Luise Rolle - Lighting Lookdev
Hi there! I'm an artist passionate about lighting, lookdev, and compositing. My adventure began in 2022 at PIXL VISN Media Arts Academy. I'm captivated by the interplay of light and shadow, and how they shape a scene's atmosphere. This understanding directs my work and influences each project's unique aesthetic.
Join me in exploring a selection of my showreel, featuring The Turtle and Tea Time.
The Turtle
Intro and Tough Bits
Let me introduce you to our cool project team: Alica Klinger did an amazing job modeling, texturing, and shading our turtle, Carsten Baars crafted an awsome beach simulation in Houdini and I had fun playing with lighting, layout and compositing.
One of the trickiest bits was getting all the parts to work together in a single pipeline. I set up a system that let us make changes, render, and sync stuff easily using OneDrive - high five to all the people who do this professionally.
I hit a bump with a version mix-up between the mtoh-plugin for Houdini and the mtoa-plugin for Maya. We had sand grains exported from Houdini that looked okay in Maya for Alica, but acted super weird in my viewport.
After doing lots of reading, I figured out that plugin version details can bite you if you're not careful.
Getting the Mood Right
When I started, I had one big question: Do we look at the turtle in bright daylight or during a beautiful sunset or sunrise? Or to put it simply, should we use high or low contrast lighting?
After playing around with different light setups, I found that sunset made Alicas modeling and texturing look awesome. So we decided to choose the last one (also in video):
WIP Testversion 22.05.23
Rendering
When the lighting was sorted, the next challenge was getting the render settings just right. The turtle and sand grains were causing some flickering because of their displacement, roughness, and coat values. To my surprise, a higher resolution actually made things faster, so we went for 4K rendering. We did have some bumps along the way, like wildly different render times on different PCs ( 41 min vs. 840 min), which meant we only managed to get a clear still frame for the second shot. One thing I learned from this: always do test renders!
The cool thing is, the final image needed barely any tweaks since the lighting and texturing were already on point. All I did was:
- Take the color out of the beauty render
- Adjust the light values in a couple of places to make the composition pop
- Add a background (from artgrid by Mauricio Tapia) and some lens effects
This was way different from the detailed compositing work I did on my previous project, "Fisherman and Firefly".
Big shoutout to Emilio Lingg for showing me the workflow with FlareFactory, LensEngine, and Bokeh nodes - it was a game changer.
Tea Time
My second VFX project is all about CG integration, with a lot of compositing going on and a focus on light matching and a back-and-forth between different programs, mainly Maya and Nuke.
Preparation
When I first started brainstorming, I stumbled upon a really cool reference. It had this awesome color scheme and lighting that really caught my eye.
I knew I needed to be smart when shooting the plate – the scene where I'd integrate my CG objects. This meant considering a few things to make the editing part less of a headache:
- Consistent lighting
- Enough parallax in the picture
- Avoiding overexposed highlights
- Trying to keep the same focus, if possible
- Lots of detail for plenty of tracking points
I won't lie, my first shoot didn't quite hit the mark on all these points. So, I went for second shot and took the chance to do a 3D scan of the set.
The objects I decided to add to the scene were a cup and a piece of ginger.
I got the ginger model from Megascans and crafted the cup in Maya. I used Mari to make the cup's base color, and fine-tuned the shading of both modles in Maya with Arnold.
About the Tracking Part
I did my tracking in Nuke, using the footage I shot. This created a 3D camera that moved just like the real one. I used the Tracker node, but also had to add some handmade trackers to get the X-value just right.
I checked my track in Nuke, using low-poly versions of the cup and ginger to see if things looked right. I positioned them as best as I could.
Lighting in Maya
Once I had the track and the CG objects in place, I went to Maya and spent some serious time fine-tuning to match positions and movement. Having the 3D scan was a lifesaver here.
Getting the movement to match was one thing, but the light and shadows had to line up, too. The biggest puzzle was getting the reflection on the edge of the cup right. After wrestling with a bunch of AOVs for beauty reconstruction and adjusting the shadows/reflections, I went back to Nuke.
CG Integration and finalizing
The last step of the CG integration was pretty intense. I built my most complex node tree ever:
So I focused on Shadows,
the beauty reconstruction, (here I had the most fun, diving deep into the very subtle changes of color and value , I love that!)
lens effects, like depth, hailation bevor merged it over the Plate.
Than the regrain
and finally some LUTs and a little more overall color correction
Finally, thank you for taking the time to explore my work. If anything caught your eye or you found something you enjoyed, know that it truly brightens my day. Looking ahead, I aim to complete my showreel by the end of June, which will feature additional projects not included in this entry. Also, I will be graduating from Pixl Visn, and I'm genuinely excited about what the future holds.
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