Project 2: Lighting an environment, then render, then comp

For my second portfolio piece I ventured into learning Renderman to light and render a pre-made environment. I wanted to make it a lighting exercise by lighting the environment during the day, night, and an eerie desaturated look. Then take those renders and bring them into Nuke to re-familiarize myself with compositing.

Day Scene

Night Scene

Desaturated Scene

Project 1: Gobo and Caustic Light Tool (with materials and textures)

For the first project I explored gobo lighting for Unreal Engine 4. I started with making a massive texture pack to be inputted into light function materials. After making the texture, I made animated materials for the gobo lights. Finally, I wanted to make a tool that would make the material parameters editable to the user in a friendly manner. I had already made a small caustic light tool that does the same thing, so I dusted that tool off and built onto it.

In the end I've made a caustic and gobo light tool that can take in the created materials, expose certain parameters that can be manipulated by the artist.

Ideas for Portfolio Projects

For this final semester at FIEA, I plan to spend to on developing portfolio pieces that pertain to layout artistry and lighting artistry. I hope to potentially  experiment with shot framing, different lighting for different tones; lighting environment pieces and experimenting with Renderman; and creating light systems for Unreal Engine 4.

1) One idea for a layout project would be to take animated scenes created by animation students at FIEA and frame and light it in different ways to convey different tones (while still being the same animation). The purpose of this project is to be able to demonstrate how changing visual cues through camera framing and lighting can create different connotative tones even though the actual acting is the same through each piece. I'm still in the process of deciding to go based on film genre or style.

Potentially using the kind of soft lighting from 40s classics

or adapting a particular director's style like Hitchcock or Wes Anderson

For sure would like to experiment mixing warm and cool colored lighting techniques too.

2) Another idea is to take environments built by FIEA 2D3D artists, lighting them in Maya and render them out using Renderman. The purpose of this project is to become familiar with Renderman (all the while experiment with lighting to convey tone, similar to the project idea above).

3) Revisiting Unreal Engine 4 is another idea for a project. In particular--a collection of light systems. Upon viewing the Unreal marketplace and looking up what was available for 'light,' there were packs for volumetrics, IES packages, lightning vfx, and etc. However, I saw no packs for gobo lights. So an idea would be to create a gobo light systems pack with a variety of light projections at the ready for engine.

Not a single gobo light pack in sight.

An example of a gobo light projection

4) Continuing on with gobo lighting, I can take it a step further and work to create an HDRI (high dynamic range image) that is a gobo light itself. So there could be light projections cast all around a 360 degree environment. This would take some creativity as I would need to acquire an HDR image--one where there'd be light projection in particular i.e. a forest for instance. And then create the gobo projection and find if there's a possible way to combine them or fake combine them so the projection would be cast around 360 degrees.

An example of an HDRI

Someone created big gobo projection onto their environment. I would like to attempt it seeming like the gobo's being cast by the HDRI.