Look and light

When to use

When building a set, a character's materials or a scene's lighting, and when a draft reads as cheap CG: too bright, too smooth, everything glowing, or floating in black.

Procedure

1. Real textures on every surface. Every set surface gets a real PBR material (albedo, roughness and normal maps): wood, plaster, carpet, concrete, fabric, metal, asphalt. Poly Haven's CC0 textures, HDRIs and models are a good source. Pick a texel density that holds up at the framing. Keep the files in the project with a note of where each came from. Smooth, flatly shaded surfaces read as placeholders.
2. Keep it dark. Dense detail at full brightness overwhelms the frame and kills the read of what matters. Sets and crowds stay dark and muted, lit only by real sources at their real reach. On a dark set, only the thing that should read is lit.
3. Only real light sources glow. Lamps, bulbs, LED strips, screens, lit windows, tubes and fire emit, at real levels. Every other surface gets zero emissive: coins, metal, rails, painted text, sand, accent bands. Capping a fake glow low is still a fake glow. An emissive value authored low (under ~0.4) usually means a surface faking its own light.
4. Real falloff (three.js):
   • point and spot lights get decay = 2 and a distance;
   • set each light's intensity at its nearest subject (illuminance = intensity / distance²), not by eye;
   • a RectAreaLight has no range and casts no shadow, so a small practical (a phone, a screen, a bulb) is a SpotLight or PointLight with a short distance, gone within about a meter;
   • no camera-side fill, and no emissive "rim" terms in shaders lighting people evenly.
5. A dark space, not a void. Don't float a scene in pure black all round. Give it a floor, haze or a dim structure, lit by the scene's own sources and falling off fast.
6. Judge color in the film's light. Tune a color on a still of the real scene where it appears, and sample the rendered pixel. A swatch tuned in a demo's lighting is wrong in every shot that matters: a gray tuned in a lineup came out charcoal in the real scene.
7. Stylized form, real colors. When a character comes from photos, take its colors and markings from them and build the form as a clean, appealing stylized version. Never fit the sculpt to the photos: a pose's squashed cheek becomes a permanent one.
8. A style needs structure, not a filter. I Can Make Anything's comic print worked because of ink outlines, a screen-fixed halftone, hard light bands, a saturated world against a muted hero, and one accent color reserved for one character.
9. Separation: a focal value per shot, warm against cool, a palette per place, colorblind-safe.

Failure modes

• Naming a lighting cause from a list of lights. The brightest light in a census added almost nothing to the crowd. Turn each light off in turn (or solo it) and measure what it adds to the subject.
• An audit whose masks leak: materials the audit can't override draw as themselves, and a bright wall counted as lit people made a darker frame read as brighter. Look at the leaked pixels before reporting.
• A bloom veil from a large white surface (an LED wall) washing everything.

Verify

• Before a lighting pass, list every emissive material by name and every light with its intensity, distance and decay. Zero the fakes at their source.
• Solo each light and measure its contribution on the subject.
• Look at stills for anything lit for no reason, and zoom into the dark areas for banding.
• Check textures at the closest framing they appear in, at full resolution.