Telling Tales: Maya lighting test

lighting in our story has an important place. we decided to set our story in sunset and midnight therefore   we need to make sure we have the similar light source in all the scenes. We use day light and tilt it make it a sunset and glowing lighting bulb inside the barn in order to give the pigs more extra light when they are inside the barn. The warm lightbulb light make the scene looks more cinematic and casting shadow to show that they are digging secretly. However the light takes ages to render and there are crashes happening all the time as well, it takes a lot more time to render that expected…me and Joe have already using over two computers to render at the same time but I am still a bit worried about the time issue.

Here is a peeking camera angle act as if there is someone spying on those pigs which I think will be visually interesting and interact more with the audience. The barrels and the grass are going to take so much time to render and also the complicated moves of the three pigs. It might be better to simplify the backgrounds and the light sources in the coming scene in order to safe time and the ease the rendering process.

This scene is to peek at the young pig and follow by a scene where the young pig is turning out his pocket outside the barn in order to transfer dirts.

A few light test on the escaping scene. I am using a wide angle shot and zoom in while the strong pig appear. I like the lighting and the shadows casted on the ground which makes a beautiful scene and also   I am going to draw dirts and dust around him in Aftereffect so the whole action could be more realistic and cohesive. 

I also learned to use graph editor to make an action loop of infinity that is very useful and guarantee the perfect same actions over and over again so no need to key every frames at the timeline. By doing this, the timing can be measured easier when having more than one moving character.

More lighting tests on the digging scene. The first one is too bright because the light bulbs intensity are set 20 which is causing this problem. Lowering it down and tilt the sunlight to make it become sunset instead of noon and the result looks a lot better. 

This is the final lighting I am using. I love this scene because it shows a lot of skills of animating using maya and the environment so beautiful. The issue is still the same, rendering. There is nothing I can doing to accelerate the rendering process and the only thing I can do is to simplify the scene but it is difficult to take the balance between the quality and speed. In order to have good result during hand-in, maybe it is better to render scene overnight and do scratches at home.