Animation I - Lighting
Ah, now we make the images shine. Literally; this is the lighting assignment.
Lighting a stove in a void is a little boring, so we switched to character lighting. We were each given
a particular scene with a set viewpoint to light. The rules were, we could change the textures a little
if we wanted, but the scene composition was set in stone.
We needed to generate two versions of the image, one lit for a specific mood, one lit to really show the
character well.
I looked at my maquette and thought, "What could POSSIBLY get him into that position."
Phrased like that, the question immediately had an obvious answer, "Alien invasion." So, I made the
mood lighting. =)
Next, I had to show of the figure well. So I thought a little more and decided a nice lazy stretch
on some warm fuzzy languid day would also work. I think I made the guy a little bright, but other
than that I really like how it looks.
Notice a problem with the last image though? Nothing is casting a shadow on the floor. I hadn't
noticed until I did this bright ligting, but the scene I had been given had a rather serious
defect in it...
When I showed this in my presentation in the morning, my professor suggested it was a result of the
alien abduction. If I had done the normal lighting before the aliens arrived, gravity and other
laws of physics might have held. :)
How about the group scenes? Well, we had two different versions of our restaurant to light this time.
One needed to draw attention to some part of the room, one needed to convey a different mood.
This is the version I worked on. We... um... never really decided what our theme was until we got
a bunch of lights in that looked good and tried to decide what to call it. Don't tell the prof
on us, okay? ;)
So anyway, the idea is an after-hours time in the restaurant, where all lights save one have been
shut off.
For the other version, we wanted some sort of disco/karaoke night. Not being able to edit the geometry
hindered this, but we came up with an off-screen mic to cast a shadow for the effect.
Shading - / - Top Level - \ - Motion