In many studios, lighting effects are like a rite of passage for FX animation trainees. The animator may not be considered ready for elemental effects like water or fire until wings are earned with several months of tedious tone and shadow scenes.
The trainee learns a lot about light and shadow during this period. The main problem I see with this structure is that, impatient to learn the cool stuff and graduate from trainee status, the animator sees light and shadow effects as babies' stuff and somehow believes that once out of training, lighting is beneath him/her. Quite simply, the animator loses respect for lighting effects.
I'm giving you this article in the third level because I believe Light and Shadow FX are way up there with fire, dust and water, and I want to reinforce their importance.
Light and shadow breathe life into 2D animation. With light and shadow, you don't just turn a circle into a sphere; you turn a cartoon into a film.
In this lesson, we're discussing the various key aspects of light in 2D animation. These are:
In 2D lighting FX, our aim is to give volume to otherwise flat objects. When creating tones or highlights, it's your job to add whatever contours are necessary for the scene, so good spatial intuition is handy as well as an excellent understanding of human (and the character's) anatomy. A confusing silhouette can all make perfect sense with the right light effect.
In this lesson, you'll occasionally read or hear the term "internal detail" which refers to details within the character silhouette. For instance, in Fig. 1 (below) the nose shadow is would be referred to as internal detail because it's well within the character silhouette, unlike the other details which are around the outside.
Fig. 1 - Separate Tone process: lines, fill, matte
In 2D animation, the dark part of a character is called a tone effect (see Fig. 1). These are sometimes also called "body shadows", or "self shadows" because they're the shadowy part of a character's body.
Tones these days are generally treated as a separate "matte" layer, which is a single layer of shadow artwork that affects the existing animation. However, another way is to paint the tone directly into the character's colours. There are pros and cons for each method.
Separate Tone (Fig. 1) - The big advantages of separate tone art are the ability to apply unique digital treatments to it without affecting the character layer, and the speed at which the effect can be done for each key, or frame. The disadvantage is that it's generally an indiscriminate darkening of character colours, so it's not very well controlled and can appear cheap.
In Fig. 1, you can see the first step is to draw the tone as linework, looping outside the character. Step 2 is to fill it, then step 3 is applying it as a matte, which cuts off anything outside the character outline.
(note - this process is the standard industry method. The "matte" step (cutting off the excess) is built into Toonboom software. If you're using Flash, it's not so straight-forward but may be done with masking)
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Painted Tone - The advantage of the painted tone (Fig. 2) is that its colours can be carefully chosen, rather than just a blanket darkening of existing colours. You can fine-tune the colours individually to get something that looks much more realistic, and less like a drag-and-drop effect. The big disadvantages are the manual work in painting tones on each individual frame, and the difficulty in applying digital effects (such as a softening blur) to the tone.
Fig. 2 - A complex painted tone. Expensive, but superior.
This is a cheap digital effect that can be useful but you need to be careful with it. Basically you're creating a kind of auto-tone effect which uses the character's silhouette, rather than hand-drawn art. Both Flash and Toonboom have these, to which you can apply blur for softening.
It's best suited to scenes where just a hint of shadow is needed on the edge of the character, much like a cloud with a silver lining (but shadowy). Because it uses the character's silhouette, you can't add special "internal details", like the eyebrow shadow (Fig. 2) and as described in the video below. When you want details like these, it will be best not to use the offset tone.
Gradient Tone - As an alternative to painting separate tones on a character, you might consider a gradient tone. This is very limited but can be used on its own, or in conjunction with other tone types. Can you see where I've used a gradient tone in Fig. 2?
Mixing a light and dark skin-coloured gradient allows you to paint certain volumes of a character, for example the head (see video below). Provided you don't mind animating, or manipulating gradients frame-by-frame, this is a method that can be very effective.
While a tone is a layer of shadow, the highlight is a layer of light. Some expensive productions have both highlights and tones, giving the characters and overall feel of the production a lot of depth. This can sometimes feel like overkill though and should be used wisely.
