How I Rendered a Disney Style Animation in Blender - Behind the render

I want to share some of the lessons I learnt the hard way while lighting an animated shot by the Character Animator Josep "Vel" Castaño.
Follow the animator Josep "Vel" Castaño Riera on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/theendisr...
Find me here! ;)
- Artstation: www.artstation.com/homspau
- Instagram: / homspau
- Twitter: / homspau
- Linkedin: / pau-homs-6a40611bb
Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
00:44 - Objectives
02:20 - Lessons from the first attempt
07:34 - Trying to get there
11:10 - Reevaluating references
12:06 - Character light roles
14:14 - Final result analysis
20:56 - The end
Further reading:
chrisbrejon.com/cg-cinematogr... - CG Cinematography Book by Chris Brejon. If you like analysis of lighting in animation, he does them better!
studio.blender.org/blog/Sprit... - Lighting Blog from the Blender Studio. I used the same technique to make all the volumetrics!

[@guksack]

This is exactly the kind of video I've been looking for! Someone that can explain both the technical side of Blender alongside the language of film. Most videos seem to be one or the other. Great stuff!

[@homspau]

Thank you! So glad it helps! And welcome to the niche ;)

[@ReverseFlash-jr5ti]

​@@homspaucan you show the actual final result animation

[@matissCG]

One of few youtube tutorials where you can tell this is a true professional.

[@Spammy151]

Beautiful breakdown, thank you so much for this!

[@marker1055]

Love it Pau, thanks you for this!!

[@Prabhakaraan]

Great video with so much information. Thanks for sharing. Much appreciated!

[@Ollacigi]

thanks for the tutorial pau,,this is what i lookin for!!

[@BuckwheatV]

OMG your tutorials are not even gold, they are brilliant! So so much valuable, please keep going with 3D lighting tuts, we appreciate it so much!

[@homspau]

Thanks for your comment! I'm on my way!

[@TheFrozenMonkeyKing]

Really good video! Thanks a lot for sharing your progress!

[@user-mo1xn3ki8f]

learned a lot from your progress! Thanks for sharing!

[@homspau]

I'm so glad! Happy lighting!

[@simonmueck]

amazing video bro! keep it up!

[@kritzstudio]

Excellent!, very good video tutorial, thank you very much for sharing your experience

[@jeremypajotart]

Thank you very much for sharing your thought process and upgrades on this cool project. If i may, i think that it would have been awesome to see your scenes directly in viewport to showcase the lighting setup 😉🙏✌️

[@yersultanblender2256]

Thank you for the breakdown Pau,It's Amazing.

[@homspau]

Thank you for your comment!

[@lightsout7443]

Thank you for the breakdown Pau Really helpful, lots of knowledge. And the final result looks amazing. Great work

[@homspau]

Thank you!

[@Wa_Animation]

Amazing work! Thank you for your selfless sharing!非常实用的经验分享，希望更多人能看到这个视频，值得大火！！！

[@UnknownMakes]

This is super Helpful!!!

[@varadparmar5178]

Oh... Wow. It's very nice. !🎉

[@jorake3d]

Increíble análisis! Gracias Pau!

[@homspau]

A ti por tu mensaje!

[@DiedSora]

Brutal como siempre

[@homspau]

Muchas gracias!

[@ageneral007]

Beautiful! 😍

[@homspau]

Thank you!

[@johnray1956]

I should have found your channel years ago. This style has become Tradition. Its a good starting point.

[@homspau]

Lucky you I've been in KZbin for under a year! Thanks for the comment!

[@lumiin3d]

Super useful, loved it! Can you do a video talking about landing your first job?

[@AutodidactAnimotions]

Excellent work very cinematic animation!!

[@homspau]

Thank you for your comment!

[@gonpoTV]

On behalf of all the viewers and comment sections, I would like to thank you for expanding our brain with this master piece.

[@homspau]

On behalf of myself, thanks for the comment. It really cheers me up!

[@artofsumit]

This helped me a lot, I hope I can make these effects too. thanks :)

[@jamesgodspower7734]

Great. 🔥

[@nextos]

Great video. Nice job man

[@homspau]

Thank you so much!

