Visualize Photography Lighting Setups in Blender
Patrick David uses a Blender setup to simulate the effect of lighting setups. The .blend file is provided.
Patrick writes:[…]Having a reference for how the contribution of different types of light will affect the final outcome is very handy for me. I’ve seen people who have taken the time to setup lighting diagrams where they will modify a given light for direction/angle, and cycle through many possibilities to help as a reference (Here is one cheat-sheet from DIY Photography).
This is nice, but what if I wanted to visualize the effect multiple lights will have all simultaneously? I guess I could go and shoot every, possible, variation, but I am really lazy. Plus, I don’t have access to a model with the patience to sit there while I fiddle with multiple lights, multiple times.
It occurred to me that I already had a great tool for doing this visualization already installed on my computer. That tool is Blender 3D. I already had been using this open source 3D modelling tool for some time, and was familiar enough with it to be comfortable emulating my lighting setups. All I needed was a good model.
Infinite Realities released a full 3d scan by Lee Perry-Smith that was graciously licensed under CC-BY. This gave me a full 3D scan of a head & shoulders with the UV maps already created for textures, and a normal map to use for bumping. Perfect!
I loaded up the model and textures, and proceeded to create some lights in Blender that would mimic lights I might use in the real world.
Link
Useful! :) (I’ve done something like this once before myself, but on a smaller scale and lower quality. This is useful because it’s a great quality and it’s already made.)
This is cool.
You could actually take two different lightning setups, put the images on top of each other with screen blending mode.
That way you can see what the combination of the different setups would look like. Al in the mater of seconds, no re-render needed. :)
How weird is that!! I was just trying to get a decent set up for my model just now to do a concept render. This will come in handy! Thank you!
Yay! Didn’t realize you guys had found my post! :)
I’ve actually tried using combinations of lighting results as different layers in GIMP, and combining to visualize the combined effect of the light, but there are some tweaks that have to be made (and concessions). Overlapping areas of lit model being screened could lead to blown out results if you’re not careful. :)
Oh, and a comment on my page noted that the texture images are .bmp – and as such cycles will not render properly. You’ll have to change them to .png for cycles to pick them up properly.
It will be nice if we have a system where we can just specify which lighting scene or environment or mood to setup, then we are done. Just give us a couple of sliders only to tweak. And it will be nicer if we can import 2 characters (one is Lee, the other Tyson), then just specify all the moves that Lee can do, his speed, his mind and all the moves Tyson can do, his power, his lawlessness. Then just render, then you will have this animation:
Dark lighting surrounds an alley in Hong Kong. Tyson, looking for a knockout punch. Lee looking at Tyson’s groin. Tyson looking to bite Lee’s ears. Lee only looking at Tyson’s groin.
If I could get Blender simpler for this purpose, I totally would. I even played briefly with the game engine to see if I could at least get something simple and useable – but not quite (my blender-fu is not quite up to snuff I think).
However, if I could, it would be sliders for chow yun fat and john woo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bozxgVQ9m0
On a more serious note, thank you for your beautiful work.
Thanks Pat! Good idea. I cracked up though. There is an ad on the site for software that makes human portraits look like CGI renderings. It was a hilarious ‘crossing of paths’ if you will. CGI folks try to add wrinkles, blemishes and asymmetry to make a good portrait and glamour photographers remove wrinkles, blemishes and asymmetry to make a good photo.
Yeah, I find that quite often straddling the line between the two myself. For instance, the head model used has a normal map that as a photographer I want to “smooth” out before I render – lol. While on the other hand I love that the map has wrinkles and pores that make the image look more realistic when rendered… :)
So, to have the best of both worlds add the bump map to the render for that CG realism we love and then composite it out for that professional photography look!
I feel like that’s a recipe to cause the universe to collapse (oh the recursion!) :D
Wonderful, this fits two of my favorite hobbies. Photography and Computer Graphics! :D Great article!
Ya, this a useful article. This is exactly what we need.
Pre Viz is what I used Blender for when I first started with it. If you don’t have access to a full studio set up, this is a real help. Interesting article, would love to see more out of the box uses of Blender.
Have you thought of using a Python script to automate running through a whole lot of combinations of positions of a bunch of lights, and doing a render of each, while you sit back with a coffee or have lunch or something? It could even join all the results into a montage for you, ready to browse when you get back.
Sort of. I went ahead and just keyframed the lights revolving around the model head, and animated out the sequences for the montage images. For anything more complicated than that, I usually just run a live blender session and render out what I’m interested in.
And really, with the wonderful work done by Jimmy Gunawan, I just setup the cycles renderer and play in a viewport from there…