LIGHT Bulb Dance (Process)
First footage, mainly used for the evening~night time
Second footage that was blended into the first footage, used to help the color adjustment of the overall footage
Animated still image for the day time, for a clear blue sky
Project Goals:
1) Learning Foundry Katana
2) Lighting a bright, outdoor scene
3) Experimenting with sunlight
4) Exploring the change of lighting over the day
Preparation:
CG Assets
With the environment asset A Boy & A Snail, I decided to combine The Dancing Light Family asset and utilize the characters' light for the night time.
The sun being the main light source, I felt that it would be interesting to show the change of the brightness and color as well as the angle throughout the day time to evening. Once the sun's influence becomes less as night time comes, the light bulbs will become the main source of light and add a different element to the scene.
Sky Footage
To use as reference as well as for the sky in the background of this project, I mixed two footages (listed at the top of this page) and color graded them to have a smooth transition while having dynamic changes throughout the day.
For the beginning of the scene, I needed more of a clear blue sky, so I had to animate the image found on Freepik and gradually blend it in Nuke, pre-comp the footage to create the final footage.
Lighting Process:
Environment Layer
Based on the sky, the exposure and color of the lighting were determined for the scene. The challenge was to have a seamless transition between the colors (daylight: neutral~slightly cool shade, evening: warm, orange shade), as this shot did not have any cuts or camera changes, to give the feeling of a time-lapse video.
The source for the key light was the sun, that has a subtle rotation animation to give the feeling of the sunlight's angle changing throughout the day. I had two versions of this key light so that the amount of coolness and warmth could be controlled and mixed accordingly.
(Below are the key light aovs for the day and evening, (characters pruned out) with the intensity of the cool and warm key light adjusted.)
To add some fill light to the overall scene, subtle skydome lights were added as well.
Character Layer
With the same lights applied to the characters, I decided to add a slight rim light for the characters. The characters were rendered in separate layers to have more control over the placement of the rim light.
The rim light passes were also created so that in comp the brightness and color can be easily modified, along with the motion vector pass to be used later in compositing.
Shadow layer
To give the realistic feel of the sharpness and length of the shadow changing based on the time of the day, I created a shadow pass lit by a distant light, to be used in the compositing stage.
Character primary pass
Character rim light pass
Character motion vector pass
Day time: sharp, short shadows
Night time: soft, long shadows
Rendering & Compositing Process
After finalizing the lighting process, the passes were created and batch rendered in Katana. The environment layer was rendered with a 10% of overscan for lens distortion.
Aside from the environment and character layers, an atmosphere layer for the day sun light as well as for the night time bulb lights were created to slightly be added.
Since the shadow layers were created separately to be added in compositing, an ambient occlusion pass was also created just in case for better integration of the character into the environment.
In Nuke, several elements such as the lens flare during the golden hour, as well as an overall lens distortion and a slight depth of field were added.
Color grading was also done to amplify the vibrancy of the sunlight on the green grass as well as the warmth of the evening sun's influence.
Final look after compositing
