About to launch into my first night time render...

[RyanSpaulding]

...and quite frankly, I'm a bit intimidated. Does anyone have any guides or tuts about how to approach night renderings? It'll be an exterior, day and night shots.

 

I'll be using Vue 5 Infinite (which I'm sure none of you use) so I'm not looking for specifics really...more general advice.

 

Any help is appreciated.

 

-Ryan

[DavidR]

watching thread

[Ernest Burden III]

You have to invert your notion of what you're looking at. In the day, light is everywhere and form is described by shadow and areas of lower light. Otherwise, its all at 100% brightness, color and texture. At night, light is elusive and becomes an object all its own. It becomes playful in how it touches a bit here, lingers in pools there. You should carefully consider where areas of light will be and think of them as weighty areas in order to balance your picture. People are drawn to light, so provide paths into the rendering with areas of light, give your subject a strong light character. Is it to be a glowing volume, or more defined sub-zones? Either way, you must use some device to organize the picture or else it will fall apart as a random group of unconnected light areas.

 

Try this: print out your layout as a line or simple shading image, quite light, at a small size. Now pick up a black pencil (remember pencils?) and draw in the light as black. Maybe a store at a building base is bright, so scribble in heavy black. That light will spill out, right? Draw that. Throw light in front of cars, wherever you think it should be. Just scribble it on. Scan the sketch and invert the image, how do you feel about it? Now you know how to light the scene.

[STRAT]

i personally use a step by step approach.

 

pick your main environmental lighting. ie, is it middle of the night? is it moon lit? is it early morning/late evening? is it a dusk mood where allot is still quite light?

 

so pick the mood (sometimes dictated by the photo/sky backdrop you're going to drop into it) then set up your indirect environmental lights so you get that feeling. dont add any direct light yet. just add your gi and general site lighting until the image looks nice. in effect, you render the scene with all the lights off. just your sky/mood you're after should be lighting the scene.

 

once happy, start adding your direct lighting. ie, all the spot lights and omni lights that'll directly light things in the scene. build it up as you go. look at real life similar scenes. look how they're lit. copy them. your lights should act in the same way.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

color looses its vibrancy in poorly lit or unlit area. it makes sense from a scientific approach also. color is nothing more than reflected light. if there is little or no light to reflect, than there is little or no color being reflected.

 

this will vary across your scene, depending if you are under a street light, or in a corner.

 

also, the color of the GI light is important. i think it needs to have a purplish blue tint. but not a heavily saturated tint. kind of like a sun will have a yellow hue, or shadows on a sunny day have a blue tint.

 

..perhaps someone can verify that last comment for me.

 

..also, i think the color of your lights, street lights, building lights, interiro lights, are more evident in night scenes.

[Tommy L]

This link gets posted all the time, but for a 20 minute read it covers all the basics of real world light and more. Well worth reading.

 

http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm

[alexthg]

In my experience, the problems with night renderings are mostly not about the technical rendering, but more about what do you want your rendering to look like? In daytime rendering, it's easier to imagine what the building will look like (just standard blue sky, and sun positioning, and it's pretty done), but not in night rendering, especially when the architects don't give any damn clue on how they want to light their buildings (usually it's just "here's the building plan, and pls make a nice nighttime rendering"

Well, maybe that's why I think nighttime rendering more challenging... because sometimes we have to act as lighting designer as well. There's just waaaay more options in lighting... downlights, uplights, fill lights, walllights, spotlights... and each has it's own effect on your rendering atmosphere.

 

cheers,

Harry

[Brian Cassil]

http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm

 

Sweet link there Tommy! I haven't read the whole thing yet but it looks like it describes some elusive topics pretty well.