I’m happy to announce my first Advanced Training: Lighting in Houdini.
Get it here: http://training.adrianlazar.com/2012/03/25/advanced-lighting-in-houdini/ [training.adrianlazar.com]
Training description
During almost 4 hours of video training we are going to discuss how to work with lights in Houdini 12 but also what a lighting artist job is in a cg production.
Using a real production scene I’m going to show you that relying just on Global Illumination is not enough to get the job done and that every asset in the scene requires special attention. In this training course I tried to cover both the artistic and the technical side of what a lighting artist has to know since I think both are necessary to be successful in this job.
Note that this video can be both downloaded to be watched offline or it can be streamed online.
Content
Part 1 - Introduction. A few words about me and about the lighting artist job.
Part 2 – Basic introduction to lights, render settings and shader work in Houdini. We use a demo scene to talk briefly about how the above work and interact. If you are a more advanced user you can skip this part since it’s aimed at the beginners.
Part 3 – Global Illumination. Using a real production scene we are going to work with Global Illumination from the PBR and we discuss the pro and cons of this technique. We are also going to briefly talk about a few render settings that are affecting the lighting in our scene.
Part 4 – Building on top of part one we are adding a secondary light for direct sunlight and talk about the improvements of our scene.
Part 5 - Continuing our lighting process we start taking care of almost every asset creating RimLights, KeyLights and FillLights so we can get the most of them.
Part 6 – Final render and conclusion.
While this training is made in SideFx Houdini the techniques and the principles you’re going to learn here can be easily applied in any 3d software. Every 3d package can work with Point / Omni Lights and Spotlights and these lights are the ones you as a lighting artist will use maybe 80% of the time.
This Video Training Course is released directly by me, the artist, so there’s no middle man to charge half of the price – and this is the reason I’m able to keep the price so low.
Enjoy the Training Course,
-Adrian
