Behind the Scenes

If I Can Dream

Elvis' "If I Can Dream" from his 1968 Comeback Special is special to me for two reasons:

1. I am attempting a comeback of sorts - a career change to my childhood dream job.
2. The title of the song says it all, If I Can Dream. As long as I dream, there is possibility of my dream to come true.

The Starting Point

With the talent of animator Ender Perez-Lopez, we start with the scene before special touches of look dev, groom, lighting, and compositing are added.

Elvio is going to Vegas - er, Katana, baby!

Maya isn't known for her lighting abilities. Even in a relatively small scene as this, once lights are added, Maya crashes - often.It was time to make the move to Katana, lights and all. What better way to also get into the newest and greatest workflows, USD. So, Elvio is packing up and moving to Vegas, baby - er, to Katana via a USD workflow.

Check out what I learned and am passing on for the next generation of lighters on LightLinks YouTube channel.

Energy Efficiency - Mesh Lights v. Mask

In Maya, the Elvio sign is created with sphere instances with mesh lights. Now that we are in Katana, two challenges came up.

Instancing:

Well, this is still a head-scratcher. If you noticed, part of my set has some Elvio letters (many tiny spheres to spell out the Elvio). Looking at the USD import in the viewport, it seems the instancing worked - I mean you can see the Elvio letters, right?

Um, yes and no.

Yes, in the viewport, but not when rendering. 🤔 (Also note that the original geo that instancing was based on have swollen to a much larger sphere and are the only ones that show in the render.)

Meshlights:

The instances are to be mesh lights. When imported, the mesh for the meshlights came over fine, but the lights attached to the mesh did not.

After many hours (days actually) of talking with the Foundry peeps and other lighters, it has been determined that the transfer of instances and mesh lights are still a work in progress with USD.

Solution:
1. Recreate the Elvio sign in Katana and add mesh lights natively.
OR
2. Create a image mask of the letters in Affinity Designer, add the mask to the emission of a plane geometry.Went with option #2: saves time and will be more efficient on rendering.
Bonus: This way is also more easily directable.

Create an image mask.

Connect mask to the emission of the geo. Adjust attributes and voila! Insta-lights.

Keyframing Lights

Yep, the following iteration is much, much better. Started working on keyframing the lighting where needed.

Getting down to the last 20% now! Have matched the reference and started to add subtle improvements.

Did you notice that the fantastic Elvio pompedour is finished? Had an interesting couple days attaching the groom to the alembic. Yep, gonna make a 'how-to' vid for that one. Stay tuned to the LightLinks Katana Learning Channel on YouTube!

maya_v27_r01d_v2 Every 5 frames. No comp work. Elvis - If I Can Dream full ref

Keyframing, bad...Follow spot, good

Turns out, keyframing lights is not the preferred method in a studio environment. So the awesomeness called Matt Hicks taught me how to set up a 'follow spot' light.

Wow! What an improvement. Additionally, was able to trim down the number of lights making the scene more efficient.