Category: Group

For this group assignment, I worked as a CG Generalist, responsible for lighting and rendering, and additionally for the DMP. Looking back on the whole project, I feel that I have made a lot of progress in these areas, but I have also found some areas for improvement.

Firstly, for the lighting setup, this was my first time working with Maya’s lighting. Before the project started, I did sufficient research and study to get to grips with the basic lighting principles and techniques. In practice, I experimented with various lighting types and settings to achieve the right visual effect for the scene and the character. I learnt to adjust the brightness, colour and shadow properties of light sources, as well as use different types of lighting in different scenarios, such as point, spot and ambient lighting. I think my efforts have been fruitful in terms of lighting, creating the right atmosphere and visual effects for the scenes.

Secondly, for the rendering aspect, I have made several attempts and experiments. I became familiar with the renderer in Maya and learned to adjust render settings and parameters. By adjusting the lighting and shadows, material properties and render output settings, I strived to achieve the best possible render quality. I noticed that different renderers and render engines can have different effects on the rendering, so I made some comparisons and choices to find the best rendering tool for the project’s needs. My experimentation with rendering has given me a better understanding of the rendering process and techniques, and I have realised the importance of adapting rendering settings for different scenarios.

However, I also realised that there are still a few things I need to improve on in my projects. Firstly, I would like to gain a deeper understanding of lighting principles and techniques in order to improve my expertise and skills in scene lighting. In addition, I realise the importance of attention to detail during the rendering process, including material adjustments, texture optimisation and fine-tuning of render settings. In future projects, I will pay more attention to these details in order to improve the overall rendering quality.

During the project, I also took on the additional responsibility of creating the DMP. I was happy to take on this task and successfully create the DMP in the project. by using nuke.

After we had done many test renders, the renders would always show noise, or flickering lights. According to our step-by-step troubleshooting, we had to pull the specular value very high in order to have no noise because of our material. But this would make the rendering very slow.

For the handover to the compositor’s work, the compositor requested some aov channels to facilitate the final adjustments and compositing.

The Crypto-object channel is particularly useful in complex scenes containing multiple objects or elements that need to be processed individually in post. It makes it easy to select and separate specific objects in post-processing without having to manually create complex masks or use other techniques.

The ID channel is a special channel used for rendering that assigns a unique identifier (ID) to each object in the scene.

The Z channel is a channel that records the depth value of each pixel in the scene. It represents the distance from the camera viewpoint to each pixel. During rendering, the Z channel is usually rendered as a greyscale image, with light colours representing positions away from the camera and dark colours representing positions close to the camera.

Based on all the comments and the refinement of the textures and the gradual completion of the layout, my final version is a blue-green tone, not too brightly lit and to keep some parts from being too bright or too dark. I have adjusted the object of the light in the lighting control layout.

Based on everyone’s comments, I looked for a new reference.

On the dom’s evaluation, he wanted our light source to come through the window. So I made some changes.

The lights were dimmed as suggested by the group.

I used a green and orange light hitting down from two opposite sides to create a high saturation feel.

The initial idea for the lighting was to make a colour clash, using two very pure colours put together to make a lowfi feel.

In the end, I deleted all the foregrounds and kept only the background and the fog, according to the comments.