Texturing & Lighting - Diana Lee
Hello everyone! My name is Diana Lee and I'm an aspiring lighting artist focusing on stylized animation. These are some of my best and favorite work I have created in the last six months. Hope you like it!
Texturing & Lighting - Diana Lee
In 2019, I made the decision to change careers from computer science and programming, to computer graphics, vfx, and animation. Spring 2020, I enrolled in the Masters program at Academy of Art University, and in Fall 2020, I narrowed down my focus to Lighting, and joined the lighting program at Academy of Animated Art. These are some of my best work that I have created since then.
Special thank you to Michael Tanzillo and Derek Flood for all their feedback and guidance!
A Hat
This wonderful shot was animated by Fabian Martinez, and I had the absolute pleasure of texturing and lighting it!
Texturing & Lookdev
Right off the bat, I knew I wanted to give the characters a deeper, olive skin tone and flush the scene with late-afternoon sunlight. Since both characters had black outfits, I also wanted to place a lighter element behind them so they would separate well from the background.
I started out by making the wall behind them white. After several iterations, I ended up with a warm brick wall and a white door, which I enlarged to frame the characters. I made several set dressing changes to make the environment a bit more realistic and subtle. I wanted all the focus to be on the characters.
This was also my first project using Substance Painter. The smart materials were really helpful in getting my feet off the ground, and the procedural texturing workflow made it easy to have creative flexibility while I experimented with different colors.
Lighting
Now came the lighting. I learned three main things while working on this shot.
1. Having the right intensity in the main source: sunlight. Late afternoon sunlight is very strong! I wanted it to really feel like they were outside in that time of day. In this regard, using ACES workflow really helped because I was able to push the exposure of my sun light more without losing information in the highlights.
2. Getting enough bounce light. I didn't want it to feel like they were in a field in direct sunlight. On top of the sun source, I wanted there to be lots of diffused light bouncing around the scene, creating a glowy, warm atmosphere that would highlight their warm embrace.
3. Creating dynamic shadows. I used a gobo on the sunlight, creating different shadows throughout the scene. This not only created visual variations in the background, but also made it feel like there were other objects outside of the frame, hinting at a larger world.
With some final touches in comp, this is the finished before and after!
Peaches
This project was a collaboration with Madison Erwin. She crafted this amazing sequence from the audio from one of my favorite episodes of Modern Love. There were many challenging elements in this shot that were new to me, and the life in the animation really kept me going!
Rendering Glass
The biggest challenge for this sequence was achieving the look of the glass case and gem.
The initial glass model that was used in animation was a thin-walled dome shape. For one, it was difficult to get the shape of the dome to read properly, especially at the base where it met the podium. And for another, it begged the question of why this valuable gem would be "guarded" by a flimsy glass dome. After looking at a lot of reference images, I edited the geometry to be a more angular shape with thickness, and used the curvature node to create a shader that looked like glass panes with metallic edges. I also scaled down the podium so that it was similar in size to the glass case, which was more realistic for jewelry displays.
For the gem, I spent a lot of time on the transmission parameters of the shader, then enhanced the refractive AOVs with compositing in Nuke. This method alone caused a lot of noise, so I rendered two additional passes to help. One pass had the gem as a mesh light. This threw caustic-like light on the glass case, podium, and the character, which I loved, and since it was a separate AOV, I was able to dial in the effect to my liking. The other pass was of just the gem and the set, with a white reflective plane animated to rotate around the gem behind the camera. I added this pass using a plus operation, making the gem look brighter and more full. Moreover, because I was rendering only one frame of the glass case and podium for the first part of the shot, this pass helped add some "movement" to an otherwise static frame.
Lighting Dynamic Character Movement
The second big lesson from this project was one that I had learned at the beginning of my studies but forgotten: to analyze the shot as a whole before starting to light! As I worked on multiple shots where the characters were more or less in the same position, I had fallen into a routine of watching the animation a few times only to identify a couple main frames, and starting to work on those frames. When I rendered the full range on this for the first time after working that way, there were multiple moments where the character was actually moving through my lights!
As I re-worked the lighting rig to fix those mistakes, I learned to consider the scene as a whole and make sure that the placement of my dramatic lights would also make sense in the larger environment. And I learned not to focus too much on placing a light based on one frame, since the character could be in a completely different position in the next!
Breakdown
With that, below is the finished before and after! A complete lighting breakdown of the shots can be found here.
Demo Reel
I would like to end the entry with my lighting demo reel, which includes a few more projects.
I tried to show the process of how I build my shots, as well as mention the biggest challenges and lessons I learned! I hope the post was informative. If you have thoughts, feedback, or questions, don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn or Instagram! Thank you for reading!
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