Week 6 / Class 11

Goals for this week:

• Adjust Shot 3 animation (bring down bounce)

• Create mask (P pass) to adjust smoke color for Shot 3

• Refine atmosphere for Shots 2 and 3

• Refine composite for Shot 3

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For this class, I adjusted the lighting and added atmosphere for Shots 2 and 3. My biggest critique for Shot 2 and 3 was that the car needed to be more affected by the lights around it. It was also noted that having the shadows move as the car passes the streetlights would help with the general creepiness. I also got the critique that the bottom of car felt too bright in Shot 2, so I set up a ground-shadow reflection pass to hopefully grade down the color underneath the car.

I started with Shot 2 first and began by placing point lights where the two street lights are in the environment. By using the point lights, I am now able to get the rolling shadow effect and have the car look like it is coming in and out of the light. In this test, you can see the shadows coming from both light sources.

With the point lights in place, it was now time to add the lights coming from the other side of the street. For the light coming from the windows, I used area lights and made them the approximate size of the window based off of my scale of the environment so far. For the light color, I used the color picker to pull a color from the back plate and then brought up the saturation just a little bit to better match the color of the light spilling onto the ground. With this, now I am getting a nice orange rim on the car and the lights are now shining into the interior of the car as well.

With all my lights, here is what my current lighting rig looks like in Maya. It is 10 lights in total; 3 point lights and 7 area lights.

With all of this ready, I rendered out everything and gave it to Deanna to composite while I moved onto Shot 3. Here is what the final render looks like for Shot 2 (without atmosphere).

Once in Shot 3, I did the same exact thing where I set up point lights on all the street lamps in the environment. This also created the rolling shadow effect but since there are so many lights, it is not as drastic since the shadows are softer.

Here is my lighting rig for this shot, it is 7 point lights for all the street lamps that the car passes.

Once this was finished, I rendered everything out and composited it together. Here is the final render for Shot 3(no atmosphere).

With all the lighting redone, my other task for the week was adding atmosphere. I added the atmosphere to Shots 2 and 3 and I'm not too happy with the results yet. The current way I'm doing it is creating an aiAtmosphereVolume in the Arnold Environment settings and then color correcting it down in Nuke but the problem we're facing is that it is making our scenes too bright now, even with the color correct. Here is what it currently looks like...

While I like the rays it is getting in the lights, it is a little too much and too bright. I think we also need some fog or some atmosphere on the ground as well to add to the spookiness. One of my main goals this week is to fix the atmosphere.