Week 8 - (Lighting and Rendering)

This would be the third week that I have been working towards creating a believable daylight scene. As much as it is frustrating that I have been on this for so long it is good that I have a much more thorough understanding of lighting in Maya.

Anyway, advice I got last week was to look into 'Lighting and Rendering' as well as HDRI lighting and colour management. I ended up actually borrowing the book and was wondering why I didn't find it before. A lot of it covered stuff I had already knew (had previously researched) but still came in handy to read.

Method

For the actually experiment for this week I was going to finally study photography and try to simulate a similar lighting setup as I could. Though before I could do that I had to remove the exposure node that I didn't want to be dependent on. From what I learnt, the way to effect exposure without using the node is through colour management.

Fig 1. Base from week 7

Originally all I knew about colour management was at the top of rendering settings. It also lies within each texture that is imported and through the render screen (was hard to find). Through there the image profile is set to linear sRGB and the Display is set to sRGB. This is meant to simulate the correct lighting for most computer screens apparently. This was rendering as an .EXR in order to adjust the gamma correctly (2.2).

Fig 2. Exposure adjustment manually

In addition the light rig I set up other lights to accommodate for bounced light. This was mainly target lights around the center  court as it was the location where the eye would look. There were also area lights put in the back to give variation to the grass (though the shadows do disappear a bit).

Fig 3. Light Setup 1 

Fig 4. Light Setup 2

Fig 5. Final 

HDRI lighting was played with a little. The method which i think was correct that I took was adding it as a skybox then  Final gather it across the scene. The results looked good but the dispersion of light got rid of my hard shadows (maybe it might look good for distant stuff). It also seemed like a mental ray dependant system (of what I discovered). Technically I still use mental ray, but I know I can easier change to other renders with little tweaks rather than have build in mental ray stuff to my rigging.

Fig 6. HDRI (sadly not a good example)

Learning Contract

Thanks to illness and being stuck in IND my learning contract has not only gotten behind but is in need of an update.

Essentially I have covered enough in order to move onto  creative lighting and other things I said I would do.

For week 9 I'd like to move onto creative lighting setups and manipulating the scene that I am currently using. Playing with temperatures of light will be introduced here as well as I have missed out on that week.

For week 10 I'll be looking at the effects still of a couple of renderings in order to both support my research to making efficient light rigs and use of average consumer hardware.

Week 11 might all spill into week 12 but will stand as the amassing of all the work I have done on my experiments. It will be fixated towards trying to create an emotional experience for the viewer through lighting. This will also may be altered through different angles of the scene to have a more depth look into the lit environment. There is a chance this may not happen due to deviating from the thesis but would be cool to end on. I may ask just to clarify.   

References

Birn, J.(2010). [digital] Lighting and Rendering. (2rd edition).Berkeley, CA:New Riders