David Head Lighting Practice

In an effort to get more practice with lighting I started a new personal project. For this project I worked in both Arnold and Redshift using Maya. Most of my previous experience has been in using V-Ray, so I was interest in learning other renderers. While overall there is a lot of overlap in how all of these renders practically function, from an artist point of view, there were differences in terminology that I had to understand. The studio I am working at currently renders mostly with Redshift, which I have little experience with, so I was really interested in learn that better. I was working from a tutorial by Arvid Schneider. Using a downloaded model of the David head and a portrait photography lighting guide sheet I created a bunch of different lighting looks. The idea was to see how many unique lighting moods could be created.

The tutorial takes you through the basic parameters for the lights and standard render setting in Arnold. From there you experiment with lighting setups with the idea of creating different dramatic effects. In visual effects the lighting setup is often predetermined by the practical set lights. We also often use HDRIs at the studio which also strictly limits your artistic choices. It was nice to be able to play around with creating lighting moods instead of having to work in the limits imposed by production.

I stuck mostly to monochromatic lighting. This really allow me focus on value instead of getting distracted by hue. This project overall took me about week of working on in the evenings. It was simple and rewarding.