Abominable Snowball

Ahhhh, Chillin'

After days of a cold winter storm, Abominable Snowball enjoys a moment soaking in the morning sun.

Finding the Light

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

Creating the Shot

Sometimes it takes a few iterations to get the right shot. In this case, the story was really about one little monster, keying in on him, well, was key.

Make the Sun Rise

Once the camera is set and the texturing is done, finally get to light!

When starting a scene's lighting, first thing to do is 'broad-stroke' lights - ambient and key. The goal at this stage is trying to get the scene as close to the final version as possible before adding detail lighting such as top, wraps, rims, and any light linking.

Righting the Light

Being new at something doesn't mean I couldn't get creative with getting the result I was striving for. I had two challenges: Challenge 1:
Color of the background (BG) treesAt the time I didn't know about the power of light linking, so the wrap light gave the BG trees more light than necessary (and turning the them pink). To solve this, I used a cryptomatte and a grade node - one for the blue hue, one for the bit of pink. Additionally, to add dimension, a gradient was added to the trees - lighter at top, shadier at the bottom.

Once I revisited the project, after having more experience under my belt, I added the appropriate light links to the rig. This negated the drastic grading of the trees to the appropriate color in Nuke.

Challenge 2:
Replace the foreground (FG) of a beauty shot to avoid re-renderingI had inadvertently rendered a master beauty instead of the BG only after adding depth of field (DOF) in Maya. To avoid re-rendering, I had to figure out how to remove the FG in order to replace it with the updated version. This was accomplished with the merge (mask) and a cryptomatte.

You might be thinking, those are simple solutions, right? Well, I had only started to learn Nuke a couple weeks prior! By analyzing what I knew about masks and grading, I was able to piece together a script that worked.

before

after

Reference v Result

Final

Getting the 'all good' from veteran lighter, Sergei Volkov (BlueSky, Animal Logic, The Mill), here is the final result!

Challenges

Being that Abominable Snowball was my first completed lighting project (of course, many unfinished scenes provided many a lesson!) and only having opened Maya, Arnold, and Nuke just a couple of months prior (heck, I didn't even know what Arnold was!) - every step was a new challenge to overcome, a new lesson learned, a discovery - and I learned it all at once.From learning the interfaces
to moving and manipulating in 3D space
to camera settings and composition
to shading and texturing.
All this before lighting!
Then on to rendering and compositing.