Lighting PT 3

So, as you know I have been working hard on creating some nice believable lighting our Princes and the Pea room. I had come quite a long way with it (if I do say so myself). I had the lights working through the window, the blue fill light, the candle light, everything, besides the diffused bounced light. I tried a few things (mainly an ambient and a volume light), but nothing was working. The lights were just too strong and didn't create the nice dynamically occluded shadows I was hoping they would. The group throught it looked nice, but I couldn't agree. It was too dark, and we are creating this for children, after all! I wanted it to be bright and appealing!






Then I spoke to Alex and he talked me into rendering my lighting on separate layers. I wasn't too sure how to do this, but once I was shown and gave it a try on our room, I thought it looked quite beautiful! We first did a test of this approach on two nurbs spheres Alex made so that I could understand the method.

This image is made up of more than one layer, that we then composited together in photoshop.


Specular layer

Occlusion Layer (for diffused light and form shadows)

Colour Layer

End result

The same approach was taken here, on my text image of the room. The entire group agreed that we liked this end result. It is just a test, and not everything has been included, like the blue fill light and the sunlight shining through the windows. But this is something like what we are hoping to achieve in the final image.