Day 53



Lighting again
Swapped out a group of strategically placed spotlights and replaced with a row of pointlights (Acting as lightsource from 7-headed drake) down the valley with decreasing in intensity and physically correct attenuation the closer they are to the stone arch. The fall off of the lights were much desirable than before.

Placed more fill lights to avoid having zero value pixels as suggested, so we don't loose those details. I had the privilege of adjusting the lights while waiting for FX portion of the project to come in, rendering as much as I could even though it was minor tweaks here and there. Wanted the computer to keep outputting, rendering low-setting/res stuff while i was at the workstation and go full-res/high sampling during lunch breaks and before calling it a day). It was a habit inherited from Mr Douglas during earlier reviews.


Bad Day
Close to 15 renders were output to view and adjust lights as i went along, there was a point where my admin user profile for the workstation got really screwed up. First my account was locked, had to reset password, i was sent to a temporary profile when i logged in the following day, first thing that hit me was the desktop was completely empty.

Long story but i was unable to retrieve 3 days of progress and decided to jump back to hip file v011 from v013 & Hakim from help-desk was unable to retrieve the female angel animation which was handed to us. 10 out of 15 test-renders were gone, will be uploading the remaining 5 very soon.



Indirect-Illumination
I guess it was really really time to stop messing with my lighting set up, final step was to get a gilight (global illumination) for indirect illumination.
Jumped into "LightMask", made a bundle out of Lighting_Set_02, up photon-counts and generated the photon map to disk and unchecked "Auto-Generate Photon Map" to avoid generating again on render.

Pretty standard workflow, like depth-map shadow. Might considering exporting this as a light export later?



Pebble_instancer
Another instancer for tiny rocks, same method of saving out a bunch of small_rock_objects and same proxy preview network used for mid-size boulders.

At the start, i adopted the same approach by scattering points all over the place, had the idea of painting them instead having small rocks to be instanced rather than using "Delete SOP" to group a points and use them as template. I had nodes appended in the wrong order and got it to work after consulting Mr Ron. pebble_instancer does not have the proper rock and box preview like rock_instancer at the moment.



Finally, i brought in the R&D for stylized lighting (Below). Preferred the lighting without it and it was adding on to render time, it shall be dropped for now due to time constraint.