay um i'm hoping i'm not boring you guys with like lots of repeated information i i'm gonna step into the the practical demonstration very soon um then we try to do focus uh getting focus through light vignetting um and vignette vignette you guys probably know is is most of the time is a post effect but um in order to make it make this whole movie look more like a like a staged model world um we try to make it look kind of staged in the lighting as well so that vignetting um is mostly done in the lighting so the center of the shot can be lit and the edges would be carefully uh would be carefully masked so you have a little bit of a fall of there um and this was also like first appeal softness and to make it look like a you know like a little tiny model world that we can go into um this is a little bit of a um of a compromise because um this was more of a rendering uh you know uh you know trying to make the rendering as manageable as possible um on agent three seven we had a lot of highly reflective objects and that caused a lot of noise and that caused a lot of render time and also those objects when they twinkle on in the background they are very distracting so what we decided that is that we would limit the amount of reflective objects and tiny busy specular highlights to the eyes which are the most important thing in the scene you're looking at the eyes of the characters and then maybe those objects that are really important that we see that they are metal so the barbecue you see has a little bit of metal parts but it's not too uh too reflective it's very very dull kind of um yeah okay so um tools to make the job easier again 227 shots so um there are some things that you can do along the way uh when also when you're lighting on your own project or on a similar show um is to to make this all easier because um you know you know you just don't you don't get 200 shots at once and then you have to deal with it one by one and you start is picking away at the the mountain with a toothpick um you have to find a way to make it uh you know to organize yourself so these are the tools that we had at our disposal or that we came up with um that make things easier um well hard to come up with this um it's very vital I would say but I have uh I just mentioned it here it's very good to have a shot list and have tracking for your shots um if you have to do 100 shots in two months or 10 shots a week or so it's uh very it can be very daunting if you don't see uh the shots within the big picture and uh of course you need the tracking part of it to make sure that you know what you're currently doing because you might not be doing one uh one thing at a time you might be doing 20 things at a time um so this is really helpful and this was really a very helpful tool um the first thing when I go into a project is to ask okay where are the shots how many shots do we have how many which are the complicated shots which are the easiest shots um then having production art is a bit of an old brainer but if you have really great inspiring production art uh it's it's very easy because you have inspiration it's all there and uh even though you might not have to emulate it quite a way um you have something as a basis as a starting point because it gets people on the same page they can talk about it and uh and then you can compare your uh your your task to that artwork uh and you have something to talk about which is incredibly helpful color script really really helpful we didn't do it for many of the projects projects that we had um mostly because of the lack of good art talent but it's um it's vital to have uh an idea how the movie looked like even at a small scale or so even if it's just little thumbnails um and even if they're just the starting point again of the conversation but um it's it's very very helpful because then you can look at this and you can uh you can evaluate it all in one piece you're not looking at shots in a sequence you're looking at at the big picture which uh you can make uh good decisions with such as for example the direction of light um which i think brings me to the next one yes direction of light is very important for continuity especially if you have a short film where stuff happens really fast it's bright for it was like seven minutes yeah seven minutes everything happens really really super quick so um so within that uh within that seven minutes we we're going through different shots different environments different lighting conditions and even though it's not completely um obvious to the viewer at every point our brain has to understand where we are in this place where we are in this forest so um one great thing that Kialte made in the beginning before even doing the layout was a kind of location breakdown and this was really helpful for me because in the beginning we had um we well we knew the movie would take place at three different light conditions so there was the afternoon in the beginning which became more of a midday thing at the end um and then there was the the the scary night stuff um peaking at the ritual scene with the fire and then there was the ending which was morning and that graduation between night and morning also happened within a number of shots so um it was very important to know where the sun is because the sun tells you where you are in relation to the environment um and then if you have a if you have a set where you're filming things at a different position or so you need to absolutely nail that sun position um to know where you are and not confuse people um it's not so clear cut all the time because like there is a lot of leeway into how you're you're positioning the sun like around 30 degrees you can play around with it cheat things in backlight or or do it more frontal or so there's there's ways to to cheat around that but at the same time yeah it's it's good to have a good basis and to know where you are and where the sun is or the strongest light source in your scene um yeah I mentioned that uh breaking it all down into different scenarios little building blocks makes it all more manageable um in sprite fight we had three different ones we had day night and morning as I mentioned and these had fixed colors already so we decided that we would use this color palette within this this lighting scenario and this within this other scenario and there was not a lot of a lot of intersection going on um color value value library was very important for that because um same as for the lights we also did that for the characters themselves we made a library an actual blend file with nodes in it and those color values and those color values values were used in all the props in all the characters um and uh we had this a similar one for the for the lighting and so that means if we change