EasyLITE LightRIG by Josh Enes

Lighting your characters the easy way!

I created this light rig in order to make it through the process of lighting my characters more quickly. The lights adjust themselves to the camera so the lighting always looks the way you set it up. It works especially well if you have big camera moves where you need the lighting to stay consistent. Now it takes me a matter of a minute to set the colour and intensity of the lights instead of playing with the light positions for half an hour. I used it on all my characters, so I know it works.

	STEP 1: First off, if you are not here to learn and just want to use the light rig, here it is: EasyLITE LightRIG (zipped model files). Just unzip it into the Models directory of your project and import one of the models into your scene. The LightRIG_Model should be a child of your character's model. The LightRIG null gets position constrained to your character's COG, and the LightRIG_Interest should be position constrained to the camera you will render from. You will also need to add the character's geometry to each light's Associated Models group.
	STEP 2: For those of you who didn't just take the money and run, you are in for a treat. Get a clean scene and we'll dive right in. First of all we need to take care of some housekeeping. Open an explorer and delete the default infinite light. Next go to the Render bar (Press 3) and click on Ambience. Set it to black (all zeros). Now we have a pitch black scene to start lighting in. (Don't test it out, it will probably crash!)
	STEP 3: Now we need something to light. You can use your own character if you have one, otherwise get some spheres and stack them into a snowman. Button eyes are optional. Give them a phong material and turn the specular down to 0.100 and the specular decay to 25. Toss on a colour if you like (light blue perhaps). Grab my snowman model if you're feeling a little yawny. Just drag the link right into XSI.
	STEP 4: Now for the lights! Get a single point light and add all the character's geometry into it's associated models group (select all character geometry, open an explorer, open the light and light property group, right-click Associated Models, choose Add to Group). Duplicate the light twice and name the lights RimLight, MainLight, and GroundLight. The RimLight is usually the most powerful. Select the RimLight and press enter. Give it an intensity from 3 to 9 and enable shadow casting so the rim falls properly on the character. Set the shadow Umbra to 0. Much higher intensities will burn your character white even after you put a colour on it. The MainLight should have an intensity from 1 to 2. The farther apart the rim and main intensities are, the higher the contrast of the lighting will be. Give the GroundLight an intensity of about 0.5.
	STEP 5: Now we need to position the lights. Using the default camera as reference, place the RimLight one character height behind, and two heights above our character. Next place the MainLight two character heights in front of the character. Put the GroundLight two heights in front and one height below the character. Move your RimLight one character height to the right, and your main light one character height to the left. Move your ground light half a character height to the right. That should give you a nice basic lighting setup from which you can modify it to suit the environment. We will add colour to the lights later.
	STEP 6: Give your character a test-render with the region tool (Press Q). It should resemble something like the image on the left. If not, try moving the camera around or tweaking the positions of the lights.
	STEP 7: Before we move on to colour and mood, lets get to the real meat of the EasyLITE system: having the lights follow the camera. Get two nulls and name them LightRIG and LightRIG_Interest. Constrain | Position the LightRIG null to the LightRIG_Interest null. In the property box that pops up, open the Up Vector tab and check on Active. This will ensure that our lights stay put relative to the camera and don't roll around. Constrain | Position the LightRIG null to the character's COG (in the snowman's case, the bottom ball). Last of all, Constrain | Position the LightRIG_Interest null to the Camera. If you want to export the LightRIG for use on another character, make a Model out of it. The LightRIG's Model should go under the character's Model.
	STEP 8: Drag a render region over the character and move the camera around until you find the angle where your lighting looks the best, and then make the three lights children of the LightRIG null. Now you can move your camera wherever you want, wowee! The lights adjust themselves so the lighting remains consistent. That's because the lights are children of the LightRIG null which points to the Camera because that's where the LightRIG_Interest is constrained to. That's a mouthful! Take a 30 second break from the monitor to rest your eyes, we will go through colour next.
	STEP 9: Lighting is probably the single most important thing for setting the mood of a scene. Here you can see I have taken the light rig we created earlier, and applied some colour to the lights. In this case the snowman is coming out of a house at night, or perhaps there is a street light or vehicle with bright lights behind him. Movies are great to use as reference for your lighting! The following are some examples from Lord of the Rings. Follow the instructions in STEP 1 to connect them to your character, or try and figure it out yourself!
	EXAMPLE 1: This lighting setup has a very weak RimLight, this causes Bilbo to blend in with the background, making him appear more creepy. The main light is doing most of the work to bring out the character in this case. Drag this link into your scene to try it out.
	EXAMPLE 2: This is a very cold setting, and the colour reflect that fact. There are two RimLights so that the character can recieve a surrounding rim light at the top, this is not possible with only one rim light. Notice how the left side of the face is very dark? That is because the MainLight and GroundLight are both far to the right side, so the left side is not catching any light. Drag this link into your scene to try it out.
	EXAMPLE 3: Oooh, firey! In this example the lighting is very bright and saturated. Two RimLights are used, but instead of putting them above I have placed them to the sides of the character. The RimLight on the left is a bit weaker and more orangey than yellow. I also moved it back away from the character more, this makes the rim thinner. The MainLight is pretty much head-on with the character not too much to either side. Drag this link into your scene to try it out.
	EXAMPLE 4: This lighting setup is similar to the others, except in this one the rim light has been placed below. Notice how the right side of the face between the left and the rim light is darker, this is because the MainLight is on the left and the ground light is on the right. There is a second rim light on the left side so the character will not blend into the background. Drag this link into your scene to try it out.
	EXAMPLE 5: Run Frodo, RUN! This lighting setup uses no less than four RimLights in order to achieve the full surrounding rim of light. The rim light cast not only on the top or bottom, but all around the character. Without this Frodo would surely blend right into the same-coloured background. To achieve the diagonally split lighting, the MainLight has been placed below and to the right, and the GroundLight is above and to the left. Drag this link into your scene to try it out.
	STEP 10: You're done! Have fun using this rig! You can grab the entire project with all the scenes and model files right here. As always, don't hesitate to e-mail me if you find a mistake in this tutorial or if you have problems. joshenes@hotmail.com