Final article in my three part graduate series, this particular feature will focus on my third graduate piece the French Cafe.
(You can visit my Graduate image gallery by clicking the menu link or the link supplied in this article.)
The idea was to emulate daylight conditions and then simulate night time conditions inside the composition as there was no direct reference to utilize for the shot representing night lighting. Most reference was sampled from various other images that depicted a potential night scenario similar to the current environment. The scene geometry is actually extremely simplistic, but was complex enough to supply the necessary forms to capture contour detail and highlights.
The biggest challenge here was to visually stimulate a mood or a sort of thought of having been at that location. The daytime scene was rather cut and dry, emulating reality through a lens with physically accurate materials and proper settings via Mental Ray proved rather straight forward.
The night time render proved to be rather fun than aggravating. The lamps were utilized to great effect in order to achieve the look. Taking into account off camera light and other interactions one would expect from a realistic situation I began to fill space off screen with streetlamps so they would emit back into the camera lens.
In order to light the scene accurately I utilized baked Final Gather and Global Illumination maps to control the lighting. This was done on a duplicate version of the original geometry with a basic form of the current shaders as a test bed for lighting color, quality and control. Once all the proper settings had been tested and were certified good for the scene I reverted back to the original shaded environment and baked out all necessary maps.
Even though the final render felt nice it was missing some post process work I felt would really make the night render stand out. I decided to take it into Nuke and add some simple processing based on luminance values mostly in order to get a foggy haze kind of appeal. As well, I decided to give the lamps some additional lens processing to make the environment feel moody and humid.
At the end of the project it had become a race to recreate the night scene before the deadline. In retrospect there are several things I would have changed about the way I approached this work. But, it was ultimately worth the effort.
Model Credit : Joel Durham
