The journey to painting a decent volumetric light
by Martin Bradstreet
A confluence of events recently occurred that lead to my wanting to be able to paint volumetric lights better, the biggest of them being Inktober. If you’re not sure what volumetric light is, the simplest way to explain it is to show a couple shots that have a lot of it.
In film, these effects are usually the result of a hazer or sometimes a fog machine, though my personal experience owning a fog machine is they are the messier option, and produce more of a true fog effect, largely because the particles are impossible to keep still, whereas with a hazer, they will hang in the air more stably for some reason unknown to me. I don’t think they’re used much in film anymore as it’s so hard to control the fog (bands use hazers these days so I must imagine film and television does too).
Film (and video games) use volumetric lighting for all kinds of reasons, the biggest of course being it looks awesome. I’m not sure you will hear cinematographers saying that’s why its used though (to support the story!) but honestly, it is such a stylized look that I refuse to believe aesthetics aren’t usually the dominant factor, even when there is messaging.
A common use in movies is for volumetric lighting to add to a sense of nostalgia, and I think this is literally as simple as ‘dusty rooms create volumetric light when the dust gets lit up, and dusty rooms make you think of the past because it means you haven’t been in that room for a while’.
I love that things like this are so simple but when used subtly, your brain doesn’t really do the middle step, like a magic trick. Other ones I notice pretty frequently are the light from a window generating ‘prison bars’ (in fact I think the awesome shot from Handmaid’s Tale above is a subtle version of this trope) and to convey a feeling of sacredness (since you often see this type of light coming from the clouds, which I’m guessing is because it passes through enough atmosphere that you get the dusty room effect).
Anyway, I mostly like volumetric lighting because it looks nice, especially when it’s colorful, so I wanted to learn how to make some with watercolors, since this is my preferred way to mess around after work.
However, it was Inktober, so with an experimental attitude in mind, i set out to make as big a mess as possible, mixing up ink and watercolor willy nilly in my quest for the perfect volumetric light!
Total Joke of a Painting #204
I had been watching the German Netflix TV show Dark (actually pretty sweet and uses fairly stylized lighting) and thought I’d kick things off with the classic ‘fog in the trees’ painting (there is a lot of fog, trees, and the color yellow, in the German Netflix TV show Dark). So, in watercolor the best thing to do is to start with light to dark, so I painted a big fat light source top right in yellow, and then let it spread out with some water to make some fog mixing with light.
Now normally with watercolor painting, the key when things don’t immediately go to plan is not to panic. In fact, master watercolor painter Joseph Zbukvic says there’s a moment in every painting in which you think all is lost and just have to have faith. So if he’s in mental anguish in his best paintings, we can all take solace in that.
However, from what I can see reviewing this painting, when things did not immediately work out, I basically said ‘fuck it’ as you can see from the tree trunks. In fact, in retrospect if I had said ‘fuck it’ maybe about 50% of that amount, I might just have got away with something, but as it stands, even the most shameless presentation of this work as modern would fall on deaf eyes. Next painting.
Driving Home at Night
The next two I went for ‘car high beams in the fog’, another classic shot from film and TV. Both these paintings are a total mess, working out how much water to add to get the right effect lead to the paper turning into pulp, holes in the paper, ruining half the sketch book when Platinum Carbon dripped through the pages, etc.
That said, you can see that i’m starting to realize that the key to a volumetric light is a bright, somewhat hard-edged light (making the core of the light as bright as possible is usually right with watercolor as you can’t ever really paint pure white), surrounded by a much softer light that still has a semi hard edge. Whats tough is that if any parts of this go wrong the effect doesn’t work, as you can see on the painting on the left (no hard edge, just looks like weird colored fog), or on the right (hard edge on right basically ruins the effect).
In fact the nightmare that is the left painting is almost better in some ways because if its soft or hard when it comes to volumetric lights, soft is better. But the best still is that the core of the light is semi hard, and the outer glow of that area is very soft.
Pig on a Bench
This next one is of The Peanut Butter Pig from our first game, Chiaro and The Elixir of Life (although this setting is certainly not one from our game). I like it better.
