Temple Lighting Untill 5.30am.....WTF!

Again was another ridiculously late night. Me, Rob and Jono were up until 5.30am!!! It is getting silly now the times we are getting to bed.. but it is a sacrifise we are willing to make at this stage because there are still a lot of little odd jobs that need to be finished promptly in time for rendering. Last night (or should i say, this morning) we were lighting the main chamber.

This was going to be quite challenging for us for various reasons... firstly the temple is going to be quite dark and dull and with the scene essentially at night time the lighting needs to be an effective moonlight... or sunset? also Jono made a good point when lighting, he said that you cant just plonk a random light anywhere you need to think where the source of the light is coming from. Therefore baring that in mind we used the same technique we used in the jungle for the temple. We made holes in the temple roof and made the light pass through them. However we had to use different lights for the temple because for some strange reason maya only lets you have six spotlights per scene!!??? very strange so we used directional lights and point lights. the only time we used spotlights was to highlight details of the scene which were too dark.. i.e the alter and the characters face.

Below are different jpgs of lighting tests:

as you can see with the picture above the light on the alter is very nice... its very harsh and draws your eye straight to it which is what we want. however going back to what i said before it doesnt work because there is no justification as to where the light is coming from.. it looks very staged and is not the effect we want, we want a more natural light.

This above image is a better example of the effect we want. This image was created by using lights through the holes in the roof. it isnt as harsh as the previous examples but still is effective in lighting up the alter.

This image again shows the effect of the holes in the roof. this time however we did use a spotlight because we wanted a more harsh lighting in some of the darker areas of the temple. Becasue this area is quite dark we think the bright lights contrast really well.

FOG EFFECTS -
These next images below are examples of the fog effect we gave the scene. We used an environmental fog which is attached to an ambient light. The effect is AWESOME and really brings the scene to life. The fog effect is in the render settings. I really like what it does to the scene. it gives it great depth and especially for the sunset/night time effect respectively.