Lighting

How do we do lighting? Well, lighting is actually a bit simpler for stylized renders compared to photorealistic renders. I provided you a single light source per character set up in the character rig in the form of a bone. This is how I personally set up character lighting in eevee for stylized characters.

The bone represents the light direction for the character shader. Now, before we begin, let’s go ahead and select our root bone and change the simplified custom property to negative one. This will help us edit the normals of the face a little bit, which will allow the lighting to be a bit more accurate to what we’ll see in final render.

A quick pass for lighting for each shot will help you finalize the look you want for your animation. For example, you’ll likely want to make sure that each shot has the character’s face fully illuminated. Although some shots may warrant some more shading or partial shading. For my scene, I’m going to reference the street as the main light source direction.

Meanwhile, the rim light color can also be changed to reflect any specific light colors our characters might be standing in front of. For example, the pink of the neon signs it can be sampled to influence the rim light for certain shots. We can change the color of the light directly in the bone properties itself, which can be found in the right-hand side toolbar by pressing N in the viewport. Key framing the rotation of the bone and the color of the light can give you a lot of flexibility.

Now, for those of you who are curious, keep in mind that lighting a non stylized scene will be very different from this and mostly involves manipulating actual light objects, which you can find in the add menu. These light objects have their own intensity and color parameters. And you can also select from four different types of lights.

If you’re working on a more photo-realistic rendering style, I recommend experimenting with these settings.

The next video, we’ll discuss how to render our animation, both as a preview and a final render.