lighting???

Evil Sock Pupet · Post by **Evil Sock Pupet** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 11:54 am

How do I get lighting in my cartoons? and can it be controlled?

Rai López · Post by **Rai López** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 2:35 pm

...Jaja, seems that now you are looking for one of my DREAMS too

myles · Post by **myles** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 12:56 am

Moho has automatic layer drop shadows, layer shading, and you can fake perspective shadows to a certain extent (see Tutorial 6.5). Don't forget about Tutorial 2.6 and masking.

Toontoonz showed an interesting lighting experiment with .psd export a while back, and you can do some faking with layer blending (excuse the animation, just a very quick demo for this post).

For full 3D lights and lighting effects you could possibly use your Moho animation as a texture map on one or more polygons in a full 3D program (thanks DK for that possibility).

Many animations get away with a simple shadow ellipse under the characters as a general "lighting" effect.

Regards, Myles.

jorgy · Post by **jorgy** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 6:00 am

myles wrote:
Toontoonz showed an interesting lighting experiment with .psd export a while back, and you can do some faking with layer blending (excuse the animation, just a very quick demo for this post).

Regards, Myles.

Now, can you have the spotlight "bend" where the floor meets the curtain, and maybe show the waves in the curtain? Or at least some fake approximation?

myles · Post by **myles** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 7:11 am

jorgy wrote:
myles wrote:some faking with layer blending (excuse the animation, just a very quick demo for this post).
Now, can you have the spotlight "bend" where the floor meets the curtain, and maybe show the waves in the curtain? Or at least some fake approximation?

The light shape is just a normal Moho shape, so bending it is easy. Rippling and waves could possibly be done with point animation - whether it's worth the trouble is probably up to the individual animator (or in other words, not me,

or at least not today for the sake of a forum posting

).

Regards, Myles.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 10:29 am

I like the Photoshop idea, I had a half idea the other day, posted it then removed it for lack of clarity. I still think there is something here so I'll post it. Maybe it will spark some additional ideas -or maybe it will just be a strange post.

Here is a mov

http://www.stormvisions.com/moho/hsv2.mov

You may have to scrub the movie a few times to see the light/shadow as I didn't make the hsv image blue channel bright enough I think.

Here's the file if it seems interesting to anyone -better than me trying to explain the half formed thought.

http://www.stormvisions.com/moho/hsv_shade.zip

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 6:56 pm

@myles -can you tell me what post you refer to regarding DK? OT but looks like phpBB has a bug. When a user creates a username of 2 characters (or less?) you cannot use the "show all users posts" or search feature -likely the search feature doesn't allow words less than 3 characters to be searched and it affects the username search as well.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:03 pm

Anyone else into beating a dead horse? Ok, last observation with hsv and then I'm off to play with the Photoshop export.

http://www.stormvisions.com/moho/hsv3.mov

This just shows the hsv image can be used on duplicate vector layers of your object filled with Effect: Shaded with Shadow Only. This way maybe you can use this duplicate layer to show areas that will take light, then paint an hsv image with some light beams and these beams will show up only in the Shaded filled areas.

I know you can do this with layer modes and masks but this one HSV image (or multiple hsv 'lightmaps' can be created for different z-depths and attach objects based on where they are in z space) can be applied to all objects regardless of where they are in the layer hierarchy and would require a lot of jumping through loops to do the same with masks and layer modes in a complex scene.

Hope it makes sense anyway. I find it hard to express some thoughts when I'm working on intuition more than a firm grasp of what I am doing.

jorgy · Post by **jorgy** » Thu Jan 05, 2006 9:59 pm

myles wrote:
The light shape is just a normal Moho shape, so bending it is easy. Rippling and waves could possibly be done with point animation - whether it's worth the trouble is probably up to the individual animator (or in other words, not me, or at least not today for the sake of a forum posting ).

Regards, Myles.

Thanks. I was wondering if you had a super-duper trick up your sleeve, but it seems that to do this effect will require just plain 'ol elbow grease. Thanks for your response.

jorgy