one color in the library um it would propagate to the entire film and um we could just you know make decisions based on one shots because all the value the color values were all the same um yeah this is the one thing I mentioned I'm gonna go into that in the live demo as well but we had we basically had libraries for um you know which are just node groups with RGB nodes it's very simple if you think about it um it's not a lot of work you just have a file that's centrally and you're located and you you're linking in those nodes into your scenes and that way you make sure that all the key lights all the fill lights and all the everything has the same color and if you just change that node in your central location you're propagating it to the entire film all you have to do is re-render everything which makes it very manageable um yeah if you want to deviate between that you can do that we did that in I don't know in some some occasions or so and if you want to deviate from that slightly you can just put a huge saturation node or something else at the end and then everything still happens in relation to your color values that you have set in the beginning um yes stylized eye highlights was also very it was a decision that we made to have stylized highlights um more um like to say more clearly is highlights that the animators place um in many of the projects we did before except for coming under I think we did all the eye highlights with lights so the lighting artist Aimee um had to set those highlights very carefully um in the shot and those highlights are very important because they uh they make a large part of the appeal of a character um and uh if you have a highlight that's positioned wrong it can look like your character is cross eyed and uh to some people that might not look appealing or so or it might not look like the eye direction is correct for you know the story that you're telling within this one shot uh shot so in sprite fight we decided to just leave that to the animator um not to like pass work away from us well yes maybe also but um but also to make sure that they can because what they do on a day-to-day basis is control the appeal of a character in every single frame and they're so meticulous about their hand crafting every single frame it would be stupid to not leave it to leave the highlights to them because um they make up such a large part of appeal however the problem is that if you're doing that uh you have a you might have a discrepancy between the lighting that you're doing and the lighting that the animator is doing so how we fix that is by um by making this eye dot cheat sheet which i made right after xialty gave us the location um the location uh map and after we had the color script um and this cheat sheet was there to give the animators uh in every shot that they would animate a little guideline to where the light would be coming from and this was done over the course of several afternoons or so just trying to figure out where the sun is where i would put the lights in the scene basically lighting the whole thing in my head and then uh putting the arrows into into the shots um just as a guideline where the light is coming from and you can see in the uh upper side here maybe you guys can't read this but this was basically just a little legend to tell them okay this is what happens if the arrow is coming from this side then the highlight is in that part of the hemisphere um vice versa you know um and never put the eye light uh eye highlight below into the into the the other like into the bottom half because then the light would be coming from below and except for maybe one scene we didn't want that um most of the time the light comes from either here or here um looks very appealing little red thing here is to tell the uh the animator that don't deviate too much from this area of of of interest that's really the part where you want the highlight to be um that's the part that looks most appealing if you put it like if you look at the uh rightmost one if you do any of that it looks wonky you can do it i i think i wrote down six never do this unless you're told to do so and even then protest um so yeah don't don't do these things and that worked great like uh maybe sometimes i had to tell animator hey had to tell the animators hey did you look at the cheat sheet and they were like no and then they they could just look at the shot and figure out the highlight and it would be great because then the lighting would also be based on this cheat sheet and also you can see a lot of the arrows going left and right because there was a lot of shot and reverse shots a lot of these shots were very stylized in terms of light direction just to make it extra clear where the camera is and where the where the uh the characters are in relation to that camera all right um i think this is one of the last ones a little bit of a no-brainer um but it's very good in production if you have primary and secondary shots um you are basically lighting one shot in the beginning this primary shot and then you can deviate a lot into those other shots um sometimes that is a wide shot so you're doing a wide shot and then your close-ups happen in that scenery in the wide shot great because then you have at least the light direction figured out um maybe not the lighting itself because you have to do a lot of shot adjustments or so but at least you can you can just copy in those lights and see what it does and then work uh based on based on that very helpful also for those shots like if you have a lot of shots and mostly most of the time it's just coverage it's a shot reverse shot ab's and so on so um you can save a lot of time by just spending the time on one shot and then propagating that light into the other shots because they're telling the same story basically and yeah sometimes it was literally just shot reverse shot so um doing one shot lit five others which was great so that's a great way of um that's a great way of actually uh slimming down everything so those 200 shots maybe just become 100 or so which is a lot more manageable um uh yeah last thing I wanted to mention is not really a general thing but one tool that we used and also developed was the lighting overrider which is a big hack sorry it's a big hack um that are working on top of you know uh that that's it's working on top of your our lighting files it's basically just a thing that generates values that uh can override anything within your scene it's not uh related to the override the library override system in uh in blender currently it's just a little thing that generates a script uh that gets run every time the shot is loaded that changes variables because that way we were able to adjust lots of things like the sprite dots uh were uh were basically a