This is our final week before our hand in on Thursday. So we had made a plan to finish all the blocking and camera work by today. We were now going to complete lighting. Mariana had sent us a useful link which explains how the different lighting worked. This was great because I had only ever used a skydome for lighting but that when cameras are being used, each shot needs to be visable and well lit using the correct sorts of lighting.
Lighting Screens:
The screen behind Stitch isn’t showing up very well because of the stages top covering the sky dome lighting. So I need to add in lighting which will make sure the boxes are illuminated as through it is a digital screen. Having read the webpage above, I deciphered that directional light would work as all screens were pointing the same direction and it didn’t matter where the directions lighting was it would give an even amount of light. This was successful as when I tried to change the material by adding a glow etc, not too much was changing.
Lighting Stitch:
So I originally tried to use a spot light but didn’t make too much sense as you couldn’t really see it with the sky dome over powering. So I used an area light just so that he was all over lit very clearly and was the main focal point on the very large stage.
Special Effect Lighting:
I wanted to include some exciting lighting as on a festival stage the bigger and brighter the better the performance. I looked online to see what sort of ideas I could do. I did a test with coloured spotlights on type to see how it would look.
I really liked how these had come out. Although I was a little worried it wouldn’t work because there was a sky dome so I guess I could dim the sky dome as though it was early evening and crank the spotlights up so it was visible.
I watched a video on youtube about making lightening in maya. This looked really cool and would work with the booth style. I wanted to try and add it in. This video also showed me that on the dynamic maya interface there are other effects like fireworks I noticed. I might look into this to see if it’s something I could use because I am still having issues with resolving the zoetrope issues.
Grid Gobo lighting technique could also be another special effect light to use. I found this on another youtube video. Gobo lighting was first introduced to me in KK’s lighting lessons. It’s the absence of light casting a shadow with a shape. This obstruction leave an interesting pattern of light. This reminds me of how disco lights are making interesting shapes on the dance floor. I was to try and create this effect of set design.
Had a meeting with Tina and Marianna to talk about lighting and how we were each going to do it before rendering. I was currently having VMware issues so could show them what lighting I had used. But I made a little diagram to show them what it looked like.
Mariana had mentioned to use a sphere in the scene to test render like we had done with KKs tutorials. Also that it was important to check render using the arnold viewer. Mariana explained to me and Tine was IPR rendering was – Interactive Progressive Render. This would be a up to date representation of the scene. We agreed that my initial way of duplicating grass makes the scene far too big. Tina showed us how she textured and added in grass roughness to the scene. We were skeptical it wouldn’t look so realistic but considering it was going to be night time it didn’t matter too much.
The length of our videos were spoken about. Marianas was 34 seconds and Tina’s was 1 min 30 but mine is a lot longer. However they had to do a lot more animation because of the dancing and movements of their characters. Stitch doesn’t move too much, and it was important to me that I didn’t chop Kenneth’s track as this was his appreciated contribution to this project. I believe we all did a similar amount of work, but in different ways which I think was the point of the project.
We discussed what sort of sky dome light we wanted to use. We landed on making it a starry night but that if we wanted to change that then it wouldn’t be too much of an issue. The acts can play over the course of a day. I was using directional light but I realised that meant the crowd was also being lite from behind so I changed this and used an area light over the screens to make them look digital.
As you can see, without any light source near the back of the stage, the screens get lost. So I made a area light that matched the size of the screen for an even amount of light. I also realised I needed to crank the numbers up on intensity settings for anything to really happen. This worked better than directional as I think it was too bright before hand.
I was testing the light intensity of the skydome to try and make the sky look more like a starry night. I got some ok results but for some reason when I rendered it looked more like afternoon and evening. I was kind of worried about time so I didn’t try and fix this issue as I wanted to start rendering today whilst having internet problems.
I tried to use the different HMRIs that me, Tina and Marianna chose but the stars didn’t seem to be coming out as well as I thought. In retrospect I would have liked to make it night time and have the scene lighted better. I made the speaks grey and they probably should have been a more metallic texture or black. They just look as though they are missing a texture which they are not. However this is just pre vis so this would be discussed further down the pipeline in a really film studio.
The sky dome light was really effecting my character in the shot where he enters the stage. So I decided to cranks it up which I think is why it looks over exposed in the render. I should have found an alternative solution.
Nevertheless, Stitch looked great in the booth when rendered. He matched the screen and the booth colours like I wanted. It was quite intense but as a Disney character those colours are used in the film branding. Also, to me I visually liked it. It was intense like the music and the character. I wanted there to a lot of light and for him to still stand out. I used a spotlight and an area light on him. I also used an area light on the front of the decks to make it look like it was a digital screen too. I wanted to make the lighting effect as I found earlier but couldn’t seem to figure it out, so I will use blue lighting zoetropes when I have rendered to After Effects.