Lightcuts ! -> Per-Camera Lighting
UPDATE 1.9.3: now supports linking worlds to any of your cameras !
WHY ?
LightCuts finally allows you to tweak & polish your lighting & composition on a per-camera basis, as this is both ESSENTIAL in film-making ,
(Directors design their lights for each camera angle, to perfect each shot's readability and composition.)
And previously IMPOSSIBLE to do in blender.
(The workaround, which I used a lot, wasted me days, because it's absolute hell, keyframing collection instances, manually disabling your lighting collections as you work them and before rendering ect.. recipe for disaster, but previously the only way in blender.)
HOW ?
Click "Enable LightCuts !"
→ Each camera spawns a collection with its name, and any object placed inside is visible only to this camera.
(you can add /remove or rename cameras, collections update instantly as long as LightCuts is Enabled.)
→ After that first click, the only thing you have to worry about is the cinematography of each of your shots !
(You can place meshes to polish your composition, lights obviously, but also shadow planes and fog cubes, even collection instances, particles & VFX ect..)
Tutorial:
How to use more than 1 camera ?
→ You can work with camera markers to time your cuts, LightCuts has buttons to add them more easily, but you can also simply switch between your cameras by clicking on their green icon in the outliner, the collections visibility updates instantly in both case.
How to send the blend file on a render farm ?
→ If you need to send your file to farm / other PC, which does not have the addon, simply click "bake", to have the lights & objects visibility keyframed. To revert to real time editing, simply click "Unbake".
UPDATE 1.9.3: World linking !
→ You can select a world under each camera, to change the time of day for example, or control exactly the orientation of your HDRi for each of your shot, to light perfectly your characters !
Why did I create LightCuts !?
Because we're producing a series of very efficiently made short films at OnePixelBrush, and the first one that was just selected at Annecy, required the director, Shaddy Safadi, to manually manage dozens of lighting collection in order to perfect the lighting / shadows / fog of each shot. We did not have LightCuts at the time so we wasted days manually keyframing and toggling all these collections instances. (as collections cannot be visibility keyframed in blender) And obviously often forgetting to update these keyframes when the shot's duration changed, or when a tweak was made while forgetting to disable the source collections, both of which means you're render is wasted and you're good to open your blend file and send it on your renderfarm again.
Have questions about this product?
Contact the creator on SuperHive
or discord:
https://discord.gg/PVY3acmqNM
Loïc Bramoullé