Israel Yang

wasn't it also Conrad Hall who noticed the rain drop shadows on the character's face and decided to keep it in "In Cold Blood".

really great photography

try posting here http://forums.cgsociety.org/ or http://www.vfxtalk.com/forum/

i haven't seen the trailer. but maybe one of the reasons is that they can perfect or manipulate everything single shot down to the exact vision of the filmmakers, obsolutely every detail! Maybe what's so great about this movie is not that it's a 3d movie done to look like live action, but a live action done in 3d.

Thank you John Holland. I used to think the term 'crosslight' actually is 2 lights coming from both sides of the subject, hence the word cross. Thanks again for your clarification.

Hi I hear about cross light all the time, and the only instances I see it used is as back light, so I was wondering if crosslight is just one of the implementation methods for back lighting. If not, what's cross light best for. Thank you very much.

Thank you for your generous sharing, I haven't seen the movie but now I will when I come by it in the future.

In John Alton's Painting with Light he spends a great deal of words on lighting for glamorizing an actor/actress, and the solution is much like what David Mullen has described here. One can easily understand the motivation of frontal lights, but I also think sometimes it can lead to the camera flash effect (especially when the background light is coming from a very different angle of the frontal key light), which I personally try to avoid (but as a 3d lighter I don't have to deal with aging actresses). So do you think if it's completely up to you, ie. without the pressuring from the producer or the actress agents, would you light differently for the story telling purposes and modeling?

Hi Steve The current Maya package comes with the regular Maya software renderer, and a high end renderer called Mental Ray. Maya comes with the following light fixtures: -Directional light (no decay, to simulate a sun light, a one-source light that comes from infinite far) -Spot light -point light (essentially a light bulb, light is omni) -area light (a rectangular light, used to simulate a light coming in the window or a reflector or other creative uses.) -ambient light (a light that does not exist in the real world, in the 3d space it just floods the whole scene without adding any modeling(which is what a light is for). ) *and all the above lights except for directional light can have a real world decay rate which is inverse square. A) if you use these lights and render with Maya software renderer, most likely you will get images that look like your every day ugly 3d renders that look nothing like what's in the real world (rendering will be very fast though). It is an acquired skill for a 3d lighter to use these lights and the Maya sw renderer to make a scene look real with lots of tricks. This skill is not easily learned and is a requirement for today's 3d lighters. B ) however, with these lights setup and correctly balanced, you can use the Mental Ray renderer and with the aid of Global Illumination and Final Gather to simulate real world lighting phenomenon, such as the bouncing of light, caustics... And with MR, you can create a geometry of any shape and turn is into a light source, and thus have any real world light fixtures you need. But rendering in MR with a real world physics and accuracy is very computational expensive, it gets easily too time consuming if you are a one-man-studio and can not afford a render farm and/or lack the experience to optimize and fine tune the render settings as much as possible. that's why nowadays many 3d productions are still solely taking the A) route, though with the technology it is changing. which every route you choose to take, you will have to spend time to 1) set up the lights as you would in the real world and 2) A)- create more lights to fake bouncing lights, colour bleed, caustics, natural ambiance... B )- properly adjust all MR settings and be ready for long render time and step 2 will likely cost you more time than step 1. Real world DPs have realism for free, and it is not so in the 3d world. so my suggestion for you is that, if you want to use a 3d package for pre-vis purpose, remember it's 'pre-vis', and don't spend too much time trying to make it mimic the practical lights because it will really take a lot of time and experience and skills. Use it for reference. And a few things you can likely directly translate to your physical set (if you use the basic lights in Maya and do nothing else to make it look realistic(real world like) and render with the Maya software renderer): -light angle and position -barn door effect, gobo... -colour of light -as for the intensity of the light, just eye it, before it gets too complicated. -you will get an accurate sense of the shadow angle(yup, angle is the only property that I think can be directly translated) -DOF -movement of lights (all properties of lights can be animated )