BLENDER

Blender Studio art director Andy Goralczyk explains the lighting and rendering process for this issue’s cover artwork

Ellie is the main character from our current film project Sprit Fright. We set out to depict her first encounter with a Sprite, the film’s cute forest creatures. This serves two purposes: 1) we create a ‘personality pose’ to inform the character design and 2) we help fine-tune the final look and feel of the film.

The result is a true team effort among many artists at our studio. The initial idea came from director Matthew Luhn, who worked with storyboard artist Dirk van Dulmen on a couple of concepts for the overall layout. These were refined by co-director Hjalti Hjalmarsson. In the meantime production designer Ricky Nierva supervised sculpting wizard Julien Kaspar to create a unified look for the character sculpts.

Pablo Fournier, character animator at our studio, posed Ellie and the Sprite according to the concept. Kaspar carried out pose refinements using Blender’s sculpting tools following paint-over suggestions from concept artist Vivien Lulkowski. Shading artist Simon Thommes created some impressive procedural materials for all objects, and finally it was my job to give the image a clear and appealing lighting scheme.

Being at the end of such a production pipeline puts a lot of responsibility in the hands of the lighting artist. Good lighting helps make all the previous steps shine while maintaining clarity and storytelling. In this tutorial we learn how to work with lights in Blender’s Cycles render engine to illuminate a typical character-centric shot in one of our films.

01  LIGHT PATH SETTINGS

Before we start any render, let’s first adjust the Cycles settings for an optimal, relatively speedy render. We don’t need a high degree of fidelity in the bounce light since we’re going to ‘cheat’ a lot. In the Light Paths tab under Max Bounces, set the total to 3 and Transparency to 32. In the Clamping subcategory, leave Direct Light at 0.00 and ensure that Indirect Light is at 10.00. Disable Refractive and Reflective Caustics and set Filter Glossy to 1.00.

02  SAMPLING AND DENOISING PARAMETERS

In the Sampling tab, set Render to 200 and cap Viewport at 100. Check Denoising for Render and Viewport and set them both to OpenImageDenoise. We are going to take advantage of Blender’s real-time denoising capabilities to get a clearer image while we’re adjusting the lighting. Set Start Sample to one (this parameter sets the minimum samples after which denoising kicks in). Lastly, make sure that the Filmic View Transform is enabled under the Colour Management tab.