Week 8 - Diorama Time!
I took this week as a push towards a more finalised exterior scene. This involved finishing up textures, tweaking my models and a whole lot of lighting. For an excuse to talk about colour for a bit, I'm going to talk about the extra lighting tweaks that I have been making this week.
I've started settling on a couple of these images that you see below to use as my official beauty shots to sell the level as a whole. In order to make my favourite images pop a little more and read a little better, I've focused more of my time putting some extra love into the set dressing and lighting in the areas that is greatly captured by each individual shot. For set dressing, I utilised greater variety and density of my foliage in areas that felt a little more subdued within the perimeter of the render which can give the illusion of huge levels of detail in the level whilst being more efficient when playing the game because the background foliage wouldn't need nearly as much density of detail because its mostly silhouettes. Another technique I used was to bring out areas of foliage that were getting a little too dark and needed some more luminescence that wasn't being controlled by the environment intensity or global illumination. I did this by dropping in some very subtle point lights over the foliage or areas which would bounce a little more light on to surfaces in order to illuminate and exaggerate the base colours that make up each piece of foliage. I can respect that this is a very subtle effect, however it added a lot more interest to the colours in the scene and strengthened the relationship I was trying to create between my hot and cold colour tones. You can see this effect more in the top render when you look at the elephant ear leaves that are far more saturated as well as the tree trunk behind that is being lit by a very subtle blue light to give the illusion of reflected lighting.
As I said above, the other major change that I made this week was finally finishing off the remaining textures that were overdue. This included the fisherman buoys, wooden planks and the posts that go up the stairway. I textured these in the same way that I textured the boat in order to achieve a level of unity with my textures. The buoys were quite enjoyable as I was getting slightly taxed by the amount of wood that I've had to paint for this scene, meaning it was really refreshing to work on another material. One thing that was brought to my attention that I hadn't noticed was how much the colour relationships of the boat were very similar to the tree. This isn't ideal as I want the boat to appear as a stand alone focal point that draws your attention. So what I'm going to do is change the colour of the boat to add more contrast as well as lighting it stronger from above in order to achieve a rim light effect that shows off the silhouette of the boat better from a distance. I'll put up a quick screenshot of that next week whilst I work on my Diorama Scene.
Finally, I've hit the point where I can hit the ground running with my supporting Diorama scene. As a reminder, this scene is going to be representing what the interior of the boat would be from the exterior scene. After a bit of experimentation with shapes and areas of Mama Odie's home to focus on, I decided to keep the design a lot closer to the original film. Much like the exterior scene, I wanted to make it clear what it is I'm presenting as a scene whilst putting my own twists and changes in order to personalise it more to me and my production choices.
I thought that a good start for this project was to get a very solid visual design of what I would be creating, that would show off almost all of the assets that I have to create within the timeline of the project. Having something down that I can constantly refer to as far as lighting and composition is going to be extremely helpful when producing this scene as well because I know at this stage, more or less that the scene works as a whole and is a manageable amount of work to get done in the time-frame that I have. Its very reassuring to have this at this early stage as I now know exactly what I have to do to complete this scene.
After settling on the concept, I have started very early ages of blocking out the scene within 3DS Max which is much farther than I had originally thought I would get at this stage. All the assets currently in the scene are all placeholder, but sell the shapes needed to tell the story and to aid composition. The scene will undoubtedly evolve and change from this as I go on, but at least now I have something that can be critiqued and observed in order to help people understand more of what I am going for. The big challenge of this scene is the much greater amount of assets that will require unique texturing in comparison to the exterior scene. I am really enjoying how this scene is already starting to look so there's nothing left to do right now other than to 'Keep Moving Forward'! - Walt Disney