[@trevorsoh2130]

Awesome teaching thanks!

[@homspau]

Thank you!! I hope it helps

[@TE_R77]

Love your video. Thank you

[@homspau]

Thank you!!

[@pro_rookie_gamedev]

Hi. I watched your BCon23 talk and came here.

[@matejivi]

thanks, this was realy helpfull!

[@homspau]

Thank you for your comment!

[@JoshWhelchel]

... you are amazing.

[@homspau]

Thanks! You too!!

[@bassemb]

Thanks for this excellent breakdown! I'm curious to hear how the new feature of light linking and shadow linking in Blender 4 will affect your workflow!

[@homspau]

The most major way in which it impacts is that I no longer need to split the eyes into a separate layer to clean their reflections. I can just remove lights from them and add exclusive ones right away and render them with the character. Aside from that I try to keep my setup as natural as possible by having lights affect everything

[@Losjo4093]

Amazing

[@homspau]

Thank you!! ;)

[@GoGo-ze1mq]

Hey man great video! You will make more of them, right? Cuz I can't wait!

[@homspau]

Yes! Lots of ideas but little time because of new professional projects. Glad there's people still around :) Thanks!

[@Spittoon]

I look forward to seeing more animations, Perhaps a tutorial.

[@tamilorejoseph4704]

I think it also depends on the form and also texture like subsurface scattering but regardless u were able to achieve a very good lighting seamlessly

[@homspau]

ABSOLUTELY. Shading plays a huge role on lighting. Finding out the shader for the skin as well as the shader for the mesh hair was a lot of tweaking. Thanks for pointing that out! And for your comment :)

[@SiteMan.]

@@homspau could you take us through that Sir

[@homspau]

@@SiteMan. I'm not planning on making a tutorial about that in the near future. But mainly it's eyeballing stuff. The only interesting thing I did is to add some sheen to simulate the small hairs on the skin, which give nicer rim lights.

[@Losjo4093]

The before and after is like how videogames are made from beta to full release

[@homspau]

Hahaha indeed! Lighting ends up being the last thing to be done ;)

[@romulocastilho6506]

porque na hora de controlar os personagem fica tao lento o blender baixei um personagem ele e mega pesado nao consigo usar

[@binyaminbass]

This is fantastic. And so daunting. I'm open to learn more. Any suggested books or methods?

[@binyaminbass]

@@homspau I have never heard of Chris Brejon before. I just opened his book and I am astounded! Thank you for this link. I am going to dive in right away.

[@Anooppie]

Um what rig is that? Where can i find it

[@kevin_forster]

Amazing video! Very rich content that you are sharing, thank you so much for that. I have a question for the volumetric light, do you render the volumetric light in a different layer or in the same as the other lights? And for that volumetric effect, do you use the volume material to get this amazing atmosphere or do you use another technique?

[@homspau]

Hey! Thank you very much! Finding out the best way to make volumetrics in Cycles was a challenge. I ended up making a variation on the technique used for lighting sprite fright (blogpost linked in the description). It consists on using an em missive material on a cube for the volume and generating shapes that act as fake volumetric lights using vector math. It's hard to explain but it isn't that complicated. I'm writing a tutorial on this as we speak!

[@nitinsharmax129]

@@homspau so you are basically creating a emission gradient in volumetric cube?

[@kevin_forster]

@@homspau Awesome! I read the blogpost about sprit, amazing stuff there! Thank you for your reply, can't wait for the tutorial :)

[@tomatoyaaaaa]

Really good video!!! also, i got a question, if i set the light correctly for one frame, like rim light, key light, shadow light so on, when the animation going the character moving, is that any light need be changing? like make the top light follow the character? or make some back light always keep between character and camera?or just stay in place? help pls!

[@homspau]

Good question!! Clever placing of the lights should get you a very long way without moving them, but constraining them to the chatacter can also be done. Whatever fits your image best! If in doubt, one thing you can always do is to go for the most "grounded" solution, the one that involves less "cheating". That would be to think of how sets are illuminated in live action photography and do the CG equivalent of that

[@JohnMervinChocolateThunder]

Awesome stuff! How did you get the anamorphic bokeh? Is the DOF done in post or is there a cycles way to achieve that?

