Week 2 - (Question)

Starting off a new tri is always been tough as the discipline I had, eroded of the holidays. When coming into the IND302 the thing I first and foremost knew what I wanted to accomplish was something in the field of 3D and light. Lighting has been a topic that wasn't taught that much in depth at QANTM. Many of my projects I felt were crippled in some way or another because I didn't have strong, or should I say, much fundamental understanding about light.

The great thing about learning skills in light is that you can use it to basically do a lot to sell a scene. Projects are literally brought to life with the right lighting setup. The negative to all this is the lack of organic creativity within the scope of process. Basically you'd be spending a lot of time toying with light attributes, nodes and rendering *sigh*. With the knowledge of light I feel would be a very useful topic for me to understand, not only as a broad technical skill but to bring back into IEP.  

As the first week progressed I constantly thought about how I could actually utilise this in IEP and form a question around it. I decided that since my main issue with IEP lighting was with the environment that I would focus on both quality and efficiency. My original question was long the lines of, "what are effective methods of producing lighting systems for environments?” I queried this to my "facilitator" on how I could properly structure the question. The feedback I got was more personalising the question to the conditions that I was putting myself under. I was making light for animation and I was only able to do tests on the QANTM PCs. The question then became what it is at now...

Thesis: What are effective methods of producing lighting systems for exterior (and interior) environments with the limitations of average consumer hardware for a 3D animation?

I didn't really give myself time to figure out a proper methodology which is what I'll be doing for week 3. I'll also be doing an experiment in there as well (a simple one though) to catch up for the lost time. Also learnt my first lesson on sticking with the thesis. I was gunner look into the Arnold renderer but was told it was mainly for high end commercial use (which I already know). It kind of defeats the purpose if I am not focusing what the public has access to, though I could probably put it in one of my tests by wording one of my weeks a certain way.