LLD - A3 - Alex Drury

Lighting and Look Development Assessment 3 - Filmic Renders

My original ideas for a theme/story of my world were:
- A fantasy town with a mood of mystery and newness, but also sort of uncanny valley/familiar but not quite
- Inspired by The Owl House as I have been watching that recently I’m not sure how to get that vibe without having fantasy people and monsters in the scene, which is difficult to find/do (especially for free)

- Fantasy city but with 2D drawn monsters, giving me like the Little Big Planet Intro vibes

- Fighter jets flying out of a portal into a medieval town - very random haha

- Adventure time vibes

I was going to create a fantasy town and a market scene, but decided against it because of time… etc. (having people models, nowhere to hide with bright lighting etc.)

I ended up deciding on creating a post-apocalyptic scene with the Aftermath Kitbash Assets.

Inspiration

My idea is to create a post apocalyptic scene inspired by the above images, featuring a cat standing over a desolate cityscape.(inspired alot by the amazing game stray).

The above image was my main reference for the layout and inspiration of my scene.

Creation Proccess

The first step after finding my references and deciding on an idea/theme was to layout my scene in MAYA with the base kitbash assets. I chose to use the Aftermath set.

After laying out my scenes forground, which was done through examining all the assets and modifying a destroyed room in a building model to fit more closely to my references design, I begun creating the tree section of my scene.

I struggled for a bit to source realistic tree assets that I was happy with, but after searching for a bit I found some I liked. The next issue was texturing them which fior a while I was very confused and didnt understand why they failed to work properly even though I was following what MAYA was telling me to do. Luckily a MAYA texture tutorial on Youtube helped me solve the issue by realising I needed a black and white image of the leaf textures to to use for the opacity for the textures to propley render in arnold, so I created the black and white images.

I proceded after finishing the trees to fix up and add more to the foreground of the scene by using items and pieces of the rubble throughout the kitbash scene to add more diversity and damage to the foreground.

The above is my initial beauty render. After looking at it for a bit, I decided I need to spend a lot more time making it look better. These are some things I fixed up:

- Found, added and posed a better cat model

- Fixing the right inside wall to make it look more damaged

- Rearranging the rocks to and make the composition nicer\

- Additons and alterations to the rocks and rubble in the foreground to make the composition of the scene more appealing and presentable, as well as to eliminate floating rocks

- Swapping some of the kitbash materials with quixel bridge materials for higher realism (on the floor, roof and the metal bars)

- Edited the lighting a lot

- Changing the position of the cat so it was closer to the centre of the image to draw the viewers eye

- Adding in fog (I did attempt to add in fog before, but it didn't seem to want to co-orporate. After a lot of trial and error, I did end up getting it sorta working, though I wish the fog rose higher and covered the tops of the buildings, especially in the far background, I couldn't get it to work proply sadly :( )

- Moving the rocks on the left side to make it look more like the floor has broken and sunken down, and the floor that has risen to the left is actually the original height of the floor

- Turned down the specular to around 0.2 for all kitbash materials as they were way too unrealistically shiny (which you can't actually see in the above render, because the HDR I used, which was apart of Tom's template file, didn't have specular and a few other things turned on, which I didn't realise for a good long while)

Sadly during making all these changes, I ran into an error that occured when rendering with random blue polygons appearing and emitting blue light in my render. I tried fixing the problem by manually deleting all of the blue polygons. After doing so, there was still blue light emitting from somewhere even though I deleted all of the visible blue polygons (well, the ones I could find), so I ended up needing to go back to a previous save file and re-do a lot of my work. This included fixing the inside right wall to look more damaged, which I spent a good hour on.

I proceeded to source a new more high quality cat model, which I posed myself to directly match a reference I liked alot.(As seen below).

Also quick tangent to highlight epic, dynamic cat pose!!!!

Compositing

Sunrise - Hero Compositing

I wanted to create a warmer feel compared to the beauty render, so I turned up the saturation a lot to add the colours back and changed the hue to make them warmer. Below is the original beauty render, and then the compositing process.

Before and after comping comparison:

Sunset - Sidekick 1 Compositing

For this render, I wanted to keep the darkness but also still have a focus on the cat, so I merged all the layers twice, making one darker and one lighter. I put the darker on top of the lighter and lightly erased with a low opacity brush around the cat on the darker layer, so the brighter layer would shine through from underneath. This brings more colour to the cat and focus to it too.

Below is the original beauty render, and then the compositing process.

Before and after comping comparison:

Moonlight - Sidekick 2 Compositing

I wanted to make this piece moody but also beautiful, with a emphasis on the blue glow of the moon, hence turning up the saturation and upping the contrast.

Below is the original beauty render, and then the compositing process.