Week 9: Cleaning up Lighting & Renders
3/3/25 - 3/9/25
Mentor Feedback
Excitingly, this week the mentors Kyle, Billy, Olivia and Hailey were able to join us in person! Though our presentations were done more casually and conversationally, they had greatly insightful feedback that will help us deliver our final ad next week.
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After showing our work, Billy gave an informal lecture about lighting and shading which proved to be extremely insightful. Here were some of my notes from Tuesday's class, which I will be implementing in this week's iteration.
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Billy:
- Light linking is dangerous!- breaks the physics of Arnold's physically accurate ray tracing
- Approach lighting logically based on how we would light an object in real life
- Using an HDRI and keylights should get the renders to 90% photoreal or convincing, the rest of the lighting is mostly art directed or subtle changes
- Great advice for render settings - AA sampling from 3 to 5 to 9, from testing to final render, everything else to 1, be very careful increasing diffuse / spec / transmission / SSS samples
Kyle:
- Troubleshoot the odd faceting in the refractions of the bottle
- Overall, push for highest quality and cleanness for the final version
- Suggested to alter the color of the perfume shader to a different Chanel No. 5 version, resulting in a shader leaning towards a cream or offwhite as opposed to orange to avoid green tints.
Perfume Shader Alteration
Based on Kyle's suggestion to change the perfume shader color, I went back to the lookdev setup to begin making changes. Originally, the orange color was resulting in green and red tints within the refractions that were difficult to control, therefore brightening the bottle will result in an overall cleaner, appealing color scheme. (outdated bottle)
Lighting Changes
After one of our mentors, Billy, gave a short in person lecture about lighting, I went back to my shots and made adjustments based on the notes. One of the things he advised was to strictly avoid light linking-- which I had been utilizing up to this point. This week, I removed *most* of the light linking and began making adjustments to existing lights. I left some of the links, mainly for cases in which lights meant to drive reflections on the bottle did not need to light other objects in the scene.
With lights now unlinked to specific objects on the bottle, I made small changes to the light positions and intensities. Here are the comparisons of last week and this week's renders, including the new lighting changes and perfume color.
In the upcoming final week, I am excited to work on and upload breakdowns showing the lighting process! Here are what the shots look like before comp:
