Why Lighting Animated Movies Is So Complicated | Movies Insider | Insider
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- Опубліковано 3 жов 2024
- Lighting is essential in 3D animated films for a few reasons: It tells the time of day, makes objects appear more lifelike, and can even convey the mood of a given moment. You can see this in Netflix's "Over the Moon." Animators start with colorscripts, which portray the entire emotional story arc of a film and guide the lighting decisions.
For "Over the Moon," Clara Chan and the CG team were tasked with the lighting on both Earth and Lunaria. When adding light to scenes, human skin begins to look more real, while a shiny jacket will begin to look like a real puffer. Then, through ray and path tracing, features like shadows and reflections are naturally added in the rendering process. And while a lot of 3D lighting is calculated by a computer, lighting artists still have a great amount of control.
For instance, the computer created really heavy shadows cast off Fei Fei's bangs, which Clara then lightened and eliminated. In general, lighting artists control the intensity of light, the placement, and the color. Lighting decisions also intentionally create mood. Like for a scene in "Incredibles 2," using fluorescent lights had an emotional purpose, while in "Over the Moon," focusing on intense lantern light rather than moonlight created a desired warmth.
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Why Lighting Animated Movies Is So Complicated | Movies Insider | Insider - Розваги
As a Lighting & Surfacing artist, I've started to tell people I'm an "animator" whenever they ask what I do for a living simply because no one's aware of the other departments involved in creating animated films.
Well that relates to many other industries too. Reservoir Engineer, Production Engineer, Drilling Engineer do completely different things, but they all say they work in Oil and Gas to avoid extra questions.
Just tell them you create pretty pictures for a living. That's simple enough for anyone to grasp.
Haha Im specializing as a lighting and lookdev TD and I can never explain what I do to my family hahaha
@@Vandalae i always go 'i take everyone's work and make it pretty' :D
Did u go to an art school to learn lighting?
Great Article! Just adding to the information
Animators - Animate characters and objects
StoryBoard Artists - Create storyboards, suggest camera angles, character placement, movement etc.
Character designers - create character designs and explore options of how the characters will look before directors decide on one
Environment designers - Design the sets where the movie will take place
Lighting Artists - Create, choose and put lighting in the scenes
Layout Artists - Create cameras and animate them
Surfacing Artists - Create materials and textures
Modeling Artists - Create the models of characters, objects and environments
Rigging Artists - Create the rig (controls and "skeleton" or structure) that will allow animators deforming and moving the characters and objects
Character FX artists - Create and give movement to cloths, fur hair amongst other things
FX artists - Create effects like Fire, water, explosions, debris, particles etc
Matte Painters - create paintings and compositions for backgrounds.
Composting Artists - Assemble the render passes and make them look beautiful and integrated. (In some companies this is done by lighting artists as well)
Colorists - They Balance the final render colors to unify the look of the movie
There are the directors, Production designers, and Production that tie everything together!
@Seyi Pelumi Same, I'm an animator. This really need clarification since I keep watching these videos that say animators are responsible for something that's not just motion
Being an FX artist must be so cool!
Me: the broke person that’s gonna have to learn how to do this all myself.
You have no idea have motivating your post is!! Right now while I am studying Multimedia Design, their making us learn lighting, rigging, and animation and camera skills all at once and I feel extremely demotivated cause it’s hard for me to do all at once. But I love how there is a posición for everything
being a youtuber 2d animator basically does all of that
Thumbnail: *Big Hero 6*
Content: *Over the Moon*
Clickbait ಥ_ಥ
Yeahi got clickbated but i also love that movie
fr? lol its gone now
Hotel:trivago
Me : surprised pikachu face
@Insider Animators actually don't light. Outside the industry we all have fallen into the only category "animators" while animators only animate and in some cases, specifically on TV shows they sometimes do layout as well. But lighters or lighting artists light, layout artists do the layout (cameras), riggers allow everything to move and be deformed, compositing artists make everything look pretty, etc. There are many rolls in animation.
I'm so happy to finally see people pointing this out! People talk about what the "animators" the time when they usually mean something that has nothing to do with animation- as a 3d artist it's like one of my biggest pet peeves when I see vids like this
Makes alot of sense
i think insider is aware of what animator or lighters do, consider the research is shown, bu they just prefer animator, because this segment is for general audience, that doesn't know anything about animation. and many people think animator is, people who create animation
@@barel8741 My point exactly. The general audience can understand perfectly that there are different rolls in animation but if every time there's a sneak peak they call everyone in the industry an animator they will never know, will they?
@@8axis3d yeah I think its just convinient for general, they just simply don't bothers, unless they are interested, it's like I don't know the difference of psychologist and psychiatrist. But in the end vox just want views by making in that way 😂😂
7:13: You said "warm and festive." I heard "worm-infested/worm-infestive."
Same
Preeeettyyyyy
Yaa same
Hehe they didn’t actually say that hehe he.... 😅
Saying "the one ingredient responsible: lighting" is a disservice to material and texture artists.
Lighting didn't give her freckles, give her proper hair, make all those surfaces look as good as they do. It works together with proper materials to deliver the final effect.
True. If one or both of those are bad, you'll notice. Especially when you're going for photorealistic, but even in modern 3D cartoon animation, where the goal usually is to be pseudo-photorealistic, you can tell when either or both of them is/are wrong, at least subconsciously.
Fr I though that?? Why did they say it made her skin more human and then didn’t mention texturing & shading??
@@Bluestroke_ Shading is part of lighting. Texturing tho, definitely should've been mentioned, although they sort of did. There's the more basic part that they mentioned where certain people adjust the reflectivity of the material as well as adjusting the smoothness/roughness. There's also the actual "textures", pictures that are laid on the 3D models for both the shading and the colors. Then there's semi-manually adding actual 3D textures besides the basic roughness, especially fur/hair. And so on...
So glad I wasn't the only person to think that.
They also seem to draw the conclusion that lighting is the only thing that turns shots from looking unrefined to realistic, only briefly describing the use of ray and path tracing; sure lighting is part of it, but *rendering* through an actually rendering engine is what gives this effect, not lighting exclusively...
Thank you! Yes, this is a huge oversimplification. The "bad" shots are not just unlit, they're also not using materials, i.e. "Look dev" mode
the difference between the initial two frames is not just lighting.
The first one is a working render, the second one a final render.
Rendering a frame with all its materials, textures, bump maps and in final resolution takes a good amount of time which is not going to be possible when you want to work on a scene and need to navigate your way around in it. You can't wait 2 to 15 minutes for each frame to render when you want to just reposition your working camera in order to (for instance) check if the finger is clipping through a button.
Working cameras and preliminary renders thus use pretty flat shaded, low resolution renders with little to no detail. Notice how her hair is pretty much solid strands instead of single hairs as seen in the final render.
Furthermore: The renderer is not the only reason modern animated movies or CGI look more realistic but there's also the aspect of shaders. Toy Story came out when pretty much the only "advanced" shader was the phong shader. Now, phong isn't bad, it is just severely limited in what it can achieve in regards to material and texture and most of the time has a fairly plasticy look.
The earlier render didn't looked like a render made with a path tracing or maybe they didn't had any light in the seen except the grey background light.
Or its something like matcap in blender.
@@ravineemkarolijoshinainital I don't know what it was rendered with, that's why I said it's a working render, which it is in any case.^^
It almost looks like a screen cap of the scene as displayed in the editor itself. Alternatively it could be an animatic render.
As I said, there's a lot that tells us, this isn't a render where they just haven't got any lighting. There's no sophisticated shaders, there's no materials and so on.
@@ravineemkarolijoshinainital it’s just a playblast. Screenshot directly from the 3d scene
The first render shouldn't even be considered a render, it's just a preview for the materials, not shaded or anything. It definitely wasn't only the lighting that changed it.
Came here to say that, this video keeps comparing Viewport images with rendered one.....
This video was definitely well intended, but it has been dumbed down and simplified so much that it feels more like misinformation...
