The Gnomon Workshop is pleased to announce the release of "Lighting the CG Portrait", Character Lighting in VRay Next with Chris Barischoff.

Great lighting is fundamental to a professional-looking 3D portrait. In this three-hour workshop, Lighting Supervisor Christopher Barischoff teaches the art of lighting characters using Maya and V-Ray Next, lecturing in a render-agnostic way allowing artists to apply the skills to their software of choice.

For many 3D artists, lighting can be a challenging step, particularly after spending precious hours modeling, sculpting, grooming hair, texturing and dialing in shaders, and it’s easy to fall short at the rendering stage if you don’t have good lighting setup in place. Utilizing the Emma model provided by Satoshi Takazawa, this in-depth training details the foundations of lighting and covers both the artistic and technical aspects of creating beautiful and compelling lighting setups. Even if you aren’t a lighter by trade, you’ll learn how to light portraits and figures using the principles of cinematic lighting, and explore studio portrait lighting setups, camera framing and lens settings, and discover the physics of light quality as it pertains to a rendering engine.

The lectures include many important lighting scenarios, from three-point to Rembrandt-style lighting, and teach how to set up your own lighting scenario with Maya and V-Ray, as well as industry-proven, advanced camera and render settings used to create professional-quality CG portraits. The workshop concludes with finishing touches in Nuke that will non-destructively enhance your final render, though the techniques can also be applied to After Effects or Photoshop.