I'm currently looking at the lighting issues in TWO. Here are 3 frames from Scenes 01a, 01b and 03 to start. More to come:

Im no lighting wizard but that looks excelant to me ,lovely shadows

Here are some explanations:

I made a new skylight rig which can be located in the "Shared Data\Models\Props\Skydome" on the SVN repository.

Basically, I took my old 25 lights skylight rig and embedded all the lights in the model. This way, I can set different colors to each lights to simulate a sky color gradient. I also added one orange sun light and one blue negative sun light.

The skylight rig have 3 pose sliders: One controls the sun position, another one controls the sky light intensity and the last one controls the sun intensity. The sun position pose are not completed yet. It positions the sun but I need to add adjustment of the sun and negative sun colors according to the sun position.

The negative blue sun is positioned at the same place as the sun. Its purpose is to cancel the general blue shade of the sky where the sun do shine. This way, it is much easier to control both the shadowd side color and the lit side color independently.

I still need to design a skylight rig proxy which would only have 2 sun lights so that renders do not take forever while tweaking the animations.

Anyway, I'd like to have your feedback on the new lighting. It is far from finished BTW. But I hesitate to push it further for now because the texturing and hair are still not completed on the models and the environments need more props and vegetations.

That's wonderful Yves! How much did you change the rig?

More info please...

EDIT: looks like we posted at the same time Yves... plenty of info... I'll play with the rig.

Looking good. Is it using AO? It seems abit blue but that might be because the sun isn't in the rig. Hopefully that will reflect in the characters eyes.
Finally, in the first picture, there's blue in woot's hair. I wonder why that is.

PS I'm just looking at the tree texture beside woot.....it's quite pixelated. We'll have to fix that.

No. I like the additional control I get from a skylight rig. I can adjust the skylight rig locally while trying to do the same thing with AO would require finding the right environment map to use IBL with AO.

The sun is there already. I'm going for a strong blue-yellow contrast lighting. Sort of like Maxfield Parrish paintings.

What would reflect in the characters eyes right now is the skydome since there is not much more to reflect for the moment. But this scene would need a render of the TinCastle hill to use as an environment map for the eyes.

I noticed that too but I didn't investigate.

This tree trunk needs much better texturing. Displacement mapping would be much welcome here.

BTW, in the last director's meeting, it was decided that the vegetation (grass, bushes, trees) would be modeled in A:M and used as a background. So we will need models of trees, bushes and other plants to fill those backgrounds. The current cookie-cut trees just don't catch light and cast shadows the way they should.

I love the lighting. Will hair still be used on this background vegatation?

Yes but probably not quite in the same way.

I think hair should be used only on very far vegetation and we should use modeled trees, bushes and other plants for closer vegetations. So hair based vegetation could be used as background to the modeled vegetation to fill in the holes but should not be prominent.

Also, we would prefer if the hair vegetation used decals that came from modeled vevetations instead of from photographs of vegetation. The reason for this is that while working on lighting _1_02_00 scene where the castle is seen from a general shot and is surrounded by trees, it became difficult to get consistent light and shadow look. After examining the decals used for the trees, we observed that all the trees were lit from different directions:
- tree06M is sun lit from above and slightly from the right.
- tree16M is sun lit from above and slightly from front.
- tree35M is sun lit from above and front.
- tree28M is cloud lit from diffuse directions
- grass07M is sun lit from above.
- grass15M is sunset lit from right.

Because Sequence 2 is set during sunset, we need a strong low light direction. There are two solutions to this: Either we go out at the appropriate time of the day and photograph the trees we need and do the cookie-cutting job or we use modeled vegetations and set the lighting to suit the scene and do alpha channel renders of the trees.

Once we have our trees lit from the right direction, we can still use those for hair vegetations. And for scenes where the camera don't move a lot, we can also combine the trees for backgrounds or layers or any other render acceleration tricks.

Quick question about using LOTS of trees... would flocking constrained to the ground still be the best solution or could A:M use a model for each hair? (I just can't remember if that's possible or not)

I think using a model for hair (not just an image but an actual model) would really make hair the cat's meow. You could create forests with just two or three hair materials and let the length of the hair determine the scale of the model... randomness of the hair length would really make for good variation.

More renders...

None of these renders are gamma corrected yet. I'm doing an exploratory lighing pass. As I render, I note lighting, color and noise issues and will come back to each scenes to retweak the lighting. The castle uses soft reflection and there are different metal types on the portal: tin, of course, gold, silver, copper, brass and bronze. In order to get metal reflectivity as right as possible, I picked reflectance data from the web. All these materials will need further tweaking to get the right look.

A vast improvement. I can only imagine how it will look with particle grass/proper woot etc. Maybe Siggraph material.....

RIght now it seems a little too contrasty, but that might have to do with the gamma corrections that need to be made. It looks awesome even with that. I love the soft reflections.

Yes. Because images are not gamma corrected, the contrast looks too high. I will take care of that later because adding gamma correction will also require readjusting the light rig intensities and colors. With gamma correction, not only the contrast would be lower but the blue and yellow contrast would also look less saturated.

