Lighting

So, we had a lighting that looked awesome, but due to render time being insane we had to scrap it. We also needed two different light settings. One for when he comes home the first time and everything is supposed to look like crap. And one for when he comes home after being at the doctor and everything is going to look nice. I sat down with the lighting that was supposed to look bad. And this was surprisingly hard. I have never really done a lot of lighting in the first place, so this was challenging. Having the lighting look like it was dark outside, and at the same time have enough light to see what was happening was hard. Also, having the light make the apartment look bad was also hard to pull off.

I tried out a few different options:
Daylight with FG looked very nice, and was fast to set up, but the rendering time was to much. It also looked to “clean” and light in away. Didn’t manage to make it look “bad”.

Daylight with skyportals looked nice as well, but again, rendering time was high.

Lightrigger was a script that I tested a little. It was fast to set up, but we had issues with shadows, where we had to exclude the walls and roof of the apartment to get light into the apartment, but when we did so those objects didn’t receive any shadows either, so it didn’t look so good. Did spend some time tweaking on this, and my teacher helped out a lot, but in the end we had to scrap this idea as well.

Directional Light with Omni Lights as fillers was the idea we ran with to the end. I sat up a direct light outside the window to mimic the moon/sun light coming in through the window. This was also supposed to be the primary light source for the scene. In the end this light didn’t provide much light into the apartment, so I ended up having to use Omni Lights to fill out a large portion of the apartment with light. At first I positioned Omni Lights under the roof to mimic some ceiling lights. This looked better, but the corners of the apartment was still too dark, so I had to position some more Omnis there as well to not get huge shaded areas.

I later added some very strong Spot Lights in the hallway outside his apartment. I wanted the lighting in that hallway to look like it was some sort of industrial lighting just tossed in there because it was cheap. So I set the strength of the lights up a lot. What I noticed a bit to late was that it looked really odd with the strong light flowing in from the door, while the outside was dusky. As if the light from the hallway was coming from a strong sun, but the outside light was coming from a much weaker sun.

Overall I had huge issues getting the shadows to look good, they were way to sharp, and we never really found a solution to that problem, so in the end I ended up using Shadow Map on one Omni, and turning up the sample range to try and soften the edges. This did give an acceptable result.

We also rendered out an Ambient pass to give more contact shadow all over the movie. And this made the shadows and lighting look much better.

I saddly dont have any testrenders of the different lightsettings, mainly because I just did a render, and rerendered when I wasnt happy with the result. So I didnt save anything. So this great wall of text will have to do.