70s Style Room – Light Balance

Lesson by Ciro Sannino | Official 5SRW study material

LESSON#11 – Light Balance (Step2)

HD VIDEO / Narrated / 5′

MAX FILES to download with all the V-Ray settings

How to hanlde the white balance;

Shutter speed to control exposure;

The principles of the light balance;

Chromatic contrast;

The kelvin scale.

This is the image you’ll get at the end of this training:

Framing & Check – Step 1

Here we are for the first lesson about 5-Step Render Workflow® : our complete method to manage
render process in 5 easy steps.

The 1st step is about Framing and Check-in. Focusing just on the Check-in, It consists in 3 simple rules
which often people don’t care, creating a lot of problems impossible to solve later on. In this lesson just
see these rules:

Never do anything that does not exist in the real world

Always use 1:1 scale models

Place the lights as if it was in a real photo studio

The step 1 is the set up of the job: a great final result is always related to a good preparation. Check your
models, find good textures, especially find good images to use as references. If you ‘are starting directly
from here I suggest to complete the first 10 lessons before > 10 Lessons to start correctly

Light Balance – Step2

Light Balance is one of the most important steps. If you can’t find a good light balance don’t move away!
Work on it until you have a good one: find a good light balance and your final render will be great, that’s
for sure.
The process is based on a light Herarchy. it’s really simple, watch the video:

VIDEO

This scene is really, really simple but that it’s not the point. If you deeply understand how important is
this step and what are the crucial concetps, you just need to apply the same concepts on every type of
scene. Even more complex scenes becasue the concepts never change.

CONCEPTS:

In studio, set White balance on Neutral (there are no dominant colors!);

Start working with shutter speed = 50;

Use light power around 300-500watts;

Always us a generic gray V-Ray Material to work on light balance;

Work always 1 Light at a time;

Get nicer look with the chromatic contrast;

In kelvin scale under 5000°K get warm lighting;

In kelvin scale over 5000°K get cool lighting;

Get a single shadow in the final image;

Don’t worry about grainy: we’ll fix in the step4.

COMMON MISTAKE:

One of the most common errors is the duplicated shadow. This is because there’s no herarchy between
the lights. Here an example of uncorrect light balance:
EXERCISE:

Download the Max files and create 3 different light balances using two V-Ray Lights. The concept is
always the same: balance the First light (stronger) with the Second one.

70S Style Room. (70scene--START.max)

OBJ format. (70scene--START.obj)

Three different Light Balances to imitate: Click on them to magnify.

To verify your exercise, please download the final version:

70s Style Room – FINAL.