Animation lighting, as we all know doing lighting is much more complex when there are objects in motion rather than static as my graduate specific pieces were. So I thought what better practice during my waning hours of graduation than to get a hold of some animation work from graduate students and create a nice lighting setup, based on their needs and wants of course.
As I had no real game plan to accomplish this task I was actually kind of diving into lighting these characters with no previous advanced knowledge of the task at hand. Invariably I was able to come up with a method that worked well but probably was not the most efficient when it came to rendering.
Most of these animation renders were done in a single shot, there was no separation of elements from the background in order to concentrate lighting on individual objects. Overall these light setups were rather simple and focused more on the characters than the background. But, as graduate animation reels are apt to be bereft of lighting in general, it was a nice addition to the already beautiful animation.
In retrospect, there would have been many changes to the original process I used to light a good deal of these animations. The initial setup was a single combined scene. After having worked on several animation scenes for lighting I would have split these up into motion categories and non motion. This would be a process of recreating a film technique where we create in a sense a back plate to render cg elements on.
I know what your thinking, "But Troy, is this not all CG?". If this is what you were thinking then yes it is. However for integration purposes there are tools that allow use to do compositing in Mental Ray using production shaders. So its not reinventing the wheel but re-imagining the process backwards.
Taking this into account I would create a nicely setup rendering environment for the background and get it the way I want it to look. Bake out my maps and render a sequence of images to re-project back onto the geometry. Then I would add in all motion items and use production shaders to composite the work together in a 3d environment. So not only do I have full individual control over the characters lighting but I am matching lighting from the environment without affecting the environment after it has been approved by the animator.
This requires a bit of setup but the payoff is wonderful. Not only do you take out potential pitfalls of complex lighting setups with motion based items on complex scenes But you also provide a framework for reintegration, a typical method used in film for with back plates.
I paired up with Breanna Carzoo and Althea Gata and Pooja Rathod for their animation assets.