Hand-drawn highlights, just like hand-drawn tones, can be used to add internal detail to the character lighting for a more realistic effect.
As the name suggests, this type of highlight is a rim of light on a character or other scene object. It's really no different to the highlight, but as a very specific and popular type of highlight, it has earned its own special name.
This term is short for offset rimlight. It's a highlight effect that, just like the offset tone, uses the character silhouette as a matte. It's still cheap and also has a lot of potential to be nasty, but this simple effect, if handled carefully can be very effective.
The best offset rims give just a touch of light around the edge of the character; just enough to lend a little hint of volume and space.
All lighting effects are designed to show volume in otherwise flat
objects. Treated with a careless offset rim, a character could still
appear flat, but merely thicker, like a cardboard cut-out.
One day you may be asked to animate light effects, like tones or highlights, for example a fireside scene. The tones will be animating on the character to simulate the rapidly changing light direction of the flames. Usually, this is a simple matter of redrawing the light effects with subtle angle changes so they appear to wobble or jitter on the character.
To avoid a harsh jittering, the tone keyframes are done on 4s, so they can be inbetweened (for 2s) or cross-dissolved for softer transitions.
As you will recall from the surface tension article, a water bead looks fantastic if there's a tiny reflection of the light source. Just like water beads, eyes are wet orbs and as such, they look great with a small speck of reflected light. While technically they're highlights, I tend to call these "eyelights" to avoid confusion with the character highlight.
This is most effective when the eyeball is coloured, rather than simple white. It's a very cartoony thing to have white corneas, but consider having blue corneas on your characters, so the eyelight appears more striking
Fig. 4 - Eyelights aren't visible on white corneas. Try adding colour so the eyelights show up.
If there's any budget for lighting in a production, it's generally shadows that are given preference. This could partially be because they are considered easy effects, but they're also very important in helping "place" characters into their worlds. In the images below, you can see that without lighting, the entire scene feels flat and cheap. Adding various types of lighting makes all the difference.
Fig. 5 - A scene without (top) and with (bottom) lighting effects
Taking a few moments to set up lighting will make a huge difference to the overall look and quality of your scene. In the following videos, I'll teach you some basics of lighting construction and introduce you to the "shadow root" (my own term), otherwise known as the "solar point" or "normal point".
Setting up the lighting should be the first step for any FX scene. At its most simple, this involves doing little more than drawing a small 3D off-screen arrow icon that indicates light direction (as you saw in the tones videos). From here, the animator can construct lighting and shadows for the scene and each frame of the character.
In a traditional 2D animation studio, the layout department should specify the light direction and ground plane for every scene. To maintain consistency in the sequence or project, the animators, background artists and FX guys rely on that layout and follow it as closely as possible.
Exercise
Click the image (below) to download it. Some of the shadows are done for you. Print or import the image into your software and, using what you learned in the previous videos, construct the following:
- Shadows for all boxes
- Character shadow (use red)
- Character tones (use blue)
Fig. 6 - Exercise: design tones and shadows for this layout.FX Layout Exercise
The image below is a typical traditional scene layout, including character key pose and directions, a rough background layout, some camera diagrams and lighting directions.
Look at this example (Fig. 7). Click to download the layout, then create your own lighting setup for the scene. Experiment by placing the light source in various positions, then constructing rough shadows for the character.
Fig. 7 - Typical 2D animation scene layout including light and shadow directions.
A drop shadow or "noon shadow" is a pool of darkness directly beneath a character or scene object. It's designed to fulfil the role of a shadow, but also to be cheap and generic. This means it has no detail and the light direction is fail-safe.
Because of their straight-down light direction, drop shadows are used as an all-purpose alternative to directional lighting. You often see drop shadows used in games that don't have a budget for dynamic, directional lighting.
This is a subtle smudge of shadow that helps something appear to contact another, for example in the image right (indicated with red), the character's contact with the map, and the map to the table. This effect should generally be so subtle as to be rarely noticed, but it makes a world of difference to how solid the scene world feels.
