Hi Jamie
Apologies for the delay, it's taken me a bit of time to get around to answering.
Thanks for your comments, so far I have really enjoyed following everyone's progress on this blog and I have been watching you guys on the modeling blog as well. Hopefully I can match your mammoth post with an equally mammoth amount of feedback :)
Its good to do some experimenting in 2d this early in production, it should give you confidence and understanding of what you can achieve in the time you have left. Rendering passes is always going to give you more control, so keep going with this technique. Using a matte-painting for you background should set off your model nicely, I don't think you will have too much of a problem integrating it in post. The most important thing now is that you have an artistic goal, and then you can tailor your work/layers to achieve it. I do have a few comments about your first experiments, (I completely understand that it is work in progress) hopefully it will give you some ideas on what to do next.
Your reference is taken from epic and dramatic films, and I can see you have taken elements to try and get a similar mood. It is a little unfortunate that all of your reference shots are close ups, you could do with finding some wider shots so that you can really see the shadows. I have been looking at 'Gladiator' for some reference, although you can just go outside and look at some real shadows :)
If you observe the outside world, you will find that when the sun (or moon) shines, those soft shadows under objects become less obvious, or completely disappear. Then as the clouds come over, the light becomes hazy, the shadows become blurred and disappear within cloud shadows, this is when you see ambient occlusion, although often it is still quite subtle. The human eye is very perceptive at spotting when something doesn't look right. Using both soft shadows and sharp shadows equally (adding them together as you have tried in your last post) is never going to look like a 'realistic' outdoor lit scene. Try rendering out a shadow pass of the ground, confining occlusion to within the shadow, should help with the believability.
Final Gathering normally works as a one pass global illumination simulation. It bounces around light, (diffuse reflections) so you are not getting an accurate result if you do not include the key shadow casting light. Final Gathering works best in interior lighting because this is where you would most see bounced light, off walls and furniture. As I said before, I don't really know much about FG, but I think if you want it to work in this situation, as a global illumination tool, you should probably look at changing your settings to get a more accurate outdoor feel. Also because you are colour correcting and adding on extra lights in comp you are not really seeing the work the light probe has done. It's something to think about.
On another similar note, I would not use both FG and ambient occlusion. In CG to get realistic results we need occlusion to take out some of the wrongly placed light from the fill, such as light inside characters mouths, and the contact shadow between the foot and the floor. If your fill already has soft shadows then really your just doubling up the effect. The occlusion pass makes everything look pretty... but it is a good idea to play with the levels in comp to get the desired look before you multiply it by the rest of the lighting. Often occlusion is very subtle, and its the icing on the CG cake... not the cake itself. Keep looking at your reference.
You talk about the Final Gathering render as soft, with a bright outdoor feel. On its own, to me it looks like a daytime that is dull and overcast in comparison to a bright sunny day. Overcast lighting in an action scene tends to look like a documentary. In war films it is used to show the harsh reality of battle. In 'The Incredibles' overcast lighting is used in the scene to accentuate how bored Mr Incredible is with his mundane life, and the dull colours are used in contrast to the rest of the film which is altogether more exciting. On the other hand using a strong light source, to show dramatic daytime lighting, is effective in war films where the goal is to glorify battle. As if the sun is shining down from a higher power.. I would say trying to mix the two is a bit of a contradiction. Personally, I would make more of your dramatic key light, currently it is a bit feeble as a rim light. For example you might want to try more than one key light (although only one shadow casting, or re-use the same shadow for both lights) to trick/spill the light around so that it catches more of both characters. It shows off the shape of your model, and instantly looks more epic.
Be careful using 2d depth of field. Z depth passes are not normally edge aliased, I know some people use fog instead, or a z depth shader so they get aliased edges. Another option is to render it double size and shrink it down. Make sure that you output the pass at a minimum of 16 bit to get all that info. You are getting glows around your model because of the inaccuracies (are you blurring the z depth pass as well?) The easy solution is to render the model out on a separate pass from the ground, so that you can blur them separately, this is what I would do.
Also using a shallow depth of field is making your model look the wrong scale, almost miniature. I found this interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt-shift_miniature_faking
We generally see landscapes shot with a wide angle lens. Even though the depth of field is the same as with a telephoto lens the effect is very different because of the perspective of the background, the blur is perceived to be less although in fact the perspective makes it look further away. Its fascinating stuff....http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/dof2.shtml
If you want to keep the shallow depth of field for your final images, I would look at changing your lens, and/or camera position/angle.
One final note, keep experimenting with colour, all of your reference has a warm/exotic feel to it, which invokes feelings of nostalgia. Unfortunately your battle took place in a much cooler climate, so you might want to think about how you can incorporate that and still keep the mood you are looking for.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. Great to see some progress, its looking good!
Cheers
Tessa
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