A few years ago, I was asked by the Gnomon School of Visual effects if I would be interested in producing a tutorial for them.
To this day, I’m not entirely sure how they found me. They said that someone I had worked with previously, who is seemingly going to remain anonymous, mentioned that I might be interested. So if you happen to be out there reading this, thank you, and please let me know!
I was fortunate to be able to use a scene for a short film I worked on, called the Sentinel. This project dates back around the time I was at Savannah College of Art and Design, circa 2014. A group of us collaborated to make a trailer for what was intended to be a TV series or possibly even a feature film. It was developed primarily by Adam Floeck, our director, along with Nate Swinehart providing some concept work and art direction, and a whole host of others involved. You can see the trailer we produced below:
The Sentinel Trailer
I was able to take a scene I originally lit for this trailer and rework it into a more focused scene, changing the camera to crop in and have shallower depth of field and emphasize the main character, Ori. While it doesn’t show the full expanse of the environment, it did show enough of the background to allow me to address lighting both the primary character, as well as the environment behind it.
My concept for the relighting of the shot was to imagine a doorway being opened, spilling a shaft of light into the envirnoment and onto the character. In the trailer you can see the ‘sentinel egg’ spinning as it opens. The frame above captures a moment where the light spills onto the environment in between the columns.
It had been some time since I rendered the scene, or even opened it. A lot had changed - software versions, render settings, shader settings. So while the original scene comprised a culmination of efforts by some very talented peers - the modelling and texturing most notably, it required me to dig in and rebuild in some ways from the ground up to get it up and running in Maya 2018.
The end result was a tutorial that covered the key aspects of lighting a scene for animation, step by step. HDR selection and IBL/environment light creation, establishing a key, fill, and bounce lights, rim lighting, and specialized accent lights to shape certain areas of the scene. I used blockers and rod filters to help emphasize the dynamic, angular shadows in the frame above. My intent was to make the instruction relatively generic - while it was completed in Maya 2018 and the included version of Arnold, the techniques shown could be replicated in virtually any 3d software and modern pathtracer. Gnomon has always had a special reputation amongst the 3d community, so it was a treat to get to make this and have it be a part of their library of instructional videos.
I also got a free mug out of the deal.
The tutorial is available for viewing here: Gnomon Introduction to Lighting for Animation