Helping out- Lighting

We found ourselves cramming in lighting/animating/rendering into the last week which caused huge problems, the whole team were behind and because of this, people with a heavier workload at the beginning found themselves havving to help share the workload of latter tasks just to get the prject finished to some reasonable extent. Because of this i offered to help light the futuristic church for Depa so that her and Guy could get on with animating one of the other scenes. I think this is where we really found out about the bonds in our team being strong. We were able to ask freely and easilty anybody else in the team to help out with a certain task if were for some reason behind without fear of backlash, and every time without fail we were able to help out to get the job done in time.

I had no previous knowledge of lighting however and i just started to mess around with spolights in the original scene file and reverted back to the render view to see how well the lights worked. Below are a selection of screen shots showing my progress of lighting to try to get the perfect lighting. I was aiming for a glow light on the pillars to illuminate the sides of the scenes and maybe to add a little light on the top walls creating contrast throughout the scene. However i felt it was important that we added a touch of reflection in the scene just to emphasise the materials and the translucent flooring within the futuristic scene. I played around with the lights until i was happy with the flooring and the side lighting. I found that the reflection on the floor only showed up in Mental ray rather than maya software, which did not matter too much as we could render this scene in a higher quality without too many problems as it was only a small scene with a relative low poly count, and my laptop managed to render it fully and efficiently in a few hours.

CLICK TO ENGLARGE IMAGES

Original view in maya


Original glow Depa had put on side pillars and floor this is where i took the scene over from in terms of lighting.



Sorted out the floor and removed a couple of lights so the light flare wasnt as intense on the floor. The floor now looked translucent again.


Made sure lit areas of scene reflected light on other areas for exaple the cross emmited light on to back walls, enhancing realism.


Reduced the glow intensity of the pillars on one side to see which looked better, i asked my team mates and we all agreed that less glow looked better. Also reduced the size of the mesh of the pillars so they didnt go underneath the floor, but now only rested on top of the floor.