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Working on shading and Lighting of an animation project from Idea to Final Render
When I was started writing this tutorial, first I looked the internet for this kind of tutorials, lots of them were about technical matters, so I decided to write slightly different and talk about the workflow of shading and lighting for animation projects in a studio and use Potion of Gala* as an example, this way we can talk both about artistical and technical stuff, here I talk to those guys who want start as a shading and lighting artist on an animation project and find their way to upper positions in the studio.
We want to talk about these matters:
- Observation (put yourself in the situation warm up your mind)
- STORYTELLING THROUGHT LIGHTING + shading
- Work as an Interpreter not a translator
- Try to know all the aspects of your tools.
- Design the workflow, make some tests and get the result.
- Be the most severe one on yourself.
- Always push the limits.
I split the workflow in separate parts just for better understanding but in reality they work in conjunction with each other.
Observation (put yourself in the situation, warm up your mind)
Assume you are about to start new project as a shading and lighting artist, first thing you should do is read the script and watch the pre-production stuffs (concepts, color keys, Storyboard…) and find what is the story and think about the way you want to do that, take note of the critical points that you think are challengeable goals to achieve, after that Google all of them one by one and see what you can find about them on the internet both technically and artistically, everything (from a tutorial of workflow of creating a shader to watching the famous Artists paintings, digital paintings, pictures of different lighting situations of an apple (if your story run about an apple tree etc) look for everything you think that inspires you, try to contact other artists those had the same challenges as you before, and ask them about their solutions and workflows (save all of those thing as R&D materials) do this processes as much as you have time, all of these works warm up your mind for starting the project.
In Potion of Gala we searched for foods and fabrics because we have complex cloths shaders and we wanted to shaders looks like foods and still appear like themselves (Woods appear like wood, cotton appear like cotton etc)
I found three things
- Foods don't have much pure black color in them
- Lots of materials we wanted, had some sort of sub surface scattering
- Finally,
It’s better to make final images a little more saturate and that makes things a little more delicious. (Notice that saturated images makes the eyes tired very soon but for 3 min running time as our short animation that is not a big problem).
Another thing I searched for was searching for big artists painting to find same lighting situation as we had and I find it easily, I love Rembrandt painting so I start from him and I study his paintings for light and composition stuff and I used the result especially in the kitchen shot.
- STORYTELLING THROUGH LIGHTING* + shading
Sharon Callahan has a great paper in Siggraph 1996 “STORY TELLING THROUGH LIGHTING”, that is about how lighting can help story telling in the film making process specially CG films (I believe shading and texturing can help too) but how?
Director always asks these kinds of questions:
- What are the characteristics and emotions of the characters?
- What is the overall feeling of a shot?
- What is the most important point of the story in each particular shot?
- etc
Always try to have better understanding of what director want to say, make every decisions for colors, shaders and lighting with having those information’s in mind, and try to help director as much as you can to tell his story better with use of those elements subtly.
I will give you an example to have better understanding of the idea.
Let`s call it One Frame Story:
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