rig function that got overwritten with those with that lighting overrider um so that's not a general tool but I just have to mention it uh last thing is a contact sheet while you're working it's extremely important to see your work within the context um so most of the time when you're watching something in succession like when you're watching the scene play through you don't realize any inconsistencies and that's just because of fatigue and your eye just trying to your brain just trying to match everything and in the end of in the end of the day the viewer is doing that like there's a lot of um you know there's a lot of leeway into you know light uh adjustments and and brightness but um a contact sheet which is just a page of all your shots together um is really helpful to make sure that things look coherent and you can uh uh you can also see I think this is the ungraded version of of sprite flight so in the middle here you can see some shots are looking really bright those in grading we dimmed down but uh yeah we could see immediately which shots are deviating from the lighting scheme and what looked off really good tool um before we jump into the live session which is great we're running great on time I'm gonna quickly mention the rendering pipeline for this um just because you gotta know the technical part of it um at least um on the surface level while you're doing these things um the the file setup we are using is very similar to um the work show the workflow that we have established over the years within our studio we have um for every shot we have three different files we can have more but these are the base files we have animation file we have lighting file and we have the compositing file and I think I mentioned this in a uh a spring pipeline presentation in 2019 or so so I'm not gonna go into too much detail here but basically the lighter is working in the lighting file the animator is working in the animation file and later everything comes together in compositing and that's extremely important because we're doing lighting uh most most of the time at the same time as animation happens like we're doing a pre-lighting pass while the animator is doing their lighting so we can't bump into each other um so it's extremely important to to separate these steps out so you're not stepping on each other's toes um and the animation gets just linked into the lighting file so every time the animator adjusts something the lighting file gets the newest version you can do this multiple ways uh but uh this is how we did it um quick word on file formats uh we uh rendered everything to multi-layer uh EXR 32 bit uh after lighting of course that's after doing uh that's after doing test renders which are all done in PNG or JPEG or whatever those are put into the edit as mp4s but the final rendering result is multi-layer EXR 32 bit has several passes we um most of the time we chose to render denoising than un the noisy result c depth uh emission pass um krypton mat very important to do color adjustments on the go and then pipe that into the comp file and the comp file would just read those as an image sequence and output 16 bit EXRs because we don't need all that information for the grading which are then at the end of the day put into the edit and the edit puts out 16 bit EXRs which went to the grading um for spring for example we left that part out we didn't do external grading but for sprite flight we did uh we had as a color a colorist do the grading for us um which um their studio output everything as a pet png for youtube and jpeg 2000 for the dcp all right um is that is that okay like was it a little bit too dry okay good i i hope i don't lose you there um um okay what i'm now hoping to do is show you through the steps of lighting a shot or a couple of shots depending how much time i have just to just to show you the day-to-day workflow so you can ask questions at the end uh we'll have uh we'll have some time for that hopefully but i'll just try to go through uh the order of things um mostly how it would go in the middle of production um on a day-to-day basis because uh on this production i did i lit about i think the most i did was around eight shots first on a day um but that becomes 15 shots in a week sometimes so it's not all the same yeah but but it was very much just you know do one thing wait for a render do the other the other thing so it's it's very streamlined okay let's let's check out a shot file let's just take this one here for ellie this was uh one of the splash screens i think you can download a similar version of this file the lighting is slightly different i think it's on it's on blender.org uh in the splash screen archive um okay so um quick run through the settings or are you guys interested in the settings anymore shall we leave them out yeah okay might as well might as well mention them just rendering settings are sometimes a little bit dry and a little bit boring but it helps me at least to know um what i'm dealing with and most of these are conscious uh decision at the beginning of the process through a trial and error trying to optimize things um so um we are uh using uh adaptive sampling which was a first on this project super great cuts the samples after a certain uh noise pattern so we're not spending too much time sampling nothing something that looks already uh fine so adaptive sampling was used denoising uh open image denoise for the final image which was great saved into the uh saved into the comp file as well um noise threshold for rendering slightly different uh maximum samples for the test renders we used about 100 samples to 115 samples depending on the noise of the shot um in the that's for the test renders yeah sorry a viewport i think we even went below that like 50 to 100 was already like we spent a lot of samples on that most of the shots test renders rendered and like eight minutes per frame so what that was that was great um uh for the final final sample count i think we've used from about 500 to 800 to 1500 which is already like a shot that has a lot of samples where stuff swims around and we did have some shots where there was a lot of noise that caused denoising artifacts that looked yeah those shots uh simon wrote a tool for that we were able to you know denoise them in a magical way um but uh but yeah most of the shots were actually fine like most of the night time shots were just done um that daytime shots were the more more tricky ones um we use a very limited amount of light bounces like three this is really ridiculous if you're coming from arches for example where you use like 16 bounces and everything you know you have one light source 16 bounces everything looks great but with this you have to output a shit load of frames uh in a short amount of time so we