Rendering

I’m in the process of lighting, rendering and compositing all the shots in ‘Rhapsody with James’. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done any serious lighting so it took me a while to get used to the whole thing. I’ve been thinking how much will I render in 3d and how much will I solve in compositing. At first I thought I’ll do most of it in compositing and break it into as many layers as possible. Sounds good but at the end of the first shot I rendered I realized that to have this functionality things had to be much more automated so that layers/passes would be created on the fly and that’s an option I don’t have at the moment. So I took the middle road: I ended up with around 10-20 layers per shot which allows me to tweak things quite fine in compositing but if something is really off I still have to rerender things.

I approach lighting the same way as animation. I take a first pass at the whole film and then go through all the shots and make another pass instead of sticking with one shot and tweak that one to the end. The only difference is there will be much less passes/corrections than I did in animation since I’m focusing much more on animation than on lighting in this film. It’s also a good excuse because my lighting skills kinda suck these days.

Though things aren’t yet final for any shot that’s rendered I’m showing sort of work in progress of one of the bathroom shots.