Right now, I'm mostly interested in getting the light and shadow directions right plus getting a render feedbacks on the metal reflectivities so I can further readjust them. I would like to finish lighting act 1 sequence 2 before I leave Hash HQ friday night but I doubt I will achieve that given that some scenes are full of surprises and require much more work than others, sometime even repositioning the characters inside the scene.

Anyways, here are some more renders.

I welcome any feedbacks BTW.

Yves,
I think they look wonderfull!

Can we use the new light rig on Non-TWO projects?
Just wondering.

Thanks,
David

Yes. Of course.

I like the yellow/blue lighting very much, and I like the contrast as well, as it is. I'm not getting a sense of the castle being made of a shiny tin, or even of metal for that matter.

You, of course are THE master of realistic lighting - and it does look beautiful - but I wonder if the castle should be like a sparkling bauble that just captures ones attention with lots of blinding, shiny, dramatic highlights with crisper, stronger reflectivity. It looks like it has more of a matte finish now - even brushed tin would have more specular, higher reflectivity. Not sure how much has been done on the castle material.

Yes. I agree. This is a little bit too rough metal.

Those renders are spot checks to allow me to judge how the metals are looking among other things. I needed different views: close-ups through general views with reflected objects near the reflective surface and far away. The progressive render would not give me a good sense of the soft reflection look. So I plan to tighten the specularity. I'm not sure how I will deal with the reflectivity. It needs to be higher so I will have to experiment.

As for "a sparkling bauble that just captures ones attention with lots of blinding, shiny, dramatic highlights", I think this will have to be added through post processing. I plan to use an HDRI sky to improve its reflections but that will not be enough to sparkle.

Not much. All I did is create a set of materials with basically one set of surface properties. I can change those properties in one single place: the material.

More renders...

Yet more renders ...

Very beautiful lightning Yves!

Very nice, the only thing I notice is some of the shadows look a little harsh and what are those strange dots on his eyes?

There's reflection on his eyes. It probably should be reduced/turned off.

Where can I find this SVN repository?

I'm on the road since one week ago and for a while. But I did some tests by changing metal reflectivity properties and did some re-renders. Here are the results so far. What do you think?

i think the trees dont quite fit in yet ..
- are they too dark?
- are they missing shadows on the grass?
- should the forrest floor have a different look? (color, needles, twigs, moss, some bushes)
- too much repetition?

the other shots look absolutely stunning!

I think the trees are just images of real trees. That'll change eventually.

Regarding the castle, I think it seems just abit too "blury". It sort of makes the castle less substantial. If it was toned down a little it might work better.

I Agree.

Will we be rendering in exr so Bloom and such can be added post? If that's the case it might be adventagoes to think of this early a think what could use light lists and such. I could see a nice Bloom added to the castle to give it some extra "shine".

I love these images you are creating with the new skylight Yves.

I'm liking the lighting very much & the use of the different subtle tones for the castle, love the coppery knockers, with the green, pink, golden, lavendar variations in the metal - and I agree that the blurry reflectiveness of the surrounding wall is causing the wall to appear to blend with the sky.

What's occurring to me as I view this, unfortunately (which I didn't pickup on before) - is other things that are disturbing that have nothing to do with the lighting - The doors are just the wrong shape - too many cut out lines - The doors should be following the arching - like church doors - I'm assuming that they will be getting some ornate filagree type work and that will also influence how things reflect and are perceived. Same for the wall and the surface of the castle, I suspect they could do with some engraving patterns.

The other thing that is also occurring to me is that the castle is so rounded - and does not appear all that large - whereas the interior model of the castle is rectangular and enormous - it's kind of incongruent - but this is cartoon land - so maybe it doesn't matter. I'm wondering if there should be some huge structure behind the round parts - or if it's better to have it be inexplainable why the castle has a small round outside & a cavernous angular inside.

Like I said this has nothing to do with the lighting which is really lovely.

Howdy.

Everything that is reflective in this movie (and there seems to be a lot of tin!) is in danger of getting lost. Every piece of metal is a potential chameleon. I think the metallic texture looks swell, and the Parrish-style lighting is very good. But the sky really needs to be brightened, with some additional atmospheric haze, to make the castle walls visible again.

I've doctored one of the images to show what I mean. Essentially, wherever there's an important metal edge, what is behind has to be different from what's in front. This can be either a color difference (from warm to cool) or a brightness difference, or a combination of the two. But it has to be different.

Maybe it'd be possible to use a fog limited to just the sky dome, or use some trick with Composite & Post Effects. I'm not conversant with these new tools. That's my cue to go back to lurking.

Sincerely,

Carl Raillard

PS: Oh, the trees! Maxfield Parrish had difficulty with trees, too! What strikes my eyes is: The dark areas of the trees ought to be brighter. Keep it high key. Foliage should not call attention to itself with a lot of dark darks next to bright brights.

Where's the SVN repository?