This type of shadow is so called because it is cast along a surface in a particular direction. The cast shadow normally has much more detail than the former types, so it's considered a more expensive effect. When doing this type of shadow, a decent understanding of perspective is pretty much essential. Animation aside, a lot of thought and planning needs to go into the shadow, taking into account the pose, the perspective and any surface contours.
Oh hey, btw: Not all layouts will have a nicely constructed lighting setup for you with a light source and normal points. Commonly, as in the image below, you'll find only 3D arrow indicators of light direction, so it's up to you to plot a good shadow using your knowledge, creative talent, the light indicators and the scene perspective.
Exercise
Click the image below to download it. There are 3 sunlight sources (therefore, parallel rays) in the scene. The #2 shadow has been done for you. Create shadows for #1 and #3, each on their own layer.
Fig. 10 - Design cast shadows using #1 and #3 light source arrows as guides.
Cast shadows look fantastic, but they aren't always practical, especially for example if there's complex ground detail over which the cast shadow must animate. When shadows collide with other objects -and other shadows- things get complicated, tedious and expensive.
A cheap way of adding cast shadows to a character is to simply duplicate the character and all its animation, darken it as a silhouette, then lay it down onto the groundplane. However, depending on your light source, character and scene layout, you'll soon find that this method doesn't always work, especially with any specific lighting setup.
In the image below for example, note example A where the character has been duplicated and flipped to create the shadow because the scene lighting allows it. For example B however, the scene lighting requires that the shadow is specially designed and animated to suit the light direction.
A. The character here has been duplicated and flipped to make the shadow; B. Manually constructed shadow
When hand-drawing your cast shadows, imagine you're an ant on the ground looking up at the sun. Then a person comes in and blocks the sun from your view. This angle you're seeing of the person, it's exactly how the shadow should look, projected on the ground. I consider this point-of-view as "looking through the shadow's eyes".
There are many cases where a shadow can be a simple black blob, but more often than not, you'll want to apply some basic digital treatments to give your shadow some realism, or simple aesthetic appeal. Two main digital treatments are blur and transparency.
Fig. 12 - Blur should be applied with perspective in mind.
Blur should be used carefully in perspective. If your software has variable blur, this is an excellent tool for controlling a blur effect. Otherwise, you might like to make use of separate X and Y blur (horizontal and vertical) values.
In the Fig. 12, the X and Y values are adjusted so that the drop shadow has less vertical blur, to suit the perspective of the scene. Example A looks pretty terrible because its X and Y values are the same. B however, looks much better with its lower Y value, giving the impression of depth in perspective.
Toonboom software has the ability to apply variable blur. This is the ideal treatment because you can control which parts of the shadow are sharp and which are blurred. In Fig. 12, you could apply the effect in B, but also make the back of the shadow (the furthest from camera) sharper than the front, giving a better impression of realism and depth.
Fig. 13 - Overlapping shadows create an ugly double-opacity effect
A shadow is a darkening of existing colour, but in digital we often have a transparent black matte that is laid over the background. Transparency can be ugly across large areas, so you may consider a darken blend mode, or something that affects colour.
Another common problem is that any crossover of shadows will create a double-opacity effect, which is only appropriate for multi-light scenes (i.e. football pitch). In a scene with just one light-source, the opacity double-up should be avoided.
Easy - Intermediate - for each of the images below, find the line art in the files folder of the lesson pack, then design two new lighting setups with different direction. An example is given below for each:
This lesson covered what some might call a basic effect. Do not neglect the importance of good lighting in your work. If you get it right, people notice. If you neglect it, nobody will notice, which is much, much worse!
Any 2D work with careful attention paid to lighting FX will turn heads. By immediately putting into practice the rules and exercises outlined in this article, AND constant practise and study of perspective and lighting, your work will absolutely blow people away. It'll have that certain "something" that your audience cannot quite place, but sets you apart.
