Lighting Workshop #1

 

 

I wanted to really push the render of this skeleton, and asked Nitin for a lot of feedback for how to handle the lights. The rim light brushing the edges of the ribcage and eye/nose sockets was something I really wanted to keep, and from my initial set up we scaled back the key to make sure the rim light popped. I learned how to use a cube hidden in game to cast a shadow where the rim light was doing too much work, and learned about colorluts to make the lighting pop all around. Something I did on my own was editing the camera focus and depth of vision to give a subtle fish eye effect and focus on the skull and not the hand.

 

The snake was really hard to light as the body is pretty flat with no big ridges to add interesting shadow or depth. After Nitin looked over my first setup, I got some advice about how to proceed and made three rim lights instead of one to emphasize the silhouette detail from the back. I used a colorlut here too after adjusting the key and fill lights.