It's on the Hash server......and the computer of everyone who's working on the project. It's 3GB (or was) so it's getting harder for people to get in on it (it has to be downloaded). So get in asap if you intend to.

It's about 6GB now Ken -- or a little over . I just d/led it. It took forever, haha.

The lighting on the castle is great but I feel the grass is way to lumunise yellow green I assume eventually youll use hair or at least a map of grass in the final, especially in the foreground As a rule, generally the forground elements tend to take on a purperish hue and I would love to see the trees run a purple to green yellow color blend, forground to back ground, As they are they tend to stick out as if from another world and long shadows at a 45 to cam would also help the foreground .The double chain shadow is a no-no but im sure you saw that. Im not a lover of the soft shadows but thats an individual preference.
BT

Back to work after the SIGGRAPH. That was a very interesting show.

Yes. Trees will eventually be replaced by modeled trees and grass will be replaced by hair grass. Mark is doinf a fine job for the trees and they should be used in this scene. I don't think it is necessary to cover the whole terrain with hair-grass though because of the low POV. There should be bushes too. So the grass should be layout last after the trees and bushes are finalized and then grass should be placed only where there are still terrain holes visibles or basically where needed.

Agree. I plan to add atmospheric perspective eventually. That will help giving a good sense of depth and distance.

I'll see if I can cheat something to that effect.

Yes I saw that but I don't quite agree that they are a no-no. As long as it doesn't interfere with the character expressions and body attitude they add an element of the decor/environment that would otherwise not be visible from particular camera angles. So the challenge is to find a way to place those shadows in a non obstrusive way.

Right now, I think the sun shadows are a little too soft and needs to be thightened a bit. But I'm not a lover of single ray hard shadows so I will not go that tight.

Here is the last render I ran this night. I modified the specularity size on most surfaces and darkened the colors a little. I have to figure why it doesn't seem to change on the outside wall though. Also, you will note that I added more towers and additional details. The added towers on the outside wall help separate the castle from the sky. For comparison, I also post the previous renders in most recent to least recent order. Still no gamma corrections. Feedbacks are welcome.

It's improving all the time. Woot looks abit anemic though.

Nice stuff Yves ! the color is cool ! girly color palette but nice !

I think the rock tiles should be smaller with more design...
maybe some flower bucket each side would help ...

nice work I like it very much !

Al

Yes. The flagstone alley does not fit well. I agree that the flagstone scale need to be much smaller. There also need to be some kind of border between the steel wall that links the alley towers and the flagstone alley IMO.

Along the same line, some trees need to be added along the outside wall and I was thinking that some vines descending and running up the outside wall would also help. Right now, it is metal almost everywhere and it gives a very dry-cool feeling. Vegetation would help in bringing more organic and warm feeling. Maybe even some suspended gardens on the castle towers too.

Lovely lighting gives a sence of realism.The flags are very big ,gives a feeling of giantism

I've not been able to use the latest Woot from Kevin with the hair and the new textures commited on july 26. When I try to load it, I get tons of error messages. The mesh seems to have been trashed in some way. Can someone else confirm this?

Kevin, if your Woot file can be loaded in A:M, would you re-commit it to the SVN repository so I can re-update it from there?

Hmm, Will actually gave me the file (he took care of resolving the differences). It loaded fine for me in AM before I committed it. I didn't realize there was anything wrong with it. I'll have to take a look at it when I get home tonight to see what went wrong. Sorry about that.

Kevin

Beautiful rendering Yves. I like the added towers.

At first glance the modified poles leading up to the castle looked a bit strange but they are growing on me.
A question / suggestion if I may?

Perhaps the poles (now that they are thin in the middle) would make great wind chimes?
It might provide another way to get a little background music (yes music... just a bit more subtly than other music in the movie)... ambiant noise if you will.

The heavier looking the lower the sound of course.

As they would be easy to model I volunteer to make them.
They could even have those fancy girly etchings/engravings in them to hint at what the view is going to see more of inside the castle.

Wind chimes... you know... ambiant noise.

Funny. I was just thinking about the small towers. I thought it would be cool if whenever anyone passed them, trumpets sounded out of them to announce their arrival. Like a fancy motion detection doorbell. It would take some modified character acting though.

It seems to work fine on my machine. I made a few more tweaks and updated the model again, see if that works for you. Can someone else try loading Woot to see if he works?

Kevin

Nice work!
This is really starting to come together!!!

Maybe it's the chor.

Info on using the SVN can be found HERE. Be sure to read the walkthrough.

Richard

I found the problem with Woot model. I was not using the latest v13 release. Once I installed the latest one, Woot loaded without problems.

I launched a new render last night just before going to bed. Unfortunately, Win XP decided to install an update and shut down my computer before the render was completed. I hope to have a new render tomorrow.

Woot's hair isn't constrainted to his head bone!

Heh, You know, I was just thinking I forgot to do that. If you are in there now Ken go ahead and add the skull cap to the head bone if you want. I won't be home for about 5 hrs.