Introduction:
For this week’s blog, I’ll be speaking about the lighting setup for all my environments, giving you a glimpse of their final appearance. I will also be discussing the process I took when setting up the cameras for my scenes. Afterward, I’ll be going through how I found the character rigs necessary for my animation, and the adjustments I made to the characters’ textures. Lastly, I’ll be listing my personal objectives that I’ve set myself to complete before the end of next week.
This Week’s Task:
To start this week off, I began with setting up the lighting for all environments, beginning with the search for an ideal HDRI texture to use for the SkyDomeLight. Ideally, i wanted a texture that was set around evening/night time, giving my scenes that dark feel towards it.
SkyDomeLight:
I kept the intensity of my SkyDomeLight quite low as I want my scene to appear dark, allowing the Spot Lights i plan to use to stand out.
Bedroom Environment:
After creating and adjusting the SkyDomeLight, I rendered a frame via Arnold Render View to see the overall look of my scene, which I was satisfied with.
However, I believe there was too much light coming through the window in the screenshot below. Therefore I lowered the intensity of the SkyDomeLight by a tad and went into the Wall’s material settings. I turned on “Thin Walled”, allowing the light outside to shine through the geometry.
To control the amount of light coming through, I went into the “Subsurface” settings and adjusted the weight. To make sure the light shining through went well which the colours of my walls, I changed the subsurface colour so that it was the same exact colour as the walls.
r experimental purposes, and a Spot Ligh. I parented the Spot Light to the camera so that it follows the camera whenever i choose to move or rotate it.
Depending on how close my subject is going to be, I’ll continuously adjust the Spot Light’s intensity. I plan to do a lot of camera animation, meaning i may even need to animate the intensity of the Spot Light.
After adjusting the Spot Light’s setting, I rendered a frame via Arnold Render View to see how my bedroom environment now appeared. The screenshot below is the sort of appearance i intended to achieve.
After previewing my bedroom environment, I decided to render a frame out from each environment to see how they all will appear.
Upstairs Hallway Environment:
Staircase Hallway Environment:
Downstair Hallway Environment:
Kitchen Environment:
I had to position a small Spot Light in the fridge, as all fridges have a light inside which turns on whenever the door opens. This was needed for a couple of my scenes as they required the fridge door to be open.
Livingroom Environment:
I was more than satisfied with the overall look of each environment as it appears to have the level of darkness I wanted, as well as there’s consistency kept throughout in terms of colours.
After setting up the lighting, I was ready to set up each camera, I created and positioned one camera for each scene as this workflow seemed to work for me. When it comes to animating, the unused cameras won’t get in my way as they’ll be hidden from the scene. To get an idea of where I should position them, I re-visited my storyboard animatic and used my drawings as a reference.
Camera Set-up:
Example 1:
Example 2:
Example 3:
Now that all my cameras were set up, I was ready to begin animating. However, I had to browse for the character Rigs that would be ideal for my animation. I actively avoided character rigs that were too complicated as I was fairly new to character animation. In fact, this would be my first animation that consisted of character animations, outside of workshops of course. Therefore, I chose character rigs that I could familiarise myself with without struggling too much. I downloaded my character rigs from the University’s Resource Folder.
Searching For Character Rigs:
I ended up choosing a total of three character rigs. This was because my animation would consist of a dark figure character, in the shape of a woman. She or it would be portraying the antagonist of the narrative.
Before importing my character rigs into my Environments, I opened them up first to change up their appearances and apply the textures I wanted.
Character Rigs:
As you can see in the screenshot below, I deleted the preset textures that came with the character rig and created my own using aiStandSurface material. I did this for my mental state so that I won’t get confused if I ever need to locate a texture. I did this so I knew everything in regards to my characters’ textures.
I repeated this step two more times for my other two remaining characters.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Animate Scenes 1-12.
- Render Scenes 1-12.