52nd St - Done For Now

I think I'm done with the 52nd St Bar for now.



For this final render I was reminded of a couple obvious but important points. Don't be afraid to brighten things up, and you can always correct in post.

I'm sure eventually I'll tweak again, but onwards and upwards for now.

I feel like this is finally getting closer to completion!

52nd St - 8/3

I have done quite a bit on this tonight! My main goals were to :

1) Create more contrast on the interior
2) Help the character in the doorway stand out with more light and color
3) Continue work on a 'mood'



I got rid of some of the unnecessary elements of the scene3 I then moved the light closer to the character so as to light him better. Color was added to the character to help him stand out.

I also tried something interesting with the Occlusion pass. Typically Occlusion just darkens tight areas, but in this case I put a luminosity blending mode on the occlusion pass and merged it with the color beneath. This gave me a color tinted occlusion pass - with the occlusion being slightly blue on the outside and orange on the inside. I like the results of this!

52nd St Bar

Continuing work on the 52nd St Bar - I'm trying to make the interior more welcoming. Whereas before the lighting was more even, now I'm trying to break it up - create more texture and tone with the interior. It's not there yet, but getting better.

FOX59 Wants to Know ...

I have been working on a new animation for FOX59 - which is FOX59 Wants to Know.

So far I am 3 days and about 32 hours into this. The 'set' is pure 3D, but the monitor contents and logo were added in post. I am planning on making the animation modifiable in After Effects so that the contents of the monitors and the logo can be changed on the fly by an artist. That'll go a long way towards making quick opens for news!

52nd Street Bar

A new CGTalk Lighting Challenge was released recently - so I've decided to give it a go :)



I like where it is starting. The light motivation and color is feeling good but I think I have a lot of tweaking of intensity to do.

Right now this shot has about 6 lights in it and no Global Illumination. I'm really going to play up the accented warm light on the exterior objects as I've started to do on the barrels to the right ... I think that will be key in this shot.

I also want to update quite a bit of the modeling. It would be great to add some more architectural details.

The biggest thing I need to work on is probably the lighting on the ground (snow) outside of the building. It feels very ... confusing.

More soon!

Art Studio Revision

I couldn't quite sit on this one, so I made a few more changes :)

1) The haze quality has been bumped up to get rid of the graininess and the overall haze has been softened

2) I brightened up the bounce light a bit and darkened the textures on the walls

3) I increased the rim lighting on some of the foreground objects

4) I brough down some of the lighting on the main subjects in the center

5) I added Ambient Occlusion to the overall image rather than doing it in post. My reason for this is the haze is difficult to composite in post due to its overall effect on lighting and the occlusion pass didn't look right layered on top. I tried tweaking the occlusion pass using a haze pass to dampen it down wherever the haze existed but it still wasn't quite right ... so doing it pre-render seems to work better for this case.

Art Studio - Done for now ...

I think I'm done with this for now, looking forward to spending time on something else :)



We will revisit later.

Art Studio Update

I'm hoping to have this somewhat wrapped up by tomorrow (Monday) evening so I will have stayed true to my 1 week deadline. Here's where I started tonight:




And here's where I'm wrapping up for the evening!



Night!

Art Studio

Tonight I started working in earnest on the second lighting challenge from CGSociety - the Art Studio. Here's my starting and end point for the evening :

I'm trying to figure out exactly how I want the light to fall. This is a pretty good approximation but I want to bring more of the details out of the foreground elements without losing the silhouettes they provide. I think I'll try to focus more on rim lighting tomorrow. There are some compositional problems such as the easel in the left rear and perhaps even the hanging lights.

With all that in mind I am enjoying a number of different aspects of this setup. The lighting is beginning to feel like a warm pool in an otherwise dim room.

I have been learning to use Photoshop to texture directly on my 3D objects. There are a number of benefits to this approach, the best of which is real time visualization of how my textures look on the 3D model. I was a bit clunky with it at first but I think it's paying off. The stool seat in the foreground was painted in photoshop using a number of different images as samples - there are bump, reflection, diffuse and specular maps present.

At this point we're 15% complete.

Back to lighting

I've been working on one of the CGTalk lighting challenges : SciFi

The challenges give you a pre-modeled scene and let you focus more on lighting and shading

It has been a good opportunity for me to learn a few new tricks and to concentrate completely on CG Lighting, which I love!! What a fun week it has been working on this :) Here are some renders from the journey so far and what I've learned :












For the non CG people : Directing the eye with color and light has been one of my more central areas of focus in this project. I think compositionally it could still use some work but animation has yet to be added. I really enjoyed playing with warm\cool color contrast, I think in the next piece I'll perhaps do the inverse and see what I come up with.

For the CG people : This is my first attempt using Importons and Irradiance Particles, which I love ... I was a little biased against "GI" solutions because I hated photons in Mental Ray. This was good for me because throughout The Red Kite I forced myself to light EVERYTHING without any GI. I learned a lot through that process. Now I enjoy IP\Importons because the artifacting is low, render times aren't that bad, and it really helps make nice renders when used well.

I also learned a lot in the rendering and compositing process. To get the final render I picked up a nifty trick where I subtracted all my passes from my masterbeauty which left me with a tonemapping pass, essentially ... I then used that as a pass which I added all the other layers back onto in order to create the same as my masterbeauty pass but in layers rather than 1 pass. Using these seperated layers I was really able to add some glow to areas I wanted, make the buttons look more refractive and have more fun with color. Big fan of post processing.

centering

Creatively I've been meandering.

One of the suggestions I was given is that I should get back to basics and focus on what really matters rather than letting all the other 'things' take over. So in defiance of these 'things' I've opted to focus on the following :

1) CG Lighting \ Shading \ Texturing \ Rendering \ Compositing
2) Scripting in Python and MEL
3) My family and other ruminations (yes, I've created an out)