New lighting looks "dirty".

[hollow]

Y'know? It's especially pronounced on skin, which of course is the thing we see more than anything else here. :D On the upside, it looks more real in some ways.

The lighting scheme I've gotten used to at this site is something I used to think of as "yellow-blue" or maybe "warm-cold". The classic examples are the images of Morgan and Hex Kitten I see on the left as I compose this. For a bigger one, check the pinup of Crypt Kicker posing next to a vase. It's probably a version of three-point lighting, with key and fill lights being standard warm white (like an incandescent bulb), and the back light being blue (like a fluorescent bulb). And the back light moves to the side a lot, making more of the figure appear blue or pink. This lighting appears in nearly every page of comics on the site (including BattleChix). I see it as "Old Reliable" - illuminates everything that needs illuminating, at the expense of sameness. You get the sense that there's these three light sources following everyone around, making every environment look the same.

The new lighting is hard for me to recognize without more examples, but as best I can tell, it's HDR. For starters, it's more diffuse. Jeff provided a great example in the pinups gallery - two shots of She-Bulk, same pose, different lighting. In the HDR scheme (I'll call it that even though I'm not sure that's what it is), the shadows are barely there; light seems to be spreading to those areas from elsewhere, and also seems to be giving the whole figure a more blurred appearance. Again, I can't be sure, since he may have changed the positions of the lights as well. (I have this suspicion he did because Bulk's left eye socket has more shadow. It looks like the light in the HDR shot was moved further to her right, and upward slightly, from the warm-cold key light.)

In general, I get a sense of sunlight streaming in through a window, or a light source as big as a wall, in the HDR light, whereas with the warm-cold light, I get the sense of two light bulbs mounted on poles a few yards away from the figure. It's more directed, and arguably more artificial. It also feels like the HDR shot is lacking a key light to make those crisp shadows and highlights. It's nothing but a single fill light, maybe.

The main trouble I see with the HDR lighting, though, is the rough effect it's giving to smooth skin. She-Bulk's neck looks noticeably worse in the HDR shot. In the latest cover of Amber, her skin is covered in "dirty" patches where the shadows would normally be. Morgan's latest BotM has her looking pretty good in the red suit or the poses with Lilyth in the warm-cold scheme, but take off the suit, and yikes! What happened to her poor neck on page 5??

I've also noticed all that diffuse light is putting less of them in shadow, making them look fatter than they really are. Again, check out those two shots of She-Bulk; don't you think she looks thinner under the old lighting?

Reading another article on lighting also reminded me of the importance of context. There are shots of nothing but the woman on a black background, as if in a dark studio, and the warm-cold scheme looks really good, like it belongs there. Not so much when they're on the street in daylight, though. There, the diffuse HDR light would probably fit (simulating the sky), along with a brighter light source to represent the sun.

But the recent places I've seen the diffuse HDR light are places it doesn't seem to fit. Amber's mansion is indoors, so I'd expect it from the windows, but from above eye level, not below. The Kicker/Broad/Bulk cover looks like Rockefeller Center, so I'd expect either diffuse from the sky in daytime, or from the ice at night, but with lots of key lights from above; not just one diffuse source from the left at ground height. Morgan's BotM pages 4 and 5 seem to make the most sense - but there's that "dirty" effect again. Amazotica's BotM is probably the best application I've seen - fits the daylight setting, and there's no "dirt".

Jeff: How easy is it for you to play around with the lighting now? How long does a single image render take? If it takes longer than, say, ten minutes to do a test, I can imagine how shackled you might feel. I'd love to see how many tests were done for the Kicker/Broad/Bulk cover, for instance (yet another illustration of the "dirty" effect), but I'm guessing there weren't many. Fill lights are often supposed to be numerous; how many can you put in before the hardware really complains?

Is this new lighting really HDR, or is it just a diffuse fill, or is it both? Maybe it just doesn't play well with skin? Or is it calculating the bloom effect incorrectly? It's like the brightness was turned down to compensate, or perhaps it's bleeding the dark as well as the light - though that still doesn't explain the rough appearance of the skin. What was the difference between the Amazotica shots and the subsequent ones?

[Jeff]

Yes, the newer lighting is HDR, with Ambient Occulsion. I recently picked up Poser 7, the latest in the Poser series, and it's got some improvements in the render engine over the previous incarnation. It's still not as good as the Carrara engine, but it's faster to set up renders. Some of the bigger hair models present a challenge, as it's trying to do softened shadows through a bunch of transparencies, which takes forever.

I also picked up Victoria 4, the newest 3D female, and am still collecting textures, hairstyles and outfits before I start using her in renders. She's good, but I don't see her replacing many of the standard character models I've been using lately.

Sometimes, the HDR lighting can make recesses, such as the eye sockets look a little funny. It can give a bit of a cross-eyed look if you're not careful. It's not perfect yet, but they're moving in that direction with the software advances.

[Jeff]

Oh yeah, some of the renders take around ten minutes - some, done in Carrara with ambient occulsion on a big hairstyle can take 4 to 6 hours.
:shock: