Wednesday, 7 October 2015

Lights and Lenses - Lighting and Reflection Effects Within the Short Film

Due to the film's unique setting and animated style, I am granted a large amount of freedom with the scenery and sets that I am designing. As it is set on a minute scale, it allows me to explore some of the more vibrant parts of the world, as anything is possible with the 3D animation. so, whereas a live action film would be limited by budget, props, physics and other issues, I am able to move around them to create better looking and more visually appealing sets.

One of the biggest parts of creating 3D sets is the lighting - whereas in real life sets will illuminate naturally with sunlight and such, a 3D set starts out with no light at all. This, while it may seem problematic, allows for a wide variety of different lighting choices and effects to be used, such as the crystals that the protagonists find in the cave they enter. These will not only be used as decoration to split up the rock and add more variety to the scene, but can be used as an incredably flexible lighting source when combined with sunshafts coming through the roof.

As the sun shafts will provide a viable area light source, one which will be used to form a base light source for the cavern, the crystals can be used as additional ones. It is highly likely that these crystal lights will have to be baked onto the caven, as the rendering power to create 10+ point lights with real time shadows attached is a heavy undertaking on rendering. However, when they are baked, point lights with shadows can be overlaid to ensure that they only need to be rendered when they are near enough to the camera. Combined with the use of a depth of field camera effect to defocus the background, this should provide a realistic effect, or as realistic as I can achieve using my computer.

The crystals themselves will likely use a form of custom shader, or will be a heavily customised version of the standard 5.0 specular shader. This will have to allow an object to be transparent, have reflecting surfaces and and have shadows applied all at once. The use of the specular varient of the shader is to allow the crystal to have a shine to it, and as it is the 5.0 shader it will have a world-influenced glow around it, providing it with a realistic effect as though it is actually glowing. The illuminicity will also be raised to give it a glowing-style, which will hopefully reflect on the cavern itself, spreading the effect of the light.

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