Lighting Art Showcase

For my entry I will be showcasing my favourite lighting projects from the past year!  All of the entry's were submitted as projects in my Art Of Lighting module at Staffordshire University.

I will be submitting:

Character Lighting Projects

Polar Sci-Fi Facility Relight

McLaren Senna Lighting and Cinematic

Character Lighting Projects, in this project I was focused on lighting characters and creating different moods and tones in the artwork by using lighting, composition and camera settings. Done in UE5 using the Paragon characters which are free on the Epic Marketplace.

Mood : Authority, Dangerous

Keylight placed above the character to create some harsher shadows, tinted a very slight cold blue temperature to communicate authority. Bounce light to create more natural looking fill, with one reflector positioned to only bounce red light onto one half of the face to create a contrasting split light with the white bounce on the right. The red communicates danger and the contrast between the two furthers this feeling

Characters head is placed in the top right of the screen as the focal point using the rule of thirds. I use this rule throughout all of my character renders. 

Medium Close-Up, 16:9 Digital Film, f 200, 3.6 Aperture

Mood : Calm, Confident

Camera is placed at eye level with the character to show confidence as she looks straight ahead at whatever's behind the camera. The key light is placed above the characters head in a butterfly lighting setup tinted a cold blue to show confidence and that the character is calm. A white rim light makes the character pop more, kept white as I wanted the shot to feel more realistic with less saturated colours.

Medium Close-up, 16:9 Digital Film, f 105, 2.8 Aperture, Butterfly Lighting

Mood : "last stand", Imminent Danger

Rembrandt lighting set up to cast some darker and harsher shadows for a more dramatic effect. The red bounce light does three things. It provides the eye highlights, softens and fills out the shadows with a red tint, and adds a mellow red fill. The light is tinted red to communicate danger. The camera shot is framed so that both the hand and face are in the focal point of the rule of thirds, drawing attention to the hand shows that she's about to block an attack.

Quarter Face Shot, 16:9 Digital Film, f 200, 2.8 Aperture, Rembrandt Lighting

Polar Sci-Fi Facility relight

My reference and inspiration for this scenes lighting came from stranger things. I wanted to nail that upside down feel. I did this by using the same blue and red colour theme as the upside down in stranger things. I wanted to focus on realism in these renders whilst keeping it interesting and eye catching, this was enabled by the fluorescent lights which allowed me to use more vibrant colours without destroying the realism. I also made sure to keep the colours slightly desaturated to keep it believable.

Composition wise I made sure to abide by the rule of thirds in 3/4 of the renders, keeping the focal point(s) of my image in one of the cross sections of the lines. All except for one where I wanted to create an ominous mood, so I placed the camera low and kept the shot symmetrical, relying on leading lines and colour to guide the eye.

I also wanted to keep the scene somewhat optimised, as good practice for when lighting games. To practice this I kept the attenuation radiuses as large as they needed to be in order to fulfil their job, and made sure that lights that were casting shadows NEEDED to be casting them. This is demonstrated in the light mixer.

References

Vehicle lighting and cinematic

This was focused more on learning sequencer and camera animation as well as starting to play around with DaVinci Resolve.