‘Tis the season to add a touch of magic to your visual effects, and what better way than with Christmas baubles! From nice shiny silver ones to matte white wonders and the versatile grey in-betweeners, these festive ornaments can be the secret weapons in your VFX arsenal, allowing you to get excellent light reference when you’re shooting.
Let’s unwrap the possibilities:
1. Nice Shiny Silver Ones: Reflective Elegance
What do you see? Become the spoon…
Embrace the power of reflective spheres, especially those nice shiny silver ones, to capture lighting references with ease. Look at the image above.
Mere mortals look at that and think it’s a photo of a christmas ornament. But not you, the VFX artist. You look at the bauble, and you see a white floor, and 3 strategically placed softboxes - these chrome spheres provide an instant snapshot of the set’s lighting conditions. If you were adding a 3D digital element to the shot, you would create a digital white floor, and 3 digital softboxes, and you’d be able to get a perfect match.
2. Nice Matte White Ones: Balancing Brilliance
White isn’t always white. What white is right? That’s what your bauble will tell you…
In the realm of light balancing, the matte white bauble takes the spotlight.
If you’re not familiar with it already, the idea of light balancing in photography is to establish what color white is under the conditions that you’re shooting in because white isn’t always white. White under a blue light is blue, and under a yellow light is yellow.
This reference point is not just for photographers; it’s a valuable tool for VFX artists too.
3. Nice Grey Inbetweeners: Shades of Precision
Black spheres…not often used, but the more reference, the better. Drill a hole in one, and you’ve got a “light trap” too!
Understanding how white, black, and grey look in our shot is essential to matching values. We’ve just covered white spheres. Black spheres could definitely be useful, but we generally don’t use them. Instead we’ll use a “light trap”, which is a fancy word for a hole. That will show us how true black looks (hint - often it’s not black. Lens flare or on-set atmospherics will lighten it a lot)
Grey spheres? Yup, that’s a thing! So get your hands on a nice tasty grey bauble, and you’re set.
Ish. Here’s a caveat - grey is literally any value between white and black. So in photography and VFX we’re quite picky about greys.
It’s not perfect. But in VFX, “good enough” is often good enough
The perfect grey sphere is “middle grey”, which is the exact midpoint between white and black on a linear scale.o add more confusion to the equation, mid-gray is also called 18 percent gray - because it’s reflecting 18 percent of the light that hits it.
The chances of your Christmas ball being perfectly 18 percent gray are pretty limited. SO if you want to be really precise about it, you’re going to have to get creative. I go into a paint shop and ask them to create an 18 percent gray paint, and use that to paint my spheres.
This holiday season, let Christmas baubles spark inspiration in your visual effects creations. Unleash the magic and transform your projects into extraordinary masterpieces.
Happy VFX-ing!
