Night Maintenance

In this project my goal was to make a cool environment render for my mech model, I must mention here that the soldier models are from mixamo and the only model that was not created by me. Everything else I made myself.

Below you can see some of the previous iterations of the scene, to achieve this render I experimented a lot with different lighting and scene layouts. In total this project took me around 2-3 days.

This was the first iteration of the layout, usually when starting it is a good idea to add a basic terrain plane and your objects of interest and just play around with camera angles and scene arrangement before adding more assets into your scene. Before adding more detail you should be more or less certain of how you want your scene to be laid out...

As you can see the first prototype render is very different from the final render. That is why I suggest experimenting with multiple lighting and compositing layouts(if you have time for that), as you never know what may look better until you try it yourself.

Another important part of making a render like this is to alter or correct your image in post processing that way you will have additional control over your image, for that you can use many softwares (Photoshop, GIMP, Lightroom) , but for this project I wanted to keep everything in one software so I just used the compositing nodes within blender. Here are the nodes that I used.

As you can see the nodes are very simple, but they allow me to alter the image the way I want. Some things are easier to do in post and you have the added benefit of not having to re-render your scene.

With just this simple compositing setup applied you can see the drastic change in mood of the image. This is why I highly recommend also experimenting with colors.

For the people interested. Below I also included some additional images from this project not arranged in any particular order.

The assets that I added to populate the scene, textured in substance painter.

The lighting of the scene, sometimes especially in night renders you can't rely on a single HDRI to light your environment.