Tutorial: Basic Lighting Methods

By Joe EarthQuake Wilson This tutorial will cover the basic tools that are available to you in Marmoset Toolbag to light your scene. Toolbag offers two types of lighting; image-based sky lighting and traditional dynamic lighting. Follow along to learn about the differences, how to successfully use both methods, and how some of the extra settings work.

Sky Lighting vs Dynamic Lighting

Toolbag uses image-based lighting which is a lighting technique that samples a 360 degree image to describe light with each pixel being treated as a tiny light source in the final sky lighting. Sky lighting can be created from panoramic photos of a scene that you want to mimic or any handmade/artificial backdrop image. This technique allows you to create highquality lighting with an essentially unlimited number of light sources. Image-based sky lighting gives you the ability to represent a lighting environment with much more detail than traditional dynamic lights. However, the big drawback to sky lighting is that after youve created your sky lighting content it is essentially baked in. The end result is a realistic, but mostly static lighting environment that is very easy add to your scene. Dynamic lights on the other hand, are more flexible as you can easily alter their properties at any time. However, the quality of light is not the same with dynamic lights as it is with sky lighting, for instance, dynamic lights will produce simple round specular highlights, whereas sky lighting contains more information such as unique ambient diffuse and specular lighting that is specific to your panoramic image.

Sky Lighting

Sky lighting is the default lighting method in Marmoset Toolbag. When you create a new scene a sky light will be loaded automatically.

Toolbag comes with a collection of sky lighting presets, its fast and easy to change your lighting with just a few clicks. There is no need to spend time setting up light sources or tweaking complex render settings. Sky Lighting Presets are located in the Light tab on the top left toolbar in Marmoset Toolbag. From here you can pick from a variety of preloaded skies, load you own, set the Sky Brightness and Sky Rotation, and launch the Sky Tool to create your own sky lighting presets. More information on how to create your own sky lighting presets is available in the Sky Tool Tutorial. Each sky preset has different color, exposure, shadow direction, shadow strength and unique specular reflection content.

Rotate the lighting environment by adjusting the Sky Rotation setting, or by holding down shift and dragging with the left mouse button.

Adjust the Sky Brightness setting to set the exposure of the lighting environment. This is a great way to control the amount of ambient light when youre using dynamics lights in your scene (m ore on that later). Note: The Sky Brightness setting does not affect the exposure of the skybox background image.

Tip: Go to the View tab, then enable Draw Skybox to show the skybox background image, and enable Sky Lighting Direction to show the angle of the sky light.

Dynamic Lighting

In addition to image based sky lighting, Toolbag gives artists the ability to create dynamic lights. Dynamic lights are a great way to supplement the inherent weakness of sky lighting, which is the ability to adjust light on the fly. New lights are placed from the cameras current position and direction. Move your cameras view to where you want the light to shine before you add a light to save time. New lights will be assigned a randomized color which you can change by clicking on the color picker box in the light properties.

Point Lights

The default dynamic light type is a point light. If you do not have the Spotlight check box enabled, your light is a point light. For point lights, the Intensity setting controls how bright the light is, and the Radius setting controls the light falloff or how large the light source is. Note: Using point lights, the spotlight specific settings like Spotlight Angle, Spotlight Sharpness, and Volumetric Haze do not apply. Point lights do not cast shadows either, so I prefer to use them to subtly accentuate specific areas and not as major light sources.

Spotlights

To turn your point light into a spotlight, simply click the Spotlight check box. For spotlights, the color, intensity and radius settings work the same as point lights. You can also control the angle or cone of the spotlight with the Spotlight Angle setting and how sharp the edge of the spotlight projection is with the Spotlight Sharpness setting. Like point lights, the radius setting can be used to limit the size or falloff with spotlights, this can be useful if you want to fade out your shadows at the extremes to give a softer look. Tip: Make sure to save a scene; saving your mesh/materials only will not save your sky, lighting, camera, or post effect settings.

