Lighting|Lookdev Demo Reel - Elia Merlin

STATION 14

After graduating from Event Horizon School, I started working on my biggest personal project yet.

"Station 14" was made in collaboration with Edoardo Maragno, who handled the scene FX.

GATHERING REFERENCES

For such a big project with a lot of details it is important to collect as many references as possible for each element on stage.

As such for the spaceship, I used the model C2 Hercules of Star Citizen as a reference, and modeled it inside Maya, while the textures were made in Substance Painter.

My idea was to create a rainy night scene, and to help myself I used SHOTDECK to get a general idea of the mood of the scene. I collected as much reference as possible and whilst no singular reference was my focus they all helped me create my unique lighting.

I set the scene in a military airport, with fitting vehicles and buildings. Finally, to make the scene more dynamic, I added a soldier running across the screen.

(The models of the vehicles were created by cenobyte-Sketchfab)

The blockout was created in Maya and exported to Houdini so that my peer Edoardo could start working on the FX even though the scene was still incomplete, which sped up the process significantly.

FX

The FX were handled by a peer of mine: Edoardo Maragno.

He made the puddle with a FLIP simulation, while the rest of the FXs are a combination of POPs and volumes derived from said particles.

Edoardo only used a Pyro solver when making the wagon mist, which was also his favorite bit of the whole project.

This collaboration was truly challenging, it showed us what it means to work in a team and design a functional pipeline.

I encourage you to check out Edoardo's Rookies post for a full FX breakdown.

Texturing, Shading and Lookdev

Once the model was finished, I started the texturing process by importing the model in Substance Painter and creating the textures based on the reference above.

After the textures were done, I started to do some Lookdev using Arnold. Due to the rain, I modified the shaders and added a wet look to them to better fit the scene.

The ground shader is procedurally generated. Starting from a simple asphalt texture, I added a wet effect, some small puddles, dirt, cracks and road lines found on airport runways. 

Lighting, Rendering and Compositing

Once the textures and shaders were all set, I started with the lighting process. The rain created by Edoardo helped give the scene a cinematic, dark and foggy look. I used a skydome light to get diffused lighting and added a directional light to get a rim effect on top of the spaceship. I then proceeded to assign emissive materials to all light emitting geometry, such as cars headlights and backlights, antennas and some props.

At this point, I was satisfied with the lighting, and to help with the foggy look, I used an aiAtmosphereVolume node with an aiNoise to break up the noise texture a bit and then procedeed to remove the volume from unwanted light sources.

I separated all the lights into light groups to have more control during compositing. Then, during the compositing stage, I used Nuke to rebuild all my beauty passes with the light groups' AOVs, added the FX layer rendered by Edoardo, some footage of water falling from the spaceship, added film grain, depth of field, vignette, and chromatic aberrations. After some final color grading to match my reference, I added black bars to give it a more cinematic look.

For this project, I used Maya, Houdini, Arnold, Karma, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Quixel Megascans, Sketchfab and Nuke. I rendered everything in ACES colorspace.

STEAMPUNK WHALE

During my second year at Event Horizon School, we were tasked with creating a robot of our choice, and then integrating it into a real life video.

I spent several weeks searching for robot references online to find a suitable reference model. I wanted to create something different than a classic bipedal robot, so I settled on a steampunk whale inspired by Grason Cotrell amazing work.

Modeling and Rigging

The creation of the 3D model was quite complex; I found myself spending a lot of time trying to understand how to shape and model each detail. For the rigging, my professor and I settled on an "fk" rigging system, as the "ik" in my case wasn't needed.

Once happy with the result, I proceeded with the texturing.

Texturing, Shading and Lookdev

The textures I created were based on rusty old ships, with dents and damaged painting, the color palette was instead based on a real-life humpback whale.

I chose tubes to represent part of the whale belly with some rusty textures to stay in theme; I used some red area lights to simulate the heat radiating from the whale core. For the eyes, I used a big glass sphere with two smaller orange and yellow spheres inside representing the pupil, with the same red hue due to the heat radiating from the core.

Camera tracking and CG Rebuild

For the video in which I had to integrate the robot, I resorted to the Gotham Filmworks channel. I settled on some drone shot footage of Manhattan which perfectly fit my needs and made for a very cinematic shot.

To track the footage, I used 3DEqualizer, but since the video has two highly reflective glass covered buildings, the tracking proved to be quite challenging. After countless attempts, with Nuke and After Effects and their auto-tracking systems, I decided to go back to 3DEQ and track it manually which yielded far better results.

Once I managed to track the footage and export it to Maya I started the CG rebuilding process of the glass buildings, as a CGI model of the buildings was needed to have the whale reflecting on the glass.

I then moved to the animation phase.

Animation

The whale animation is based on real life whale swimming patterns, which I had to slightly modify because my whale isn't swimming in water but in the air. I then attached the animated swim/flying-cycle to a curve path, and made some final tweaks to the turning animation to more closely resemble real life.

To enrich the scene, I also modeled some small fish, which I then animated, multiplied, and randomized with MASH inside Maya.

At the end of the animation, as the whale is closing in on the camera, it whips its tail, creating a shockwave, which I represented via a camera shake effect added during compositing.

Lighting, Rendering and Compositing

I didn’t have the original HDRI for my footage, I worked around that by using a frame of the video to get the reflections. I simulated the sunlight using a directional light, and due to the large environment, I added a series of area lights all around, positioned in a circle at the top of the scene pointing slightly downward. I kept the exposure low, to create a rim and fill effect that makes everything much more interesting.

All the lights were separated into light groups to have more control during compositing. Then, I used Nuke to rebuild all my beauty passes with the light groups' AOVs, added some fog, film grain, depth of field, chromatic aberrations and motion blur. After some final color grading to match my footage I added black bars to give a cinematic look.

For this project, I used Maya, Arnold, Substance Painter/Designer/Sampler, 3DEQ, Photoshop and Nuke. I rendered everything in ACES colorspace.

KOENIGSEGG AGERA ONE:1

I decided to model the Koenigsegg Agera One as my personal project during my first year to improve both my 3D modeling and texturing skills.

The hardest part of the project was modeling the car. Being it a supercar, it has a lot of curves and details with complex shapes, which helped me understand the creation of clean topology and the importance of having good UV.

For this project, I used Maya, Arnold, Substance Painter/Designer, Photoshop and Nuke. I rendered everything in ACES colorspace.

Thanks for watching!