Making of Eternal Flameby Enrique Parietti
Texturing
With the geo defined, now came the time to give colour and "paint" the figures. This was done in Photoshop over UVs that had been unwrapped with UVLayout. (Pic.06 & 07)
Since all elements in the scene receive light from the front, I opted not to use any SSS shader to avoid complex calculations and unnecessarily long rendertimes. Another important note is that all the materials had some kind of reflection, often very soft and almost imperceivable, but it had to be there to achieve a correct integration.
For this I created a sphere environment with a mapped sky near the simple geo. This would later contribute to the general mood of the lighting, shadows and tones in the scene. (Pic.08)
Texturing and render are very close friends and in this aspect, the relationship between them is where the first problem with the scene emerged: the combination of GI-based lighting with FG together with the Ivy leaf sprites.
The result was a ridiculously long rendertime.
This was slowing down the
progress of the scene,
so I had to pause for a bit
and research information
on the lifesaver of
all 3D artists: the Internet. Fortunately, I found great
help on XSIBase.com which
I immediately put to
practice. After some testing,
I finally got some
acceptable, "more normal"
rendertimes. (Pic.10)
Lighting
The lighting was of the great importance since it would be what would give the scene the mood I was looking for:
a peaceful, calm surrounding,...with soft shadows and softly lit zones of darkness.
The combination of GI with FG was the best option. (Pic.11)
I put an Area Light that would throw soft shadows as the main light.
A Point Light was used for the fire, with shadows enabled and then two extra lights in the sky that would merely contribute to the GI bounce light. A negative light was added in the side of the Ivy whose shadows I wanted to darken.
To emphasize the mood even more, I duplicated the main light (the sun), and I gave it a volumetric effect and set it up so that it wouldn't contribute to the actual scene lighting.
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