Balancing Sky Lighting with Dynamic Lighting

As you begin to add dynamic lights to a scene, you may notice the combined strength of your sky lighting and dynamic lights cause your render to become overexposed. A great way to combat this is by adjusting the Sky Brightness setting. This will allow you to balance how much ambient light is in your scene. If you want to light your scene primarily with dynamic lights, it can help to a use low brightness value.

Tip: If you plan on using dynamic lights as your primary light source, you may want to use one of the ambient skies, as these often have very light shadows.

Additional Light Settings

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)

SSAO is a real time effect that is used to mimic the look of occluded light. This effect is very efficient to render because it is a screen space (2D) computation rather than volumetric (3D), which means that it has certain drawbacks. For instance, objects that are off screen (even if just slightly) will not occlude light, and objects tend to become outlined as well, which means SSAO does not generally hold up well in motion and may not work well with certain types of objects. You can enable SSAO by clicking on the Ambient Occlusion check box in the Render tab on the left hand menu. Set the strength of the SSAO effect by adjusting the Occlusion Strength slider. You can also manually enter in values higher than 1; however, this tends to exacerbate the rendering artifacts inherent to SSAO. Tip: From the Render tab, change the View drop-down to ambient occlusion to see what SSAO looks like before it is multiplied onto the final render.

Lens Flare

Adding a lens flare to your spotlight will blast your face full of awesome when the camera is pointed directly at the light. Enable lens flare by clicking on the Lens Flare check box. Adjust the size of the lens flare with the Lens Flare Size setting. Lens flare strength is tied directly to light intensity. You can use lens flares with point lights as well; however, the flare will be active any time the light is visible in your scene, so I find it best to use lens flare with spotlights. View example image at your own risk, Marmoset LLC is not liable for any medical expenses related to bleeding from the eyes or ECS (Exploded Cranium Syndrome).

Volumetric Haze

Volumetric haze is a great way to add depth to your spotlights, enable it with the Volumetric Haze slider. You can use it to mimic foggy, misty, or dusty environments. Volumetric haze can also act as a way to control contrast when used as a harsh back-light pointed directly into the camera.

Gel Textures (GOBO)

Gels or GOBOs give you the ability to project an image from a dynamic light to filter or mask its effect. You can select a gel texture from the spotlight Gel Preset drop-down or create your own gel image and load it into the Gel Texture slot. Gel Tiling adjusts the scale of the gel. You can project patterns, textures, logos, or even change the shape of the light (e.g. turn a spotlight into a square or rectangle shaped light) with custom gel textures. Gels can be used with both spotlights and point lights. With point lights, the gel will repeat in all directions until it hits the lights radius. With spotlights, the gel will only be applied inside the spotlights cone, and a Gel Tiling value of 1.0 will match the gel texture to the spotlight angle. You can use full color images as gel textures, the texture is multiplied over your light source, so anything that is black will not show through. You do not need to use an alpha channel. Some more practical examples of gel textures include using a colorful stencil to mimic light coming through a stained glass window, black and white horizontal stripes to mimic light coming through window blinds, or a cloudy texture to mimic sunlight shining through the clouds for an outdoor scene.

Light Animation

You can add flickering or pulsing animation effects to your lights by changing the Light Animation Function from Constant to any of the other settings in

the light animation drop-down. Frequency sets the speed of the animation, Amplitude sets the strength of the animation and Phase adds an offset(in seconds) to the animation to avoid having multiple lights synchronized with the same settings. The various functions will give your light animation a different look. Square Wave will give a clear on-and-off type animation, like you would see with a strobe light. Triangle Wave, Sin Wave, and Saw Wave are different types of pulsing animation. Flicker Smooth and Flicker Random work well to mimic the flickering you get with florescent lighting or fires.

Light Position
You can manually set the position and rotation of your lights with the light position settings, this is useful if you want to place your light at a specific point and/or rotate it to a specific angle.