Nobody f***s with the Jesus!

Nobody f***s with the Jesus!

Hi! I'm in collaboration with Jaime López (@troitiarts) to create this shot. He did the modelling, texturing, shading, grooming and scene layout, and, in my case, I did the Lighting and Compositing Shot. I hope you like it!

In lighting, I started with a dome light as the fill light. After that, I’m lighting the Background using differents area lights and volumetric light to create the general atmosphere. After, I created two different lights in the lamp: the area light and volumetric light. The next step is to create the lighting setup for the characters: the warm light, two top lights and the rim lights.

Later, I separate the elements into different rendering layers: the background, the foreground, the characters (each on a different layer) and the different volumetric lights. AOVs are used in the image. The AOVS I use are technical AOVS like Normal, Position and Depth Z; AOVS material such as Diffuse Direct, Diffuse Indirect, Specular Direct, Specular Indirect, SS Direct, SS Indirect, indirect transmission and albedo transmission; I also use the light groups to separate the different lights to adjust the lighting in the composition: the dome light, the character lights, and the background lights. The volumetric lights that I separate in the Render Layers.

In the case of compositing, I created the template in Nuke that separates into different layers. I adjust the light groups to fit the final result and add the final adjustments like depth shift and push the gamma in the background and foreground. 

Also, I raised the gain on the characters because I thought they were a bit dark. I adjusted the lights in the sequence by adding the glow effect because it's a similar effect that happens in real life. In addition, I added the warp effect of the lights on the silhouette of the characters to give the fort the edge rim light. Besides, I used the cryptomatte to retouch the specific areas like skin or clothes. In all layers, there is a zdefocus effect to make a more realistic shot.

As I mentioned earlier, I added the volumetric light with the screen mode in the merge node. In this case, I didn't retouch the layer and we took advantage of it as it came out from render.

Finally, I add the lens effects like glow, chromatic aberration, lens distortion, grain and vignette. Also, I used color grading to adjust the colors and gamma.