Introduction to Cameras, Lighting, and Rendering

  1. Video Screening
  2. Demo
  3. Technical Readings for 3D Rendering
  4. For your Bookshelf
  5. Terminology
    • Lighting setups
      • 3 point lighting (key, fill, rim)
      • Light types: Area, Spot, Directional or Sun, Point, Volumetric
      • Geometry-based lighting using Emission shader
      • Geometry-based lighting using Principled Volumetric shader
      • Staging lights: Light box with side and top lights, curved color background and floor
      • Image based lighting (IBL) using HDR images
      • Shadows: The larger the light source, the softer the shadows
      • Create edge bevels to capture highlights on hard surfaces
    • Camera
      • Perspective vs Orthographic
      • Sensor size
      • Depth of field using aperture F-Stop: Shallow depth of field is created with lower settings. (In Blender, very low settings may be needed such as 0.1)
      • Blades add flat sides to the Bokeh
      • You can create custom Bokeh shapes
      • Safe area
      • Composition guides for layouts (golden ratio, golden triangle, thirds, etc.)
    • Render quality in Cycles
      • To reduce render times, keep material shaders simple. Use principled shader if working with photo-real renders.
      • 500 samples are usually needed to reduce noise.
      • Use advanced denoising workflow in the compositor
      • If using motion blur or depth of field, sample sizes must increase dramatically.
      • You can get away with 120 samples if you use denoising in the Compositor
    • Render quality in EEVEE
      • EEVEE Lighting
      • Enable render settings including: Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, and Screen Space Reflections
      • Shadows: Increase the shadow map to 4K