@Better Than Pixar just read thru the most thumbs up’d comments. They’ve explained the undumb information
The comparison from the beginning is literally a screenshot from the viewport or a playblast vs the final render
Eddy alright alright nerd !
I think I just learned a lot more by reading the comments than watching this video 😂
Over the moon is the best movie I’ve seen in a while! It has the childhood cartoon feel that I haven’t been able to get in a while.
For me, Coco still the best...
@@the1bookworm173 I don’t think so, not yet. But I will now that you recommended it, thank you😊
@@janglees3372 Honestly Coco is amazing but I just found this to be amazing. We may just have a tie though😆
Oh, i would never compare both of them or with any of Pixar production.. The only think i like in over the moon only the "sad room".. The other not really touch me.. Even the songs and music not touching me at all... But i appreciate your favorite.. The animation are fantastic.. I hope netflix will produce more better story and songs...
@@janglees3372 i do think that we shouldnt compare them but in my own preference i dont really like cocos music so much. But they did do a great job introducing the environment that this movie didnt do
I'll add one more "animators don't light" over here.
And what makes the scene looks real is render shading... not just lighting...
Did they change the title or something?
@@milddiffuse Yes
@@Terjay I really enjoy Videos on anything Animation, but its sad how rarely people actually know what they're talking about. Most of the things said in this Video are processes basically identical to what you would do in live action filmmaking and other things just plain wrong.
@IanHubert thank you
Showing a rendered image vs a screenshot out of the viewport is not just "lighting".
Literally anything exists in a animated movie
Insider: "SHHHH ITS DONE BY ANIMATORS"
I don't want to be that guy, but "animators" don't light anything...
@@thatsinteresting7041 THEY DO ON SMALL PROJECTS LIKE THIS LOOL
Yeah ,its the graphics designers
@@digitalhouse6969 this is not a small project
There are many smaller studios and projects where a "CG artist" has to do many things. Nor am I suggesting animators cannot be talented lighting artists or visa versa. But the title of this video is using the term "animators" quite loosely and in fact, incorrectly when referring to this project and this company. Sony has some of the most talented people in the industry and they all do VERY specialized tasks. Animators don't "light scenes" any more than they would do concept art, or design, or model, or rigging...
@@lukky6648 No, they're called lighting artists
This is completely false, the first image you see is so called "material mode" which is a 3D file where animators can make materials, animations and preview them in realtime , while the second one is called the "render" which Is a photo file which takes a lot of time to render.
0:16 lighting alone doesnt get you from viewport to render.
2:54 pay attention to the dragons "cheek" during the transition. There are a lot of imperfections that come through textures, its not purely the light. Also a whole lot of particles are added and such. Lighting does a ton of improvement, but its not everything.
I loved the lighting in Over the Moon! The only thing that bothered was their defocused backgrounds, they didnt have any bokeh, it just looked like a normal blur, I wonder why they did that, especially with everything else looking so nice
This is most probably due to the use of post production blur which does not carry as much detail as in camera blur. In-3Dsoftware camera blur looks gorgeous and very realistic but it comes at an incredible cost of increased render time.
@@blackspear217 It also risks putting the director in a position where he'd have to re-render shots if he wanted the background to look more detailed. You can blur backgrounds in post, but you can't unblur backgrounds in post, so it's often better to err on the side of using minimal blur in a render just in case.
Correct, in a large production pipeline. Blur is usually added in post production to maintain creative flexibility. Nuke has been doing a great job at faking good blur but whenever I render in camera blur in maya it just looks so much juicer.
I love this movie and I loved this video. When I hopefully one day go to art and animation school, this might help me a bit!
wish you luck! i'm currently final year in bachelor 3D animation
Most prolly not since the video is kinda misleading and all over the place. But you'll definitely learn in school! Good luck!
Just learn for free
I’m actually in ArtSchool and have been studying 3D design over the past semester and lighting really does give an “umph” to the model. You have to play around with the texture and shader to have the perfect effect/scene.
It is not just lighting, but also materials which have to react to the light.
