Lighting Tutorial Suggestions for Series work

DDCreate

Hello All,

I was wondering if anyone here had any suggestions for a lighitng tutorial that is more geard towards series work. The ones I have tried so far seem to be geared for single shots and a lot of "fantasy" themed stuff. Ogres and the like. Awesome stuff but my renders tend to happen in real world situations. I know that the word "easy" doesn't apply to lighting in Daz and to me, it really is one of if not THE most important element in a render that really makes it pop. What I'd most like to learn is how to take a room and give it static lighting. I often get fooled when I buy a product because the Product page looks amazing and when I buy it, I realize how much light work went into the promo pics. I want to do lighting like in promo pics. How can I learn that? I know there are hundreds if not thousands of lighting tricks but I am looking for the ones that don't require 3days of test rendering per picture and then when you move to the next picture, three more days. I just want to learn how to light a room so I can save it and consider it a stable, reliable place to "shoot." I know it takes time and practice and won't come over night. I'm just looking for where I can get started because limping my way through lighting is getting a little tired.

Thanks for any help!

SickleYield

Every time a figure moves their lighting needs to change, or else you need to control stage management of scenes to keep them in the right orientation toward lights, as a film's director and cinematographer would do. For me the happy medium has lately been to set up any ambient lighting first (lamps or flame or whatever, diegetic mesh lights that are obviously "explained" by the scene), then set up a soft key and rim light on any figure(s). Your diegetic lights can easily be saved and left in place. The figure highlights will often need to be moved as your camera and/or figures do. There is no one light rig that works in every situation, but if you reuse sets you can save lit versions of them as scenes or scene subsets, and save your figure-highlighting key and rim as a scene subset also. For max control of shadows you might experiment with turning Environment to "scene only." At the least it gives you a good idea how much the HDR affects your scene.

DDCreate

Thats good info and yes, I agree that the character lighting has to change. Most times I do this with a Point Light set at about 20k lumens. What you explained about the ambient lighting and the key and rim was more what I was talking about. What are mesh lights?

SickleYield

A mesh light is an object in the scene where some part of it has a luminous material set in the Surfaces tab.  You turn this on by turning the Emission color from black to white (or yellow or green or purple, whatever).  You then must set a temperature (which determines color, lower temp = more orange or red) and a luminosity (and you have more choices of units from lumens, although that is an option).  Many products sold in the store now have some mesh lighting because it can give a more warm and flattering light to characters' skin and interiors.

https://www.daz3d.com/ig-iray-lights-and-shaders-table-lamps

The simplest and fastest-rendering way to use mesh lights in your scene is with an off-camera square/rectangular primitive set to be emissive (because the higher-poly the emissive object, the more it slows render, meaning actual mesh light bulbs are not always ideal).  There's even a few beautifully set up products for this purpose, including this one by Kindred Arts that straight up points an arrow at the thing you're lighting:

https://www.daz3d.com/iray-ghost-light-kit

The downside to off-camera mesh lighting is that you need to parent it to the camera (that is, move it with the camera) or you need to work the camera around it, just as you would have to with non-diegetic lights on a film set.  One way you might handle this would be to show or hide specific mesh lights depending on your camera angle.