Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll be talking about how I managed to texture the bedroom environment and set up the lighting. Lastly, I’ll be listing down my objectives to complete by next week.
This Week’s Task:
For this week’s task, I worked on the Bedroom’s textures and the lighting set-up. I knew that I wanted to keep the texturing simple and not make it too realistic. This was because I wasn’t fully familiar with the texturing in Maya as of yet, and didn’t want to invest too much time experimenting. I told myself if I have any additional time, in the end, I would come back to see if I could make any improvements.
Exterior Texturing:
I kept the same workflow I used when modeling the environment, starting with the wall, floor, and ceiling. For all textures I used AiStandardsurface. For the floor, I used a wooden seamless texture as I believed it went well with the scene. I didn’t touch much of the settings yet as I planned to alter them once I’ve set up the lighting. I created an AiSkyDomeLight so I could render an image, portraying the real look of my environment.
Interior:
Continuing with the same workflow, I next moved on to the essential objects. Besides the mirror and the window, I used AIStandardSurface for all of the object’s textures. I used a Glass preset texture for the window and used Phong for the mirror’s texture.
Lastly, I finished off by texturing the last few objects I chose to import. I used an AIStandardSurface texture for these objects. As you can see in the screenshot below, I used an image for the paintings on the wall and the painting above the bed. I was curious to see how the rendered scene would appear with them included. If the images make the scene look off or too realistic, I would remove them for the scene.
What I Plan To Do:
As mentioned before, I plan to come back to the texturing if I have any additional time once I finish everything else. However, I will be making a few additional adjustments to the textures when setting up the lighting, and maybe when it comes to rendering to either decrease render time or improve the quality of the render.
Lighting Set-up:
When it came to setting up the lighting for the scene, I wanted to begin with outside lighting as it’ll give all scenes the same consistent lighting, allowing me to work around that. Therefore, I began by creating a new AISkyDomeLight. I wanted to texture the AiSkyDomeLight so that it gives a realistic look and lighting. I applied an HDRI shot that was captured in the middle of the street because that is an environment that you would typically see when looking outside your bedroom window.
HDRI Lighting:
I downloaded my HDRI shot from a website called PolyHaven.com. This website was great as it gave me a wide selection of HDRI shots to choose from.
I applied the HDRI shot to my AISkyDomeLight to create the default lighting. In the screenshot below, it appears brighter than it should be as I have temporarily hidden one of the walls to render an image of the whole bedroom.
I wasn’t fully satisfied with the default lighting yet, as I wanted it to emit a dull shade of blue as well, representing the colour of repression. Therefore I re-visited the Wall’s texture to see what changes I could make to achieve that look. I first turned on “Thin-Walled” in the Geometry settings, allowing the outside light to pass through the wall’s geometry.
I could control the amount of lighting passing through the geometry by going into the Subsurface settings and changing the “weight”. I kept the weighting low as I didn’t want my bedroom environment to appear too bright. I also changed the “Subsurface Colour” to the shade of blue I wanted my lighting to produce.
After making these changes, I re-rendered the image to see how the lighting now appears. Again, I’ve temporarily hidden the wall to see how the whole environment appears. My next task was to see how each of the scenes look without the wall being hidden.
Lights:
I used Scene 1 to test how the lighting appears. I was happy and satisfied with the default colour now, as it appears as the blue dull colour that I intended it to be. However, it was time for me to add the additional lights that would be used for the lamp and ceiling lights.
I created a Point Light to use for the lamp as it gave off the best lighting in this case. However, I needed to repeat and use the method as before to allow the lighting to pass through the light bulb and lamp cover geometry. Therefore I selected both objects and turned on “Thin-Walled”, and edited the weighting.
Once I was happy with the lighting, I then went through all scenes to see how the lighting came out as I thought it wasn’t best to base it on one camera shot.
I was satisfied with the lighting as it appeared great in all scenes. My last task, for now, was to create lights for specific scenes. For instance, In the screenshot above, we weren’t able to see the time on the alarm clock, even though the default lighting was fine. This led me to create a small Area Light, strictly for Scene 1, so we could see the image I applied to the texture of the alarm clock. The image I used for the texture was created in Photoshop.
What I Plan To Do:
My lighting is complete for now; however, I’ll be revisiting the lighting again when it’s time to render as I would like to reduce the amount of noise and fireflies seen in the rendered image. Furthermore, I may also re-visiting the lighting to see if I could reduce the render time or improve the quality of the render.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Model a blocked-out version of the Classroom environment
- Complete the camera set-up for the Classroom scenes.