Friendship ended with Rasterization (Lighting Studies)

Ray tracing is my friend now! In preparation to the upcoming animations, I've started reworking one of my environments, starting with the Forest Pass from the recent Encounter 2 animation. I'm planning on using the environment in next month's mini animation that will feature Bunsen and Space Hero.

Fully converting the environment was a tad easier since the background was already using Redshift shaders, the foreground however was still using the old rasterized render engine, which had quite a lot of shortcomings when it came to lighting and the rendering of vegetation. The greenery is now using proper subsurface materials with fancy backlighting, something that wasn't possible previously due to the lack of support of SSS with alpha materials.

To get a bit more familiar with Ornatrix, I've been making fur maps for a lot of the environment assets to simulate moss. I'm still improving the material shader itself, which is pretty good training for remaking Zoe's fur later down the line. I'm anticipating for it to look a big step up from the previous fur model due to some new shading parameters such as scattering and reflection, which will allow me to add proper light scattering and wetness  properties to fur/hair shaders.

I'm still unertain on which lighting mood I'll be going for for next month's mini animation, but it will likely either the sunny one, or the one with the moody early morning lighting. For the animation I might also be using some fancy volumetric effects, such as steam coming from Bunsen's maw. I've used an effect like this in the past for Zoe's maw, but it was mostly a layered smoke effect in post that I sometimes combined with a 3D depth channel to make it a bit more convincing. There's already some volumetrics in in these renders, including 3D clouds, which will probably become standard for future animations as well.

I'm going to start work on the new mini animation in a few days and will hopefully have the first playblast for the first half of the month. I'm quite excited finally something that doesn't use my old renderer, as the render workflow will be so much better, oh gosh! Also note that I MIGHT have another post coming up soon that shows a bit of a VFX breakdown of some Encounter 2 scenes. Stay tuned! <3