That over the moon shot is just before rendering not lighting. Edit: actually most of the shots without "lighting" just haven't been rendered.
When I watched over the moon with my sisters,all i could think about was that senor chang was in it.
The Title is misleading,"Animators" are just animate the character or objects! This is somthing that should be fixed for general public,there are more jobs in a 3d animated movie other than animators!lighting artists do the lighting as they use during this footage!
Ok boomer
@@joeybaseball7352.? It's actually factual and true tho???
@@roegieescleva7012 Some people can’t accept the truth. Just ignore him 👍
@@joeybaseball7352 stfu
@@joeybaseball7352 ...what?
Please just one more.......
ANIMATORS AREN'T THE ONES to do the lighting
they use ‘lighting artists’ and ‘surfacing artists’ IN the video dude
@@kv5995 old title dude
Why can't they do everything?
@@cupcakemcsparklebutt9051 as an animator, I will say why. Animation is a very long and grueling process. And an animator mainly just puts down the basics, like character movements. We generally don’t do much after that. After we are done with our part, we hand it to others that clean it up and make it look good. In 2d thats usually adding the line work and inbtweens, the the colorists color it. Now sometimes an animator will clean up their animation and color it. But if every animator did that, it would take a lot longer to complete stuff and some people just couldn’t take it. It’s easier to have others make the thing look nice, and it saves time and keeps us sane.
@@ind0266 okay bear with me, help me understand this. Lets say a rigger has been, well rigging, is it like since they were kids they were all like "gee I wanna add digital skeletons to models when I grow up!" Or something? Or they actually know how to do more than rigging but decide to just stick to it to cut the alloted work load?
I mean, this isn’t really fair cause the last one is full render and it’s not REaLlY the lighting only
when the thumnail was big hero six but the content was over the moon, incredibles 2, finding dory, and toy story. but anyways, i learned a lot. 😊
Over the moon was one the most beautiful animation films I’ve ever watched during quarantine haha
Animators are severely underappreciated
Wow. Crazy that people want to know this part of the 3D pipeline. Pretty dope.
Animators are really backbone of movies. They have so much patience but they aren't given that much credit
According to this entire comment section, they are given too much credit
>talking about "lighting animated movies"
>confronting unshaded viewport non rendered scene and rendered scene with metallic, bumpmaps and roughness
Yeah they need to stop yapping misinformation and let the real professionals talk more.
This is awesome! 🥺💕👌 it looks so unique with the cartoonish style yet the shading is so realistic!
Amazing! They do not just add color but study how to create it as well as how it will affect every scene in the animation
There’s a difference between ‘Complicated’ and ‘Complex.’ I would say lighting and rigging are _complex_ tasks.
So we just going to ignore the materials team? This is not a bad video but too dumbed down
I personally didn't care for Over The Moon, but I can't deny the animation is excellent.
I agree, as soon as she left Earth it got kinda weird. It started to remind me of a knock off “Coco”.
@@billiejackson6903 I actually didn't like the story as a whole as Fei Fei rejects her would be step-mother who was nothing but considerate towards her. I honestly don't see any similarities between this and Coco apart from a kid going to another world, but that's been done before either film.
What you shoowed in the beginning wasn't just lighting but more importantly shading
Okay there’s also texturing and making things reflective so they respond to the light as well there much more to this that you are explaining
i love love animation post-production videos THANK YOU
“The Clone Wars” Series (the 3D version) has SPECTACULAR lighting. I would recommend checking out for the animation alone, but the story is wonderful too.
Although the lighting in particular is one of the big things that make the last 3 seasons look far better then the first.
@@milddiffuse
Yeah.
6:12, still one of my favorite environmental scenes ever.
Animation and lighting are two different fields in Animation
Good one! Never noticed that these people do so subtle changes for the viewers.
0:15 I'd say that's not a fair comparison as you're showing a real time renderer used only for animators to see and comparing it to a path traced and composited final image. The viewport render most of the time doesn't take into account the actual lights in the scene, it's just one light that moves parented to the camera
Respect the animation industry, a lot no, a ton of work, hours and detail go into every second of an animated movie! It is no walk in the park
Stop saying animators are responsible for anything that's not just motion. We make things move, not lighting. That's another department.
