Portfolio Piece #10: Realistic Lighting Render Outdoors

Realistic Lighting Render Outdoors:

This was one of the hardest projects I've ever worked on. As I've mentioned before, I am not a person who is good at modeling or setting up a scene for lighting and renders. Nonetheless, this was a project I had to do and struggled with. The goal was to create a scene modeled in maya and build your own scene assets (lights, cameras, render layers) to create a realistic looking render of an outdoors scene. My first arduous task was finding a maya scene that I could use for my scene, there was no way I could completely model out a scene and render it with the time limit I had for this project. I found a scene online and it was perfectly suitable for my needs, unfortunately it didn't have any textures with it so I had to make those for my scene as well. I went out and took my own photos so I didn't have to purchase any and so I could have high quality textures that I own for the future. I also tried to get a few panoramic scenery shots so I could use that as a lighting source for my scene. After capturing those images and transferring them to Maya, I had the monotonous task of fixing the UVs for the models in the scene. This ensured that the textures I applied to the objects in the scene would be displayed properly and wouldn't be distorted once the textures were on there. This would also be important when applying lights in the scene so the reflections and refractions of the objects would operate normally. The second to last task was to apply lighting to the scene, this can be a very difficult process so I tried to take a kind of shortcut and use Imaged based lighting on my scene with photos I took before. This only worked so well and of course I had to tweak it and add some other lights to make sure it was realistic. The last and hardest part of this project was to set up proper render layers and render it out. With multiple render layers and effects, these renders took a long time and I had to budget my time wisely to ensure that the project would be finished on time.