delete

Che Dolce Amore!

What sweet love! Taking full advantage of the Italian life, Josh brings on the charm with his sweetheart, Mery.

Inspiration

GET IN THE MOOD


Get pre-production right, the rest of the scene goes more smoothly. First thing: references - the blueprint and setting the mood. 

Setting the Scene

Gotta say, when setting up a scene, pillaging from different assets is half the fun. In this case, several assets had to be brought in and manipulated to create the Italian village square and populate the scene. 

 

Timelapse

A process is never perfect from the start, many changes and iterations are worked on before the final version. 

 

Final

Implementing the feedback from lighting experts Quan Tran (WetaFX) and Adam Yost (Skydance), I was able to add detailed polish to the final image. This also gave me valuable insight about working in a studio with a Lighting Lead and Directors.

Challenges

This was a more complex lighting rig set up than the projects I had previously worked on, which not only included character lighting but environment as well.

For this project, I wanted to challenge myself even further. Adding to my arsenal of knowledge this time were the following:

- adding rigs to pose with two of the three interacting,
- grooming with Xgen and styling hair for male and female, and
- remodeling some geo to fit my needs as well as creating new textures. 

It only gets better with time...

A couple months later, I had the honor of having one of the lighters from the original film, Francesco Giroldini, give feedback on my work. Not only was I able to improve the shot even more, one of the most amazing things about looking back on a project is to see how far I've come.

Because of what I know now, I noticed processes that could be improved and was able to incorporate them. 

One such improvement was in the fur. Having learned more about grooming in my project Dolce Amore, I now understood how melanin and diffuse works on hairs. By changing melanin and diffuse from 1 to 0, I was able to gain specularity on the fur which was missing.

Another epiphany was simply looking at the reference again and noticing details my eye was not trained to see a few months ago. Volumetrics, for example. 

Francesco's paintover included volume. When I added a volume shader and adjusted the lights, I was able to get closer to the reference without as much color-grading in Nuke. 

Misfits


Going back to previous work as I gain experience, I am able to look at my own work even more critically.

For this scene, there are a couple things that I will be going back to 'fix.' Two such changes are the missing 'grainy noise' on the wall behind the characters and pulling back just a hair on the volume going into the room from the doorway.

As stated previously, one of the challenges for this scene was  getting the shaders to work with the lighting. This scene was a great lesson in the importance of spending time on the look dev. The more get right at the early stages, the easier the following stages go.

My biggest 'obsession' in this scene was the gradient of light on the wall. At first glance I figured it was simply light coming from the door, but after further study I felt that instead it was more likely a light coming from above, like a ceiling light.

As I gain experience and look back at my previous work, I am able to look at my own work even more critically. For this scene, there are a couple things that I will be going back to 'fix.' Two such changes are the missing 'grainy noise' on the wall behind the characters and pulling back just a hair on the volume going into the room from the doorway.




Challenges Along the Way

Part of Summer Nights challenges

I started this project with an aggressive self-imposed deadline of one month. BUT, as the title of this section suggests, there have been challenges.
Upon return from Siggraph mid-August, this project was put on temporary hold in order to start the Pixar RenderMan challenge as well as a project with my mentor (Catcall, above).

Everything was moving along quite nicely until things seemed to get progressively worse. This was more due to Maya acting up (crashing, things not the same the next time the scene opened, lights disappearing, just weird stuff).

I was able to get the lights to match color of the reference on some areas, but then other areas would be off. Adjusting lighting to fix one would change the other. So back and forth trying to find the balance. Went in circles for a while. Fix one, another area 'broke.' Next, the water in the scene stopped 'picking up' the blue from the ambient and moon. Then windows and lightbulbs weren't transparent anymore.

To solve the challenge, I wrote down specs on the lights that seemed to work, then reverted back to a previous version where things were working then input the information.

Then just when I was getting somewhere, Maya crashes again. All work lost. The issue with the rooftops and cobblestone not getting the ambient color still not solved. Deadline closing in.

Gotta love challenges, huh?

Seeing Double