Combined Setting and Base set up for Lighting

The sets now are all brought together and are sinking up. I've painted few more texture/transparency maps to make sure all is sticking ( example the far away water edge flows nicely into the sky or the tops of the mountains merge with atmosphere ect.)

Also Alan helped a lot with understanding the lighting set up, how to think about it. To my joy, it looks like its gonna be pretty much hands on when I will actually play with light types and it won't all disappear under heavy tables of maya generated lighting.

Dream Island's Lighting

Lighting tests. Firstly we see island in daylight but from far away, while the Ivan is exploring surroundings and himself.

 

By the time he flys and reaches the island it is a dark night and the island would be  lit only by lantern light. So far it seems that when the island is in a close up of a camera, it is better to have a setting covered gently by  darkness as then it keeps the mistery and softness of the place. However, when it will be about  a particular shot, I'll put in few more and dim lights to bring some of the detail back.

'Painting up' the Scenes

 Last couple of days the time went on 'painting up' and retouching the scenes. Whether it meant building and bringing in last details, or 'painting' the set using  lighting set up for the better final image result.

So to start with, The opening scenes only briefly suggest that Ivan perhaps isn't the only character in the story. As camera pushes through the workshop we notice one another model in the set, also on the notice board next to Ivan there is a worn-of sketch of other mish-mash models.

So I've designed and created the Shiball (she has ship parts and ball) character.

the texturing for this character:

Further I went back to the second environment again . First,  trying to figure out ocean shader . With the help of Simon Holland, I think now it looks far better.

Other  largest elements in the scene was the front modeled trees.

And the scene, after bringing the major elements together now looks like that:

 However if this was a painting I'd say it lack of that last layer of details. And to be specific:  Nests, waist disposals, wind vane on the house, foam for shore line, grass here and there, little statues , something to also cover the contact point of trees and the ground. Just lots of things nobody notices yet it somehow brings  life to the scene.

Few more scenes are ready to be baked after spending that time for lighting, render setting.

Much like with animation, lighting is also getting easier and easier . Through trial, experimenting, reading on tips,  it reaches the point when you are actually getting creative with it in maya , even if it is not as simple as making few brush strokes in photoshop. Light linking is used extensively to emphasize  some of the set's and particularly character's aspects.

Lastly, I think this picture summarizes the work of past few days: the needed other elements are built and  brought in ( outer environment) the lighting is set up, rendering (render settings,  passes and effects) are adjusted.
 

Now I started working on show reel's element, and personal branding. Hopefully these will take no more than few days.

Project progress: Lighting and Animating

Today the time was spent to get the lighting working when character was finally set in to the scene.

Each bit of  scene ( in total 7 for act 1) is lighten separately.

For example in this scene  four more lights support the character to create a volumetric lighting. Key light,  few section boost lights and rim light shape the bird in this image. I think more work is needed still. For example light wings. Also it is clear now, the background is to empty .

This scene I'm pretty happy with. Though it looks like it still needs some tweaking on shadows.

In this scene I used rim  and Rembrandt short lights (light which is 45 degree to the character) to separate  the character from the background .

All the images have render layers combined. So this perhaps would be the end result of animation looks.

And here is the portion of animation. The Bird after encountering the enchanting Island rushes towards it and gazes at it in chill amazement.

As usually after seeing a sequence of animation I go back and do some curve cleaning, but essentially it is the same what's in the video.