I love these videos! Can’t wait for another one
idk why this was recommended to me but wow, i did not skip even a second and listened really intently to every word. This was very interesting!!
good girl !
The explanation is much better than my lecturer used to teach in university.
Cool vid. This should be linked to game videos where they are talking about ray tracing and some are only seeing it as a gimmick for fancy reflections.
Bruh It would take 5 months to just render that 1 shot with my pc
Oh eek the other comment was right… 2:30 and 2:50 It sounds like they’re crediting the lighting artist for the work of the surfacing artist. The reason the skin looked opaque before was that’s simply how it looks in the program before you press the render button. The surfacing artist determines how it will look when that button is pressed. However, if you don’t add some source of light to the scene (regardless of color or mood), it will render black. The lighting artist of course can control where light hits, the color of the light, and where there is shadow. So adding a warm light coming in from a window or behind the characters so we see them from the shadow side, etc.
Maybe if you wanted to show what the lighting artist does compared to the surfacing artist you could have rendered the surfacing artist’s work, first, with a simple point light or sky light (just double click on a button) and then show a comparison of how that rendering would change with the input of a lighting artist.
(You could also render the scene without the surfacing artist’s work but with the scene lit up by the lighting artist, etc. if you wanted to show what impact the surfacing artist has on the final image)
Fantastic video! I love these animation videos so so much
I’m not a professional by any means, and I’m a one man team, but when I am dealing with raytracing I am constantly going back and forth and visually tweaking things until it feels just right, sometimes it can take a couple back-and-fourths to make the scene I imagined
I already watched it and it was amayzing
This is great, I used to do lighting for games a long time ago.
ima add it again too. lighting is done by lighting artists and animators animate. texture artists do textures and even then sometimes you cant see the true look until the final render. An example on blender sometimes aka eevee and cycles (: I love the vid but there’s a difference
One of the best movies I've ever seen
Yes I have watched the moon movie
It was awesome
Just going to add that Raw Renders/Lighting Passes by lighters will usually be further polished by the nyctophile department, aka Compers. When placed side by side, there is a very noticable difference.
The realistic lighting is achieved by the process of ray tracing where computer simulates millions of light rays falling over an object from a light source and realistic skin achieved using subsulrface scattering which basically tells us how many rays should penetrate the surface vs how many should reflect back from surface. Moreover, different types of map is used for materializing a surface like normal, occlusion , specularity, displacement, color and roughness.
What I noticed is a change in thumbnail, the present one is better, it summerised the whole video
This is how Ubisoft makes games, but backwards
The Moon is the best Swiss cheese you'll ever have
Lol ikr
Moon is made of rock not Swiss cheese
@【cheese omelette】 HOL UP
Nice Mother 3 profile pic :)
That Thumbnail’s Terrifying
Why you compare viewport to final render imao, and talk like a scientis that know anything🤣
Lool ikr 😂🤣🤣 shows the viewport and says ya this is before adding the light
Actually in her house no powercut, that's why she don't know no light Means darkness..
She is right. In the viewport you don't process light sources. Wtf are you all talking abaout
@@highost7245 viewport is for work , modelling, adding light source, animate,etc. Comparing viewport and final render on a lighting context is wrong. Rendering is final step after you done anything in viewport.
@@fitmyface6123 And rendering is based in what? Light. Rendering is basically the adding of light. The only difference between the view port and the final render is the path-traced light processing. If you remove the light sources, your render become 100% black. Why? Because the only thing that is processed during the render is the light and its effects on the surface of the models.
So what you are saying is Jimmy Neutron looked like garbage because they skipped the whole lighting part of post?
No the designs were ugly as well lol
Probably
I loved it! I'm about to get my degree in 3D animation and visual Fx and I'm looking to do an internship in something related to light in movies or short movies.
Go to Canada, Australia, New Zealand or London, there’s loads of movie work in those places.