I think the key to this one working ok is just that you can make the edge 100% hard if you put a bunch of fog in the light ray. Then you get away with it. This is more like light streaming through fog though, and besides that, it is pretty stylized shot, more like a Pig sitting on a park bench on a stage in New York. He’s a singing pig after all, so he wouldn’t be completely out of place on Broadway.
Watcher
My next attempt after The Peanut Butter Pig. I wanted to try messing around with some color on top of the Black + Yellow mood. Making this one was pretty fun, I used so much ink that i basically ruined a whole sketch book as it all seeped in between the two pages, and I even made a hole in the page on the right, but when the mayhem cleared, I found myself satisfied with the result.
What makes the effect mostly work here, the area in the center of the light beam is brightest, and the areas on the edges clearly create a cone, but without a hard edge. The weakest part of the painting is that I didn’t fully commit to the cone shape on the right with the ink because I was worried I’d end up having to paint a hard edge if the ink didn’t go where I wanted, and that’d ruin the painting. Contrast is really hard with watercolor and even harder when you’re dropping ink on there.
Harlequin Painting
Lastly I tried applying the things I had learned about painting lights to a painting I wanted to make for our animation director, Nesrine Ibrahim, who is a big fan of Harlequin. With Birds of Pray coming up, I thought I might make her a painting of Harley. That said, I am a big fan of the old design (and knew Nasso was too), so I went with that. I gave her the one in the middle, but you can see its super tough to control the ink. The one on the far left is much more misty but lacks decent contrast overall in the picture generally. However, fixing that, well, it introduced a few, let’s call them happy accidents’ to the image.
The one on the far right has a better overall volumetric lighting effect in my mind, with the interior ‘volume’ nice and bright, and the edges nice and soft. But i think overall the painting is weaker, not just because the figure is poorly drawn but also because there is much less contrast.
That’s the last thing I’ve found tough in this exploration- getting good contrast is almost at odds with the soft lighting approach. But I do think it’s possible, and will persevere.
It was a fun exploration
Anyway, it was a fun exploration overall, and I learned a lot. I’d used ink and watercolor together in the past but usually just to make the sketch with ink, and then use the watercolor like a coloring book. This time i just poured ink all over the place.
The big problem with ink is the second it touches the paper, it is there for good, you can’t just wipe paper towel on it and kill half the value, you are stuck with all of it. On top of that, it moves in a crazy way, like dark tentacles seeping through the page, threatening to ruin the last 3 hours of your work.
You fight back desperately with a spray bottle but the dread spreads over you, ARGHHHH WHAT IS HAPPENING WHY DID I TRY TO MAKE IT BETTER ARGHlkj;a.
Here’s an example:
To me, it’s quite clear at this point that the pre-production of Death Stranding was basically Yoji Shinkawa dropping ink onto waterlogged paper while Kojima tried to work out how the hell he was going to turn this effect into a new game genre.
The Quest to become a Light Lord is madness
The last thing I’ve noticed in my studies of volumetric light (and lighting generally) is that it really turns you into a numerologist type of character and you start seeing it absolutely everywhere.
For example, I’d always been a big fan of our Art Director (Anastasia Ovchinnikova)’s magic card ‘Magic Mirror’.
And everything I have struggled to do in my own paintings she completely nails! This is no study it is the work of a master! On top of that, she pulls in some crazy colored lights, the exact thing I had experimented with in my own painting independently, but, WAY BETTER! ‘Oh, he’s trying to fool around with that semi colored volumetric light thing? I will show him how Russian Master performs THAT technique!’.
Perhaps that is my favorite part of learning new things. It makes you realize just how skilled the people you admire truly are.
Anyway, time to relax, run a bath… soak in… wait..what? Is that a rainbow in the water around my feet in the tub.. But.. I said i’d stop looking for you everywhere… It was becoming a problem… but.. your refracted light.. shifting around my soapy toes.. I need to study you more, you won’t mind. It’s the right thing to do… Watching you from afar with my notebook……
