Lighting the scene

- The first thing I like to do, when setting up any kind of lighting, is to establish where the camera's going to be, first. And then once we do that, we can really understand how much lighting we're going to need. So. Let's go ahead and press shift + a, and let's create a camera, right here. And there it is. Now I'm just going to drag it forward here. And I'm going to hit the n-key, and let's take away some of the rotation here. So I'm just going to click and drag in here, and then type 0, and hit enter. And that will point the camera straight down. Now I'm going to press rx90, and bring it back up, so it's pointing towards the character. I can also hit s, and scale it down a bit, so it isn't quite so big in the view here. Now, what let's do is, view the scene through the camera. We can do that by hitting the 0 key on the number pad, right here. And then if we want to move the view around, or move the camera as we're looking through the camera, we can come over here and choose lock camera to view, and now we can just do our normal movement, with our views, just like we would in the 3D view, and just move the camera around until we get it about the way we like it. I'm going to turn off the helmet for just a minute, so I can see where she's looking. And let's see if I can maybe, I kind of want to... Have it be something kind of like this. Yeah. Let's try this for now. At least that's a pretty good place to begin. I'll turn off the lock key camera view, and then tumble around, and now here we go. So, this is our camera placement now. Let's then go ahead and turn on our textures here. There we go. And here, let's hit 0 again, and we can see what it looks like now. Okay. This hand may not be quite in the right position, but we can work on that, now that we have our camera in place. But, what let's do now, is bring in a background image. Now, just like there are HDMI images here in the look dev, we can bring in an HDMI image here, in the render view as well. And what I've done is, I've actually gone out to the NASA website, and downloaded a couple of star fields. So let's try one in here. I'm going to go to the world tab, right here. And under surface, I'm going to click use nodes, and then under the color, I'm going to click here, and I'm going to choose an environment texture. And that's what we want to bring in. Now, the reason it's pink, of course, is because there is no texture in here yet. So, let's click open, and if we go to the textures folder, you'll see some star map images in here, and we've got a 4K image, and 8K, and a 16K. I'm going to go with the 8K image, and see how that works. I'll click open. And there we go. Now we've got a star field in here, I'll hit that 0 key again. And that looks pretty good, actually. Now it isn't giving us much light on our subject, the way the look dev would do, mainly because it's mostly a black image, but we can go ahead and add other light to it, to compliment it. So, let's go over here, and I will create a new light. I'll press shift + a, and let's go to light, and I'm going to create a sunlight. And here we go. So, currently the sunlight is pointing straight down, and for a sunlight, it doesn't matter where you put it. It will always point straight down, no matter where it is. All that matters is the rotation. So, I'm just going to go to the side view here, and hit r, and rotate it back some, like that. And then, maybe, I will press r + z, and rotate it in the z-axis, just to turn it, just a little bit, like that. No. I don't think I want it like that. Let me hit 0. Yeah. Let' me do r + z again, and let me go this way with it. Like this. Something like that. Okay. So that's pretty bright. Let's come over here, and under the object data tab here, let's take the strength down from 10, let's try 5. Let's try that. Okay. Maybe 3. Yeah. Something like that. Now let's add a little bit of fill light. This is a good key light. In fact, let's come over here to the sun here, I've got it in the environment, and what we should probably do is create a whole new scene collection. Let's call it "lights". And let's grab that sunlight, and move it in to here. Then I'll change the name, and I'll call it "key light". There we go. Now, let's create a fill light, coming from over here, from the other side. So, I'll press shift + a, and let's create an area light, right here. Okay. So let's move that up. And let's move this into place. I'm going to move it over here into the side, kind of like this. And then I will go to the front view and hit r, and rotate it toward the character, and then the 7 key, and rotate it toward the character there, like that. So we have it pointing at the character. All right. So that's also too bright. So let's bring this power down from 10 watts, let's try 2. How's that? The problem I'm having here, is that even though we've got the lights coming from above, we don't see any shadows under the nose. And we need to be able to see that. To do that, let's come down here, and let's spin down the shadows section, and let's turn on contact shadows. Do that. And let's also do the same thing for the key light. Let me turn on contact shadows here, as well. That helps. So, now we've got those shadows, happening underneath the nose there. I think I may turn the sunlight a bit more like this. Let's try this. Now go back and I'll hit 0. Well, it's a little bit too much. Let me hit 0, and then I'm going to press r + x, and rotate it down a bit. You can see that shadow over the eye growing as we turn that down, and I just wanted to reduce that, just a bit. Kind of like that. And it seems a little too hot, still. So let's go back up, this is the sun, maybe we can take the strength to 2, and for the area light, let's change that to fill. Okay. So we have these now, these particular lights in. I also want to be able to create a turntable animation, and if we do that, the camera will spin around here in the back. So I think I better create an area light back there, too. A back light. So with this area light selected, I'm just going to press shift + d, and duplicate it. Bring it back here. Just press r, and spin that around here. I probably don't need it quite so bright, so let me turn it down to 1, here, like that. There we go. So we just have a little bit of light happening on the back there, as well. Okay. So now, let's go back to our camera view, I'll hit the 0 key, and hit alt + a to deselect the light. And so that's generally the pose, and the camera position. That's not looking too bad. Let's enable the helmet, and let's take a look at this. Yeah. So I think that will work okay. The next thing we should do, now that we have all this set up, is to actually create the material for the helmet glass, and the eyes, so they are transparent and reflective. So we'll do that next.