Master the essentials of lighting and look development
Originally posted on 9 January 2021. Scroll down for news of Vol. 2 in this series of workshops.
The Gnomon Workshop has released Lighting & Look Dev Essentials Vol. 1: Lighting Theory, a guide to the fundamentals of lighting a 3D scene.
The five-hour workshop, recorded by Digital Domain CG supervisor Adrien Vallecilla, is the first of a new series of tutorials on lighting and look development for visual effects and general CG work.
A complete guide to the fundamentals of lighting a 3D scene for rendering
In the video training, Vallecilla covers the absolute essentials of lighting a 3D scene, beginning with the differences between real-world lighting and CG.
He goes on to explain how to set up realistic lighting for a scene, how to recreate natural lighting phenomena digitally, and how to optimise lighting and rendering settings.
The videos were recorded using Maya and Redshift, but the theory can be applied to any 3D software: Vallecilla explains the key differences between rendering with GPU engines like Redshift and CPU renderers.
The training concludes by exploring how to composite all of the lighting passes rendered from Redshift in Nuke to create a final image.
As well as the videos themselves, viewers can download the Maya scene file, HDR image and Cryptomatte file used in the workshop.
Updated 15 March 2021: The Gnomon Workshop has released the second instalment in Adrien Vallecilla’s series of tutorials: Lighting & Look Dev Essentials Vol 2: Shading & Texturing.
The latest workshop, which includes over four and a half hours of video training, explores how to add realism to 3D scenes by creating textures and shaders that mimic real-world materials.
Vallecilla sets out his own look development strategies for shading vehicles and human characters, before moving on to look in detail at how to texture the still life scene created in Volume 1.
About the artist
Adrien Vallecilla is CG supervisor at Digital Domain, where he has worked on movies including Avengers: Infinity War, Terminator: Dark Fate and Spider-Man: Homecoming.
He has worked in the VFX industry for over five years, at studios including Scanline VFX and MPC, and has recorded two further tutorials on lighting and rendering in Maya for The Gnomon Workshop.
Pricing and availability
Both Lighting & Look Dev Essentials tutorials are available via an online subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, providing access to over 300 tutorials. Subscriptions cost $49/month or $490/year.
Read more about Lighting & Look Dev Essentials Vol 1: Lighting Theory
Read more about Lighting & Look Dev Essentials Vol 2: Shading & Texturing
Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon.