When lighting, I try to keep the basics in mind: to have a focus point and to create a mood. I almost always start off with creating an environment light first; get the settings working then hide it then get started on the basic three point lighting. Depending on the scene, I also use bounce lights to help put emphasis on specific areas. I personally think lighting is a magical process in cg art, seeing the gradual change of a shot from a playblast to a rendered image always blows my mind.
SOFTWARE
Autodesk Maya
Pixar's Renderman
Adobe Photoshop
The Foundry Nuke
Copyright 2013 Tiffany Chou, Artie rig belongs to Ringling College of Art and Design
The assignment was to create a scene where the character is waiting and essentially doing nothing. My personal goal for this project was to utilize lighting to make the scene more interesting. Thus, I built a window and had the window cast a soft shadow over the focus of the scene, the character to draw the viewer's eyes over. For this scene I studied a lot about lighting theory and how they effect each other through James Gurney's Color and Light. It was a really interesting read and while the book was meant for painters, I applied the same theory into 3D and found that the same theories applied. Creating a cool sky light on low intensity balances out the harsh warm sunlight and thus giving a more subdued early morning feel.
Copyright 2014 Tiffany Chou, Gabriella Lutostanski, Rachael Yap
The goal of this shot was to bring focus to both the box that is running way on top of the fences as well as the protagonist, Holly that is reaching out in attempt to retrieve the box (dubbed Pinky due to the pink bow). With the box already in the foreground I had to figure out a way to balance the shot and draw the viewers' focus back down to Holly. Thus, the light intensity on Holly's face was amped-up, with the fence shadows falling across her face, it creates a visual interest that would draw the viewers' eyes back down. To further make sure that the colors around Holly and Pinky plays a contrasting part to each other, lights were constrained to only hit Holly and the areas around her. This makes the floor around Holly brighter, while the area around Pinky was darker.
Copyright 2014 Tiffany Chou, Gabriella Lutostanski, Rachael Yap
The focus of this shot is to show the box running frantically to the door of the house, thus I wanted to direct the eye to the box and it's main detail, the bow. The shot takes place in the late afternoon where the sun is about to set, so I used the hot glaring sunlight as a rim light, hitting it right on the top of the box to draw the eyes over. To have more control over how much light want emitted onto certain areas, I utilized a lot of bounce lights to isolate areas that I want to be light up such as the doorstep. With the lights coming from the house, I decided to put incandescence on the window glass of the house as to show a hint of lighting coming from inside the house. Without any extra lights in the house, this allowed my team to cut down on unnecessary rendertime.
Copyright 2014 Tiffany Chou, Gabriella Lutostanski, Rachael Yap
Again like the chase scene, the pint of the shot was to make sure that the viewer's eyes are drawn to both Holly and Pinky. The most challenging and difficult part about a chase scene set during sunset is the make sure the position of the sun is constant. Keeping that in mind, I cheated a little and angled the key light (the sun light) a little so that the shadows from the buildings would form a line on the ground. With that, both the shadow and the sidewalk acted as leading lines that direct the eyes from Holly to Pinky.
Copyright 2014 Tiffany Chou, Gabriella Lutostanski, Rachael Yap
Set inside the office, the challenge of this seemly simple shot was to make sure distracting shadows from the typical overhead incandescence office lights are not being cast. Thus, I angled the over head light slightly so that the shadows would fall at a more appealing angel and softened the shadows so that they are not distracting to the viewer.
Copyright 2014 Tiffany Chou, Gabriella Lutostanski, Rachael Yap
With the film have a chase sequence, this particular shot had a lot of layers of object whizzing by. The goal was to make the viewers' eyes stay drawn onto the midground where Holly and Pinky are. Thus, objects in the foreground such as the telephone poles and the trashcan are cast with less lights and blurred out with darker textures while the buildings in the background are made lighter and more faded to show contrast to the light colored Holly on top of the black steal fence. The design of the was originally a brick wall, however the design change was made to give more visual interest and by making the midground the busiest area of the scene, the viewers' eyes are naturally drawn towards it.
Copyright 2014 Tiffany Chou, Gabriella Lutostanski, Rachael Yap
This shot has Holly going down the hills towards the sun. The hard part about this shot was to make sure that Holly isn't blown out while still showing the colors of the hot, pinkish colors throughout the shot. To do this, I used bounce lights to gradually build up on the different colors of the sun and used a pinkish rim light to bright out highlights on the scooter and Holly's hair.
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