Floodlighting with Arnold Quad light

- [Instructor] The simplest form of studio lighting is flood lighting, with just a couple of big, soft lights to provide an even illumination. We've currently got the scene set up for an HDR image as a background environment. Let's switch back over to our studio setup. Before we do that, I'll just mention in passing that I've made a few minor adjustments to the materials. I've increased the base weight on the propellers, and I've increased the base color map values for the enclosure. I've also reduced the brightness of the cyclorama object so that the drone is brighter than its background. Let's go into the Rendering menu, to Environment, and turn off our environment map. Just disable Use Map. And then we get our background color. Let's switch this back to black, so we don't get any extraneous light in our studio. Click on the color swatch, and set the value back down to zero, click OK. Also, in our Physical Camera Exposure Control settings, we want some neutral settings for a studio setup. Arnold default exposure value is six, so let's set that to value of six. And also, set our white balance back to D65. Choose Illuminant. And from the pull-down list, switch it back to Daylight, 6500 kelvin. Close Environment and Effects. Our cyclorama object is hidden, so let's bring that back. Go to the Layer Explorer, and re-enable visibility for the backdrop layer. Then we can hide that Layer Explorer once again. Now we've got some pretty good rendering here in Nitrous, in the viewports. However, that is going to slow down our processes, so we're going to just switch this back over to wireframe. Give focus to the camera view, and press F3. Click in the perspective view, and also press F3 to switch those back to wireframe. Now we're ready to create an Arnold area light. Go to the Create panel, to Lights. From the pull-down list, choose Arnold, and click the button labeled Arnold Light. In the Create panel, you should see some default parameters. In the Shape section, we just want to make sure that the type is Quad. Go over to the top view, and click to the left of the camera. Hold down the mouse, and drag out to create that light's target. And release the mouse. Then we can rename the object. Let's call it flood01, and press Enter. Then we can right-click to exit creation, and we can position that light. Grab the Move tool. The light's already selected. Over in the left view, we can right-click, so we don't lose that selection. Move that light upward. I actually know basically where I want it to be, so I'm going to plug those values in to the transform typing area down here. I'll set the X value to -70 centimeters. Press Tab, set Y to -55. Press Tab, and set Z to 125 centimeters. I can also move this target up a little bit so that it's not on the ground. And let's see what we have so far. We'll do an ActiveShade rendering. I have that set up to render the physical camera view. And with default parameters, it looks pretty dark. So let's change that up. Select the light. Go over to the Modify panel, and we've got the Color/Intensity roll-out. Down at the bottom there, we want to disable Normalize Energy. What this does is it maintains the amount of light coming out, regardless of the size of the light. We do want the light's illumination to be affected by the area light's actual area. So let's disable Normalize Energy, and we'll need to reduce the exposure or the brightness of that light accordingly. Let's bring the exposure down to three, keeping in mind that each integer of exposure will increase the amount of light by a factor of two. We've reduced the exposure value by five f-stops, which means we've reduced the amount of light by two to the fifth power, or 32 times. Okay, this is a pretty good start. In the following movie, we'll fine-tune our flood lighting setup.