have to limit everything to three bounces uh maximum five i would say if you do a shot within a city or so but um three is really enough in a forest with a lot of with a lot of shadow and depth going on set already um and most of the bounces you're already faking within your light setup as well um because you're more uh working from a perspective of a cinematography uh of a cinematic you know lighter where you're putting bounce cards to to emphasize a highlight or something or you put a diffuse um so it's it's already the lighting setup is very stylized and supposed supposed to mimic those bounces already no clamping no caustics um fast approximation of gi which was super cool um cut down the render time to about from um about 30 percent or so 10 to 30 percent depending on the shot um that just replaces the uh a certain um after a certain number of bounces it just replaces everything with a tinted AO of the scene um which speeds up the rendering a lot um it might not look as refined if you have you know realistic light bounces and stuff but most of the time again we were faking those bounces and um so we could get away with that saved a huge number of uh samples and render time here rendering we're using 3d curves simplify it was enabled great um that's it pretty much so um these are the rendering settings um and we can just let this go this is how our shot looks like great it's done um okay so um what you can see here is a bunch of uh I hope you can see this can you guys dim that light in the front maybe is it possible this light that's shining on the screen no yes no shaking your head okay so um we'll just have to imagine that everything is dark so um the first thing that I would uh do is um is uh figure out the conditions of the light um what is the environment doing with the light of the character um we have some fog beams here they were mostly most of the time added uh after the lighting was done but I'll just leave them here um disabled um then what I would do to make everything coherent is link in the world and the world was always uh in a central location we had a library we had a lib lg t templates dot blend which was uh where we kept the lighting templates um these were basically just worlds so we have one world for day and one for night and we link it with relative path and we link it in and we take it and activate it in the scene and there you go you already have something to see and your scene is not completely dark you don't have to start completely from scratch um this world is very simple um there are two different ones so what you can see here is that we have one for the camera and one like this is the camera part let me show you yeah like this so this is what the camera sees we're just supposed to be kind of a drop-off set or so mostly we try to we try to mask that but just in case we have a free spot somewhere we would pretend that this is the sky and this is the ground um this is what the lighting sees because this is what what is used for the fast a o approximation so this actually does a big job already because it lights everything from above uh it lights blue and everything from below it kind of lights uh yellow ish which fakes this balance that you get in the forest where like if you have imagine you have a you have a canopy you have the the sun seeping through and you have bounce on the floor and you have that bounce in your in your shot um you know just subtly illuminating every everything that's kind of uh you know above our heads this is what this is supposed to do time is up stop in two minutes please then let's do this super quick okay i can do one shot all right let's start with the um most important thing which is the environment so i'll grab an area light which is a prepared light source of mine um this is um rectangular one i'll just use disc areas for everything this is going to be the world this is going to be the fill light so what we'll do is just take that enable nodes we have the nodes here uh we can have the group we can have the variants the variable for the lights and we can pipe the color of the fill light into this and it is the color of the world kind of uh we'll bring it down to two um because most of the time we're just trying to emphasize the light coming from above to uh to ground it in the world um we'll duplicate this um and this will become our key light um that is this we've duplicated it's also an area light but it'll become the key light this will be much brighter 20 um key lights i try to make kind of small ish but not too small we'll get to that later um i'll duplicate that and this becomes our sun um forget me forgive me for not naming everything no i have limited time the sun is also our key light but you can you can see it illuminates kind of everything also the character we don't want those sharp shadows and we don't want this uh a very sharp terminator line uh and also we want to make the angle kind of two degrees it doesn't help the character is still too much in the sunlight we want to bring it down a little bit um then we want to mask the sunlight of the character so we can light the character separately this just bring it here and this becomes uh our shadow caster this will get a dark material and this will not appear in the camera um if i have more time now i'm sorry i kind of overestimated time um i would have i would just make this look like leaves and add some gaps here and there um all right we want to focus our attention on the character so it's dark in the background a little bit make it make a little bit more space here now we can see the sunlight still has an effect on the scene it gives us the feeling as if we had sunlight going through the leaves um but the character is still not lit um so let's bring back the fill and the area let's bring it up here okay so we're creating a soft light and mostly in film production this would be done with a bounce card or like a soft uh soft light source or so and we just light the character um we bring that around the character and that becomes our rim light um our rim can be on the side of the sun or it can be in the shadow this way it looks a little bit fake it looks like as if the rim is coming from a bounce that's somewhere in the scene um so let's not do that let's just put it on the side of the key light um and this uh basically already illustrates the the principles that i i showed you like the just the three different steps and what you're doing with this is just you're watching out for the main appeal the character is already animated great the models look great uh the asset department spend time making everything look cool so everything has great shape language and we just have to emphasize that and if i'm not mistaken i'm the time is over now yeah sorry thank you thank you very much