In the last week, I've been focusing on getting the lighting fixed. It was a tough job, since I had some computer troubles and had to use an old mac in the class. It took me a really long time, and a lot of tutorials, but I think it's close to what we'll use in the final render.
This was about what I started with:
Just a skydome with some directional lights.
I turned it into this, which is about what we need:
I had to do a lot of fixing. The Paint Effects that I used for a lot of the leaves ended up with this ugly black border when I move it to Arnold. so I had to add an alpha map to all of the textures to get rid of it.
In researching/looking for tutorials and ideas, I found out that using a volume shader on the atmosphere would really add to the visuals we were looking for (which was the foggy dusk or dawn lighting). The problem was that it doesn't work on a physical sky, just a light that works nearby. So I had to put together a photometric light that would simulate the same lighting as the sun in the physical sky. I think it worked out quite well.
I've been working a lot lately, just trying to get all the pieces put together, and I'm getting pretty tired. I hope that I can rest a bit when the renders start running later on.
Ronan and Emmet have continued to work on the characters, as they keep running into rigging problems. I had hoped to start the animation a lot earlier, but the rigging problems have delayed it. So, I've tried to keep proactive by coming to class and working on lighting and eventually rendering.
I'm pretty happy with the scene's appearance at the moment, and just have a few more adjustments in the layout until it'll be render-ready. I have learned a lot about render layers, so I'm pretty hopeful that i'll be able to split the scene up in rendering (otherwise we won't be able to render until the animation is finished. With any luck, the renders will mostly be done in the next week. I'm a bit nervous though, just because it's such a heavy scene to render.
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