zigzagg

A Bit About Lighting...

Added 2021-11-17 05:11:02 +0000 UTC

So, I thought I'd do a little behind the scenes thing for anyone who's interested in that sort of stuff.

Soooo... I spent 4 days rendering an animation... and then decided I hated the lighting. *le sigh* It happens.

Image 1 is a still frame from the original pass. As you can see, there are a lot of shadows on the wall that make it look really busy and distracting. Same deal with those cereal jars on the counter. Too much stuff drawing the eye.

Any good lighting designer knows: Your goal is to always make the background as unobtrusive as possible, while still being interesting.

Worse still, the way the sunlight hits Trevor, it seems to accentuate all the wrong parts, and really hit him with harsh highlights. No good.

So, I scrapped the lighting and re-did it from scratch. Image 2 is the result. Now, we have a nice side-light. Much more intentional. It rims out (heh) the deer nicely, accentuating his muscle and drawing attention to the face. On top of that, the background is now much less busy. None of the models have changed, but there is no longer this mess of shadows that draws and distracts the eye. Much better! Aaaand now I'm gonna give rendering this another try...