Reference Balls - Gurney Journey

Trang chủ » Visual Effects Silver Ball » Reference Balls - Gurney Journey

Có thể bạn quan tâm

Gurney Journey

The Artist's Guide to Sketching

The Artist's Guide to Sketching "This is the book that started it all" —Patrick O'Brien, MICA

James Gurney

James Gurney This weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums. Visit me on Substack

Blog Index

  • Academic Painters (609)
  • Animals (323)
  • Animation (135)
  • Architecture (37)
  • Art By Committee (44)
  • Art Podcasts (3)
  • Art Schools (105)
  • Audio (35)
  • Book reviews (82)
  • Casein Painting (91)
  • Catskill Mountains (11)
  • Clementoons (12)
  • Color (248)
  • Color and Light Book (83)
  • Comics/Cartooning (169)
  • Composition (105)
  • Computer Graphics (107)
  • Dinosaurs (112)
  • Dinotopia (231)
  • Effects/Phenomena (44)
  • Elementary Schools (10)
  • Figure Drawing (65)
  • GJ Book Club (7)
  • Golden Age Illustration (329)
  • Gouache (229)
  • Hudson River School (59)
  • Illustrated Books (35)
  • Imaginative Realism (53)
  • Journey to Chandara (138)
  • Lettering (42)
  • Lighting (139)
  • Living Sketchbook (11)
  • Miniatures (79)
  • Models Posing (55)
  • Movie Studios (15)
  • Museum Visits (213)
  • Paint Technique (249)
  • Painting Gear (89)
  • Pen and Ink (81)
  • Pencil Sketching (279)
  • Perspective (28)
  • Photography (66)
  • Plein Air Painting (220)
  • Portraits (341)
  • Preliminary Sketches (75)
  • Printmaking (12)
  • Puppets (3)
  • Rabbit Trails (119)
  • Ranger Rick (10)
  • road tour (63)
  • Sculpture (22)
  • Toys (16)
  • Video (200)
  • Visual Perception (153)
  • Watercolor Painting (355)
  • Writing (68)

Blog Archive

  • ▼  2012 (442)
    • ▼  January (41)
      • Artist's Facial Hair Poll
      • Bennett School for Girls
      • Roadside Dinosaurs
      • John Berkey in Illo 36
      • Dinotopian Dragon
      • Macro Photos of the Human Eye
      • Woodson Museum show opens
      • Soulful Moment
      • Lilac and Carnation
      • Digital Film Preservation
      • Visual Effects on "Boardwalk Empire"
      • Best Facial Hair Nominations
      • Fantasy World Map
      • Still Time to Enter Spectrum
      • Year of the Dragon
      • Alaska Residency Opportunity
      • Posing Animals
      • Ghillie Suit
      • Interview on WAMC
      • Visually Similar
      • Reference Balls
      • Video in the Works
      • Really Rough Maquettes
      • Joan of Arc Video
      • Orchestrating Cloud Shadows
      • Before the Judge
      • Tabernacle Frame
      • Dinotopia Exhibition in Wisconsin
      • Rapid-Fire Painting
      • Gérôme's Pet Monkey
      • BlueCanvas Interview
      • The Color Blue in Toy Story 3
      • Color and Light is a Making-a-Mark Nominee
      • Was Rockwell Looking?
      • ImagineFX Map Special
      • Slowing Down Light
      • Archivist’s Top Ten Tips
      • Old Dog Silver
      • Life is like an ink painting.
      • Artists' Lay Figures, Part 4 and Final
      • Artists' Lay Figures, Part 3

Tip Jar

Enjoy what you read? If you support this blog, you will feel good and the world will be a better place.

Color and Light Book

Color and Light Book Classic textbook on a universal topic

Imaginative Realism

Imaginative Realism Signed by the author

Other Official Sites

  • YouTube Channel
  • Instagram
  • James Gurney website
  • Gumroad Videos
  • J. G. Original Art
  • James Gurney on Twitter
  • Dinotopia Wiki

Illustration

  • American Art Archives
  • Howard Pyle Blog
  • Illustration Art
  • Leif Peng's Flickr Sets
  • Lines and Colors
  • Muddy Colors

Painting and Painters

  • 19th Century Art Worldwide
  • 200 Russian Painters
  • Art and Influence
  • Google Art Project
  • Handprint (Watercolor)
  • Land Sketch
  • Underpaintings
  • Virtual Gouache Land
  • Web Gallery of Art

Drawing & Cartooning

  • Character Design
  • Character Design (Pinterest)
  • Making a Mark
  • The Golden Age
  • Urban Sketchers

Animation Art

  • Animation Backgrounds
  • Animation Physics
  • Animation Resources
  • Animation Resources I
  • Animation Resources II
  • Animation World Network
  • Flooby Nooby
  • John K's Lessons
  • Living Lines Library
  • Matte Shot
  • Michael Sporn Animation

CG Art

  • CG Meetup
  • CG Society
  • Concept Art
  • Dark Roasted Blend
  • FX Guide
  • Imagine FX
  • Matte Painting
  • Nuthin' But Mech
  • The CG Bros.