[@homspau]

A bit of both! The first and third shot have the DOF rendered in Cycles and the second, since it has some very defined bokehs, it's made in Nuke. In cycles it's just a matter of tweaking the ratio of the DOF and in Nuke I used a Bokeh image for more detail.

[@herumartio4225]

Excellent work bro. i still confous about render in seperate layer. how to get bounce from the background, how to get shadow to envy . the third shoot i realy counfused if you using seperate render layer for render. i hope you can make premium tutorial for that :) . because for now i just use render beauty, so i little bit hard to get nice rim light to character without broken the envy with much shadow sory for bad english :)

[@Losjo4093]

Your english is amazing"really good"

[@tushardodke498]

Can you provide the blend file please ❤

[@vinicimmm]

obrigado.

[@romulocastilho6506]

eu queria aprender como fazer animações de voos de super herói nao acho um tutorial sobre no youtube

[@nandi1110]

Sorry, I was wondering what the labeling software was in the video, thank you so much for your response~

[@homspau]

It's Blender's VSE!

[@babaksobhani1307]

That was so interesting but why you are not working with shaders and sub surface scatter on your character ?

[@homspau]

I am! The shaders on her took a lot of time to get right

[@PurXion_777]

I am completely new to blender and I am planning on trying out something like this, like a pixar/illumination style animation process. I am well aware of the fact that it's not going to be easy, especially considering I'm new, but I am still willing. What tips do you personally have for someone like me?

[@homspau]

Hey! Congrats for starting! There's a lot to learn but if I had to pick a tip would be to finish projects. This has a lot to do with the scope of them do not embark on gigantic projects right away, do small stuff that you can finish, share, and be proud of. Even if you're not super sure about them: looking back to your old work will make you feel great about your progress. Also, when you feel you can handle bigger projects, remember to do also small stuff. A project made and finished in a day or an afternoon can be very fun and refreshing. Those are my medicine for art block. Hope it helps!

[@Elyakim_binenstock]

Thanks for the breakdown, a small question, how many samples did u used

[@homspau]

Thank you! It depends on the layer & shot, but mostly at a noise threshold of 0.03 max 4096.

[@raghavendra4633]

Hi can you add a small little video tutorial from blender or Maya software, and about how to add gradient light on a character, for example using area or spot light, as said from 19:31 ..I am also getting hard edges, not smooth gradient edges.Thanks and would be very helpful for everyone learning

[@homspau]

It all depends on the size of the light! The bigger the light source the softer the shadows

[@traderz13]

When you say its a different sun (character by envo) so diff softness but same intensity. What does that mean? What settings are different versus the same? Can you do a video where you show us exact lighting settings for this? Things u changed to give the effects?

[@homspau]

Hi! Thanks for your comment! It means that both the color and power are the same, but the "angle" changes. The bigger the angle, the softer the shadows

[@The_OG_troller]

nice work, one question though from where did you get the girl model and if you made it yourself, can you please make a quick tutorial or maybe a timelapse

[@homspau]

Hey! The character is a rig property of Animschool. I did not make it. This animation is an assignment from Josep "Vel" Castaño from one of their courses. Sorry to disappoint you! ;)

[@syntaxandRender]

How would you redo this now that blender will be getting light linking?

[@homspau]

Great question! The only thing that will be optimizer with that is the render layer setup. There will no longer be the need for setting up a separate lauer for the eyes. Instead, you can exclude ugly lights from the eyes and include some art directed ones. Thanks!