Without good layout, lighting cannot pack enough punch.
thats some straight human evolution
Was I the only one that thought she said "The production manager, Celine Deon"
Awesome video, but the difference in the "over the moon" example is not the lighting (not in particular at leas) You are looking at a viewport preview. It uses simple colors and artificial lighting to give a 3D look for the animator. If you added lighting to this, you wouldn't see a change, as this mode doesn't even display light interaction. It would have been better to show the scene rendered, but unlit for a proper comparison. You compared two completely independent things.
It‘s complicated because light = color and every Image has colors everywhere, the looks depends on the lighting. A bit could change the whole Image.
The first shot ain't even rendered.....
none of the examples were
@@ian.jo_ 0:10 is a rendered shot
@@TECH3_ He's referring to the fact that in the Video they're comparing the final rendered image to a picture of the working environment for the animators. Which literally doesn't try to look good, but mainly is supposed to look clear to make it easier to use for animators.
@@milddiffuse yeah i know i do some animation as a hobby , its just a bit too over simplified , comparing scenes with metcaps vs shots complete with hair , shaders and lighting its not just having light and having no light ( or just random sun light or something like that ) atleast the first shot
@@TECH3_ Oh shit, I didn't see you were the same guy who started the thread, I just tried to explain your own comment to you. lel
Well anyway, I do enjoy these types of Videos. But mostly because they are the best we've got. It really bugs me how little many of these channels seem to actually know about Animation.
Wow what a great video! Thanks Insider
"Lighting team" "lighting artists" shes said animators once! And there's so many comments about one time she said animators.. even the title doesn't say anything about animators. She constantly called them by their title and actually did mention surface artists, did tall even watch it?
This is lots of work indeed
0:12 This is completely wrong, while lighting is a big improvement it's by no means the one ingredient responsible. None of the textures are applied in the first image and they are applied in the second image. The textures alone give a massive boost to the image quality. As much if not more than the lighting.
Almost made me cringe there with Ray Tracing. I yelled Path Tracing so hard. LOL. Good you clarified yourself.
I recommend everyone to watch a Makoto Shinkai film (start with Your Name on Netflix). You’ll witness animation in its purest form.
This was amazing, thank you!
4:21 nice crossover
0:14 shading to be exact
Do Fei Fei with Gobi next pls??
Don't worry you're not alone if you're not an Artist
Are you sure about the term "surfacing"? I've never ever heard that term in 3D, "textures", "shaders" and "materials" I've heard lots with regards to what you were trying to explain
Surfacing is a correct term for define all that, the texturas, shaders and materials have a point, create a correct surface
@@teamem2studio94 I've watched dozens of vfx artists and 3d experts in Maya, C4D, UE4, Blender and not once have I heard that term. Literally hundreds of hours worth of teaching materials
@Omar Akhtar I think that animation studios call it surfacing whilst vfx studios call it shading, but it means the same thing
@@omarakhtar3075 I work in the industry and surfacing is a term that is used. There are a lot of terms. Sometimes when separated into steps you have it split as texture/lookdev or texture/shading. Or sometimes look development is a term used as a catch-all. Same with surfacing.
Thank you for a highly educative video
Future computer animated films would use game engines like Unity & Unreal Engine for better lighting, after importing character models from 3D computer animation softwares like Maya & Blender & before rendering.
Light passes help light artists to edit after final render sence
📸 Thank You!
Nice article. And great source...
That crack face 0:17
I think the thing that people miss that lighting does is problem solve literally all the things that come in broken from upstream, I stg I do that more than actual lighting xD
In the before and after they also added textures... kind of a huge oversight/ pretty clickbaity
Bruh the first one looks like it was from ratatoing and then the lighting made it look like ratatoulie 😅
What about Compositing Artist.
A Compositing Artist also have to make lighting changes according to the scene. And its the compositing artist who changes thr color of lighting and keeping the lighting and coloring consistency throughout.
DPRK animation for the win
And there are people saying digital art isn't real art
Looking for Ray Mak...