Project Weeks 5/6: Lighting and Rendering

Even though I promised to make two different blogs for the lighting and the rendering, they really kind of go hand in hand, so I'm going to condense them into this single post.

Lighting is the process of adding lights to the scene (imagine that). I used a modified three point lighting system, which involved placing a point light, two fill lights, and a back light. The point, or main, light is in front of and slightly above Kopf, and is shining down and casting a shadow behind him. It is the only of the 4 lights to emit diffuse and specular. My two fill lights are located on Kopf's sides, and help to make the shadows on his body less intense so as not to obscure detail. The back light is directly behind Kopf and shines forward to help him stand out more against the background and add depth.

I then added a simple camera, placed its pivot point inside of Kopf around his mid-section, and set the camera to rotate 360 degrees around him over a span of 120 frames (about 5 seconds).

My lights from the back, showing the point light furthest away, the back light closest, and the fill lights in between

I attempted to render out in mental ray, a plugin which using raytracing to simulate natural light. However, given how OS X Mavericks seems to hate mental ray (and Maya in general), I was not able to batch render out my full rotation. I did, however, get this pretty sweet still shot.

He looks pretty nice when his spine isn't wrapping around itself

I used an additional setting in mental ray called global illumination to help with indirect bounce lighting, which is why you can see the tinge of red from the floor shining onto his lower body. However, this also created the issue of the red circles on the floor. The circles are created when the amount of photons being cast by a light are too small to accurately bounce light off of an area, but the Mac was already about to catch fire while rendering it, so I couldn't really push it further.

You may be asking: Where is the final rotation? Well, it's coming in the next post, where I will summarize my experience and point out areas that I still need to work on. It won't initially be rendered in mental ray, but I will find some way to get that done later. It will instead be in the (rather disappointing looking) Maya Software.