[@beyondblender]

Hi, Pau - I just found your channel, and I'm very much enjoying the content, thanks! This is incredibly interesting, and I have a question for you now that we have Light & Shadow Linking in Blender. If you had these new features on this wonderful animation, would it have been a huge benefit for you? I'm gonna guess... yes! :) Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

[@homspau]

Thanks for the comment! Light linking is a big thing, but actually, it doesn't make that much of a difference. I like lights, whenever possible, to affect all the objects in the scene - set and characters - the same way. It helps keeping everything grounded when doing this kind of PBR "naturalistic" style. Only exception to that being eyes. I do a lot of work on eyes to remove ugly reflections and create new, cleaner reflections exclusively for eyes. That's where I would use light linking. At the moment of recording this video I had to do a separate view layer for eyes with its separate lights and then comp them one on top of the other. Thanks again! :)

[@koa3680]

Please can you do a video about how you textured the skin in blender

[@homspau]

I'm not that experienced on texturing, so I won't, at least for now. For this model I was given the albedo & roughness passes and I painted masks for adding sss and also a bit of sheen to emulate the tiny hairs on the face

[@indecentparodies]

3:32 is better than my projects after trying them for months. And you call it not good enough? 😢

[@homspau]

Everything is good enough if you feel like you've tried your best! Specially if when looking back you feel like you've improved your skills. I try to push MYself, but I hope it doesn't make you feel worse abouy YOUr progress. We all have different journeys! I hope something in it helped yourse and you keep enjoying art for as long as you want to! :)

[@BangBang-zb8sf]

00:03 i saw something else which was huge too

[@gart2922]

Thank you for the breakdown Pau, Can I ask how do you stack all the layer for composite? Did you split all the light layer on the model and mix it back or you render out all at once? I kind of understand about splitting the bg and character, but a more clear explenation on compositing would really help.

[@homspau]

Hi there! I rendered, as I said, 4 layers per shot. The comp was made in Nuke, but it could have been made in Blender simply using an "alpha over" node. Separating the layers helps setting different diferent sampling per layer which results in optimized rendering, most of the time, and also let's me change the intensity of the volumetrics slightly in comp.

[@gart2922]

@@homspau thank you fpr the answer. But I am still a bit confused. In you video you did explain that you split the bg and character. Can you specify the 4 layer you used?

[@homspau]

No problem! I used separate layers for characters, environments, eyes & volumetrics. This isn't always what you should do, you could need more or less layers depending on the project. Hope it helps!

[@gart2922]

@@homspau Thank you so much. This helps a lot. So the lighthing role you explained is done all together then on the model. You use exr for the export I guess?

[@homspau]

Yes! Multilayer EXR indeed

[@neakybrown6088]

How about your clothe,is that simulation or just a basic rig clothe

[@homspau]

The character (which is property of Animschool) had rigged clothes already

[@ryotaakabane8495]

Amazing work,did you use Cycle for the rendering?Beginer here.

[@homspau]

Hey! Yes I did! Cycles for the whole thing.

[@tamilorejoseph4704]

Did u also parent the light to the character ? :)

[@homspau]

No, there aren't any lights parented to the character, although I made tests that had some. If you're asking about the eye specs (or eye dots) they are a shader hahahaa Simply adding an emission shader on top of the transmission limited by a gradient. Did the trick

[@shankarlearnstovlog]

Hi is this the free rig from blender ?

[@homspau]

It isn't! The free rig you might have in mind is called "Rain" by the Blender Studio. This one is a proprietary rig from Animschool, since the animation was made by one of his students.

[@the2ndperson309]

you create a tutorial this animation?

[@homspau]

I don't because the animation was not made by me!

[@Aharon_I]

Thank you for the breakdown Do the animator have a youtube chanel?

[@homspau]

I'm afraid not! But make sure to follow him on LinkedIn ;)

[@neironxanimation925]

Wow Bro ! Its so cool , How long time you make it?

[@homspau]

Thank you! It's a hard question to ask since I never really worked on this project full time, it's something I did between other projects and I used it as a place to experiment. But quite a long time

[@neironxanimation925]

@@homspau Thanks Man! I wish you great success! :D

[@Losjo4093]

Was this made in cycles or renderman?

[@homspau]

It's simple and plain cycles! From Blender 3.2 ;)

[@Losjo4093]

@@homspau okay thanks

[@Mbg-tech]

Shiw us the scene maybe.this makes it hard to grasp

[@Marco-ut6ll]

ρгό𝔪σŞｍ 😳