Solved Lighting characters to use in Renpy

[Handyff]

Hi, absolute beginner here.

I am making a visual novel in renpy and wanted to take the half body shots of characters so I can show those in front of some backgrounds instead of making new scenes each time.

But Lighting!
I been trying to fix it myself, tutorials, plugins. Etc. But the portraits come out washed, or too dark or flatly lit.
Shadows are either not there or everywhere.

if I fix the light on face, the clothes are messed up and vicer versa.

What would be your lighting setup for a character cutout you wanted to "pop out" from the background while still having shadow on face and details on clothes.

 

[hazmhox]

If you're doing renpy, unless you are in a real enviro lighting process/shot, I'd suggest using Studio Maestro to create fully transparent shots of the characters to overlay on top of your background. Both shot independently.

If you're in a full enviro shot (ie: you want to capture both the scene and the characters at once)... you might be going to harsh on the settings.
First build your ambiant light (or use baked environments) and ensure it's not too heavy.
Then light your characters with close light sources to build your details and your shadows.

 

[Handyff]

If you're doing renpy, unless you are in a real enviro lighting process/shot, I'd suggest using Studio Maestro to create fully transparent shots of the characters to overlay on top of your background. Both shot independently.

If you're in a full enviro shot (ie: you want to capture both the scene and the characters at once)... you might be going to harsh on the settings.
First build your ambiant light (or use baked environments) and ensure it's not too heavy.
Then light your characters with close light sources to build your details and your shadows.

I was doing it with every environment light set to zero and just with 3 lights.
Btw love your work.

 

[hazmhox]

Thanks

You can do that! (with light at zero), just ensure you have a base lighting for the enviro which will be wider. And your specific lighting for the characters on top.
If you do this for offline (ie renpy), put everything to "force pixel" and you can add as much lights as you need : )

I'll try to show you an example in a moment.

 

[Handyff]

Thanks

You can do that! (with light at zero), just ensure you have a base lighting for the enviro which will be wider. And your specific lighting for the characters on top.
If you do this for offline (ie renpy), put everything to "force pixel" and you can add as much lights as you need : )

I'll try to show you an example in a moment.

Honestly I might just use the Studio Maestro for portraits. It works flawlessly, thanks.

However I do need some characters-in-environment scenes, which I need to light myself. You said above that I should use the environment lights plus my own closely placed lights to make shadows and details.

I would like a Maestro like plugin for that too but that wouldn't exist, right ?

 

[hazmhox]

I'm using maestro for both situations, here's an example, shots are in order based on the following bullet points :

• Lighting enviro, 4 lights, overall feeling, Adding characters with base pose
• Adding more "hero lights" ( 2 in this case ), finding a LUT I like for the tone of the scene
• Reframing a bit the shot to be able to work, tuning lights and shadows
• Finding the final framing
• Adjusting final framing and tweaking skins ( spec and subsurface ) to fit the light better. Optional: adding super nice writing as a bubble "Hey girl wanna take a shower?"

Obviously, quick and dirty, you'd probably get better results with more than 10 mins spent on this

The downside of Maestro when you have enviro lights is that is grabs all the lights, so you CAN'T use the rig features anymore or you will break the whole scene lighting.
This might be an interesting feature to add if you name lights a specific way to "bind them" in a specific enviro lighting parent instead of the characters.

But all and all, scenes with multiple characters requires very artistically driven lights, and rotating the rig starts to get less and less useful.

The next update is bringing a big panel with all lights available to tweak individually: