Lighting/LookDev DemoReel - by Julian Büttner

Rookie Awards 2023 | Rookie of the Year - Finalist

by JulianBuettner on 1 Jun 2023 for Rookie Awards 2023

Hey everyone! I am thrilled to introduce you to my entry for the Rookie Awards 2023. I will breakdown and show you the projects I did for my first demo reel, which I started working on during my education at PIXL VISN media arts academy in Cologne, Germany.

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Lighting/LookDev DemoReel - by Julian Büttner

by JulianBuettner

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I started these projects during my time at PIXL VISN media arts academy in Cologne. When it was time to start working on my demo reel, I thought about what I would like my reel to look like. Because I wanted to focus on Visual Effects, a few things were a must, for example a high quality CGintegration as well as a relatively photorealistic style.

For these projects I mainly worked in Maya and rendered with Arnold. All projects are rendered and created in the ACES colorspace, which allowed me to obtain richer colors as well as a great amount of freedom in post. Nuke was used for the compositing afterwards. I also rendered every project in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio (CinemaScope) because I’m a giant cinematography geek and I wanted my reel to reflect that.

In the following article I will show you and give detailed breakdowns for each project.

Enjoy!

Environment - Festival of Lights

For a Lighting/LookDev Artist I have a bit of an unhealthy thing for large scale environments. So it became clear pretty early on that I wanted to include such a project in my demo reel. For a chance of success with a project as large as this, it was crucial to keep a few things in mind while looking for a concept. First, it obviously shouldn’t be TOO large or feature thousands of clearly different and unique assets. Second, it should be an interesting lighting scenario. A lot of environment light setups are “just“ natural lighting. For me it was really important to be challenged by this project, but I really didn’t want the focus to drift too far away from lighting.

This Project was done in Houdini Solaris and rendered with Karma.

First Steps

After looking online for concepts, I came upon this one by Wayne Leung Hou-wai. It immediately caught my attention and after having a closer look at it, I decided that I would use it to create my environment. The first step was to make a list of the necessary assets . I went through the concept and marked every clearly unique building, as those were the assets I would need. Put together with a few more genereic buildings, I could build the city without anyone noticing that it’s all the same buildings. After that, I divided the concept in layers, deciding which parts would be CG and which ones I would create in Compositing as a Matte Painting.

After carefully considering all aspects this project would require, I realised that my usual software solutions (Maya) wouldn’t quite cut it. I originally wanted to do this in Isotropix Clarisse, but after doing a test run with another project, I found that it didn’t really give me everything I hoped for. A friend of mine suggested that I should use Houdini Solaris and after some research, I decided that I would go USD baby. I never really used Houdini or USD which required me to learn everything about it while doing this project. While I was a bit concerned that this could lead to problems down the road, this was exactly the sort of challenge that I was looking for in this project.

Layout and Asset Creation

After choosing the concept and the software I would use to realise it, I started roughly matching the camera position in the concept by blocking representations of the key landmark buildings in the scene, scaling them to a realistic size and moving some things around until it seemed right.

From there I began looking for assets which I could use. I found most of them on CG trader in a quality that I could use. They didnt came with PBR maps however, and I would have to do a lot of work in the LookDev later to get them to look right. I built all Assets in the scene as clean USD Assets with MaterialX shading and proxy meshes using Houdini’s component builder for a smooth and clean workflow later on. After the rough blockout I did earlier, I started with the actual layout in Solaris. All buildings and most other Assets are point instances of a referenced USD Asset which lets me change almost everything about them at any time with relative ease. The source for the instancers are simple SOP create nodes which specify a point and an index to control which asset should be instanced to the point.

During the Layout it was important to establish the key light direction as early as possible. Because I wanted to match the concept as best as possible, I first aligned the buildings to the image and then sculpted a simple ground plane to conform to the buildings. For the background I created some simple mountains in Quadspinner Gaea and the kitbashed them to form the mountain range in the background.

After completing the layout of these landmarks, I started placing trees and bushes to piece everything together. The fooliage in the city is completely hand placed, but for the background I used Houdini‘s amazing scattering tools to speed things up a bit.

The Sky Lanterns

One of the things I knew would be difficult to do where the Sky Lanterns. While the Asset itself is quite straightforward, the layout and movement was not. But first things first. For the Modeling and Texturing, I asked a friend of mine (Denny Diel) if he could jump in and make a simple lantern for me. While he was at it he also did the small round lanterns hanging at the buildings. We also collaborated on another project which I will come to later on.. for the fire I wasn’t sure how close I wanted to get so I decided on rendering a simple fire simulation in Houdini onto cards. While the solution is simple, I found the result to be quite nice.

For the Layout and Movement part, I needed some help. For this reason, fellow student of mine Saad Hassan made a simple to use system for me. He made the process semi procedural, meaning that I could places boxes with different attributes in them driving a point scatterer. I could even modify the movement separately. While the movement of the Lanterns is not actually simulated, they utilize a basic point simulation to create the effect of updrift and wind as well as rotation. Saad did an awesome job with this and it was truly a joy to get to work with him!

In this picture you can see how the lantern scene is built. I rendered them separately to save on render time and be more flexible in compositing.

LookDev & Lighting

The CGTrader Assets were quite complex with a lot of shaders and given more time, I would have severely simplified them to improve performance as well as my headache trying to remember what all the materials are for. Looking back at it now, I should have probably saved some time on this part, because many details of the shaders aren't really visible in my final lighting setup anyway.

During the Layout Phase I made some tactical changes from the concept to make my life a bit easier. For example, I changed the city from going on far into the background to stoping a lot sooner and covering the rest of the space with a lake. When first building the shader for that, I did a really simple material with a noise texture in the displacement. However later on, I changed the whole thing to utilize Karmas Ocean System which improved the look and feel a lot. While I was quite satisfied with the result so far, I figured that everything just looked a bit too clean. To resolve this, I scattered leaves and other debris on the roofs which helped tremendously to blend the buildings and fooliage together.

The Lighting started out really rough. I already had the Key Light from the Moon and started by pretty much enhancing it with supportive lights where necessary. A Skydome provided a general ambient light to imitate the sky and atmospheric scattering at night. I chose to lean a bit more into a stylized look, tinting everything more blueish than it should be, to enhance the feeling of night.

Once the natural lighting was done, I first started adding interior lights to the building to make the city feel more alive. Here it came in quite handy that the assets where so overkill because most of them had a simple, empty interior with actual empty window frames. This allowed me to just put some lights inside and get a plausible result. For the round building in the center I made some adjustments to the shader to make it look like there is light behind those paper windows. Further lights where added to illuminate the city in a warm ambient glow.

I was fairly happy with how the render was looking like at this point so it was time to move on to Nuke. In the end I split the render into 6 layers and rendered a good number of light groups for the most flexibility in Comp. For the rendering, I exported the scene into USD Layers and just referenced it in a brand new file where I handled all the rendersettings.

Compositing

A lot of work was done in Nuke to turn the raw render (see above) into the final image. The very first thing I did was to balance out and modify the lights. While most of them very pretty straightforward, the sky lanterns where not. For them a lot of comp work was needed. I rendered a cryptomatte pass in which I randomly split all lanterns into 10 IDs. With this, I could easily simply use noises to put in variation as well as additional flickering on top of the rendered "real" flicker which I found to be way to subtle. I also made the water a bit darker to make the shot more gloomy. Furthermore I did some simple relighting on the long house to the right of the palace and added a rim light to the palace with some nuke tricks.

After that it was time to tackle the background Matte Painting. Im not much of a Mattepainter to be honest so my goal was to get something that works and doesnt look too much out of place. First I extended the set with some mountains I put onto cards behind where the CG environment ended. After that I had to do the sky. I decided to utilize some elements from my concept like the moon and surrounding area. For the rest I grabbed other elements to build the final product. At this point I was pretty happy with how the background looked like, but it was still a bit too static. Using a simple Compositing trick I added a "fake parallax" effect to the sky. below you can see how the sky is built.

Next I had to add some atmospherics. My plan was to add fog cards using Nukes 3D System and the zDepth I rendered for masking. However this wasn't nearly detailed enough to work. After some research I decided on using Deep Compositing. I originally did not render my scene in Deep, so I rendered out a scene without materials and disabled all the render passes which gave me only the pure Deep information. Here a comparison between masking with deep and zDepth.

Using this method allowed me to build an environmental fog layer which perferctly integrates into the scene. For anyone who isn't familiar with the Deep workflow I can really recommend checking it out!

After adding a zDepth fog I still wasn't happy with my atmospherics. Even though I wanted to avoid it, I decided on rendering a volumetrics pass for the Sky Lanterns. I used Karma XPU which helped with the render times and the resulting comp looked quite a lot better.

For the final touches I added depth of field, motion blur, chromatic abberation, lens distortion, vignetting and finished up everything with some grading. I added a screenshot of my node tree below.

Conclusion

Finding that great concept in the beginning really gor me off to a great start. The Layout phase was pretty time consuming and obviously learning both Houdini, USD, MaterialX and Karma from scratch was quite challenging. Especially since I hadn't done anything close to this scale before.

I would say the biggest takeaway for me however was just how much you can do in Nuke and Compositing in general. The comparison between raw render and final comp is still blowing my mind.. Now that I'm done with the project, considering that this was my first large scale environment, I think that overall I'm really happy with how it turned out!

Character Lighting - Minotauros

After starting to work on the Environment, I was looking for something smaller scale for some change in pace compared to the bigger projects. Somewhere around the end of our time at the school, Denny Diel approached me with this character and asked me if I could do the presentation for the project. Since I am a huge mythology fan, I was instantly on board.

This project was done in Maya and rendered with Arnold.

Layout

First thing was to gather references for the environment. I decided that an environment is necessary as this was a full body shot and also a themed character. While browsing on ArtStation I came across a post with pictures from the game Assassins Creed Odyssey. Unfortunately I cannot find the post anymore but big shoutout to the Artist who made it!

I started to blockout the rough environment to get a feel for the scale of the scene. I modeled the outer brick wall railing, the wooden roof and the metal vase with some light texturing in Substance Painter. For this Project I heavily utilised Assets from Quixel Megascans, which was especially useful for the fooliage. The plant tubs were done by Denny. After completing the layout, I added some greek amphoras from CG Trader to give the scene more details.

Next I did the cameras. Denny gave me some rough angles he would like to have for his reel and I integrated these suggestions as best as I could.

Lighting & Compositing

Because Denny had already done all the LookDev of the Character himself, I didn't really need to touch on the Minotauros shading. I did all the LookDev on the Environment.

With the Lighting I decided to take it in a more realistic yet still unnatural beautiful direction. Because we were outside I started with the sun. In this case I had the roof with ivy over the whole scene which made this step by far the one I struggled the most with . After trying a lot of angles I finally came to the conclusion that it was probably smarter to adjust the position of the geo to the position of the light instead of the other way around. This allowed me to establish a good looking light direction first and art direct the soft shadows of the ivy after that. The rest of the lights were compared to the key pretty straightforward. I added some supportive keys, a fill and a few rims. I also boosted some overly dark shadows in the background.

The Compositing process was pretty simple for this project. First I did some lighting adjustments and added a simple atmosphere based on zDepth. For the Background I simply put an HDRi on a sphere in the Nuke 3D system and merged everything together with a lightwrap. After that I decided that some dust particles would really help with the mood of the shot. For that I used a simple Nuke particle setup and tweaked it until I was happy with the look. Add in some post effects and grading and done is the project!

Conclusion

It was nice to work on a slightly smaller project for a change which required a lot of planning around the layout and render settings. I am very happy with the results, however there are still some things I would like to adjust when I find the time. Figuring out how to light a character and working around the challenges that come with that was really interesting and I'm looking forward to working with them in the future!

Character LookDev - Orc

This is my most recent work. After finishing up my environment project I wanted to do another character but this time I was looking for something where I could focus more on the LookDev part. I knew that my friend Andreas Niederhofer was working on a photorealistic bust of an orc, so I approached him and we decided on doing this project together.

This project was done in Maya and rendered with Arnold.