Contact

You can write me at:James GurneyPO Box 693Rhinebeck, NY 12572or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

Permissions

All images and text are copyright 2020 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Reference Balls

Here’s visual effects wizard Wesley Sewell holding up two lighting reference balls during live action plate photography for the movie “Kingdom of Heaven.”The purpose of those balls is to record the sources and distribution of lighting in the scene so that later on, the visual effects team can match the virtual lighting of the CGI elements that will be added to the shot. Why do they need those balls to know the lighting? Isn't it obvious by looking at the lighting on Sewell’s face? There’s a strong, warm, low light source from off to the left somewhere. But the mirror ball (also called a “light probe”) shows more. You can see that there are some thin high clouds near the sun diffusing the light just a bit, and the ground is a warm dirt color. Those factors change the effect of light appreciably. This shot is from the special effects company WETA Workshops’s model and miniature department. It’s a still frame from a test video sequence of a matte gray ball being “flown” through a miniature set of the catacombs of Orthanc in Lord of the Rings. In the frame at left, the ball is lit by a blue light from above, and a weaker orange light from below. During the test video, the lighting changed throughout the course of the fly-through. If you wanted to animate a digital creature flying into those caverns, the forms of the creature would have to respond to the same lights that are lighting the gray ball. Digital lighters can unwrap the data from the gray ball or the mirror ball into a spherical environment map.Although I don’t use digital tools in my work, I sometimes adopt this trick when I photograph maquettes, because it makes it easier for me to reconstruct the pattern of light later on when I’m compositing various elements in the studio. This silver ball (an upended Christmas tree ornament) sits on a piece of kneaded eraser. It shows the illuminated wall on the left, the skylights and fluorescent lights on the ceiling, the greenish window light, and the sharp low spotlight. All these lights affect the way the forms are lit.Here's another studio shot. This time there's no sharp spotlight; just the skylights and window light, and now my hands are a warm source of light bouncing into the shadows. The main point here is that lighting is more complicated than just "light and shadow." In every real-world situation, there are multiple light sources, each with different qualities of softness, directionality, color temperature, and intensity. Whether you use reference balls or not, the more aware you are of those light sources, the more convincingly you can paint or render each of the forms in your scene. By the way, thanks for all your really helpful comments on yesterday's post about art instruction videos. I'll be reading all of them carefully --ALL of them-- before I put my video together. LINKS FOR MORE INFOColor and Light (signed from me) or (Amazon)Kingdom of Heaven (movie)Weta Workshop miniaturesLord of the Rings fan siteHere's an in depth tutorial of how reference balls are used Posted by James Gurney at Wednesday, January 18, 2012 Labels: Journey to Chandara, Lighting

5 comments:

Tom Hart said...

I love this post and look forward to re-reading it. This is an example of why I return to Gurney Journey several times a day: not only to learn more about what I'm interested in, but also to learn about things that I never realized I was interested in!Fasciniating...

January 18, 2012 at 11:37 AM Tim said...

How funny, I was just flipping through Imaginative Realism and I believe there is one of these located on the bottom on page 86.Pretty interesting stuff.

January 18, 2012 at 11:55 AM Zeitwolf said...

whoah, thanks for this extremely helpful post! I can only second Tom. I'm currently trying to teach myself without the help of art school and never had I imagined to search for reference ball...

January 18, 2012 at 1:54 PM jeffkunze said...

Really great tip! Thanks for sharing!

January 18, 2012 at 4:40 PM Josef Sy said...

Thanks for this great post, James. Great tip too. Having work in the VFX industry but in animation, I have always wondered about those spheres. I know our lighters use them and they can get the CG objects and creatures lit seamlessly into the film plates. :)

January 20, 2012 at 9:41 AM

Post a Comment

Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Từ khóa » Visual Effects Silver Ball