Designing Shadows

I was watching the Secrets of Shading by Steven Zapata the other day and he mentioned a concept that really got stuck in my head:

Everything that you put down into a drawing, you need to draw it and design it and give it as much thought as any other part of the drawing.

Being a 3D artist, I never really paid that much attention to shadows. Shadows are there. It’s what you get for free. You can influence them with the light setup, but more often than not you just get back to the setups you already know. There’s a trusty rig for isometric dioramas, which I learned from Roman Klčo of Polygon Runway. There’s a few “standard” portrait setups that I picked up from the literature. I never really bothered to think why one light clicks with me better than the other, though, until Steven mentioned it in his video.

You get used to shadows being exactly right with photorealistic rendering engines like Blender’s Cycles. If it doesn’t look good, of course it’s because you didn’t place the light source properly, or you didn’t balance its power right, or its colour is off. Never before had a thought that I need to design for the shadows crossed my mind, because I was thinking with the light sources all the way until I went to study some fundamentals of 2D media.

When you draw the shadows, it’s different. It’s up to you to place the flat sketch into a 3D space and make sure the light bounces in all the right directions. There’s no machine to cast the light rays down on your model, and you are free to be as photorealistic or as artistic as you wish. Shadows are just a tool in our toolbox, and, as any other tool, we need to learn to use it properly. Our viewers don’t see the light sources, they only see the shadows those sources create. Which means that you need to pay more attention to how the shadows look, then how the lights are set up.

This brings me back to the thought that a 3D render has way more to do with professional photography, and observing how photographers work will help you improve the quality of renders. While the photographers are limited with the physical world and we have all the default cubes at our fingertips, the core concepts are exactly the same. And just like 2D artist has to learn how to design the shadows to make them look interesting, we need to learn to place our light sources, bounce light surfaces and matte blackouts to achieve the same goal. This is why a simple gobos library can add visual interest to your scene even without your realising what those shadows do exactly to your render.

Pay more attention to how you work with every part of your picture, be it negative space or shadow. In the end, the result is a still image, and it doesn’t matter if you used Blender or a charcoal on paper to get there. The fundamentals are the same.


Last modified on 26 January 2025