I've been doing some testing over the last day or 2 and thought I would let you know how things are going. I've been following the blog as I work, your doing a wonderful job!, great to read your advice to others.
So... If you remember my horseback fighting modelling project from my earlier post....
I realised there wasn't much point going about lighting my scene without something to aim for so I have been trying to find references with an epic, dramatic mood and have gatherred some images with that feeling and the sort of colours I will be using. The following images are from the Return of the King, Beowulf, Gladiator and Hellboy 2.
After my fist post you asked what I was going to do for the environment, and I must admit I was so busy trying to model the poses I hadn't really considered it fully. In the images above, particularly the ones on the left side the background is slightly ambiguous with atmospheric dust and the sky and landscape quite blurred out and suggestive. This is what I'm going to try to do with the environment. I was at the battlefield at the weekend and gathered lots of material to help produce painted planes that will hopefully fill out the distant landscape in my scene.
Below is my first compositing trial, graded to match the lord of the rings colours from above. It was rendered using final gather and the light probe images I took on the Bannockburn battlefield. It also has a ambient occlusion pass multiplied in and I rendered a Zdepth pass and used this to add blur. I also added on top a render with a single directional light to pick out some areas of the horse.
Because I hadn't setup the background mattes yet I did a photoshop paintover to suggest what I would like to end up with, bearing in mind the texture work is only just begining really and there are alot of elements not yet included:
I like the way it is looking, even though the background is just a few brush strokes on the horizon if I could recteate this kind of feel I'd be happy, I worry it might all be a bit more uniform and CG looking once I create it, but I'll try to avoid that.
One last thing that I'm trying out is shown below, I did a quick 3 point lighting setup in XSI and added it in nuke to the final gather render I had done using the light probe images. The result gives the long shadows and stronger light source of the 3 point render whilst retaining the softness and bright outdoor feel from the FG render. I like the idea of using this method, it's like you said in an earlier post, like using the environment light as a fill light, just to lift the whole thing. I will experiment more with this and try to encorporate the textures, the background and all other scene elements but as it stands I think I will go for this kind of technique.
I suppose it's more heavilly relying on compositing with no single final render outputted from XSI, but I quite like the control you get from it. Maybe you could let me know your thoughts on this way of working.
Sorry for the mamoth post, hope I explained my process well enough.
Look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have.
Jamie.
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