Lighting

The lighting of the environment was something that I had to rework multiple times. The scene would not be right if the lighting did not give someone the feeling of wanting to go outside. I wanted it to be cloudy but have a warm light shine down. Those warm colors would be the only light present, giving everything a balanced contrast. However, this entailed not just the lighting, but the atmospheric and exponential fog since both can help or hurt the lighting. So I used a Directional Light with a warm yellowish orange tint. Intensity is set at 5, which is quite high but all the trees make the areas with sunlight really pop. The Temperature is set in the 3000’s and Light Shafts were enabled. I also used a Sky Light that had a small tint of yellow with mostly white. I turned cast shadows off and had a very low intensity of 0.5 and a cube map made with a Scene Capture Cube. Next, I worked on the Post Processing settings. I had worked with post processing settings before but never dove to deep into its ability. If there was ever a time to learn it was with this project. So, I did a top to bottom test on what each slider, checkbox, and value did. The main things I changed were White Balance-I turned the temperature of the scene to 5800 which kept most of the nice orangey-yellows but added some blues back into the shadows. I turned the Contrast up just to 1.1 to give the trees a little more depth and darkening. Gain was a game changer-I turned it up to 1.74 which gave the sky that bright glow. I added Bloom but tried to keep it low. To much bloom can blow the whole environment out. Next, I went to the camera setting and adjusted the Exposure Compensation to -0.5. I turned Auto Exposure on and made the min and max 1.0. As I said, the fog can make a difference so I tried to push it back so close details would not be lost but there would still be a haze in the distance.

Challenges

As with every project, there are complications and Fresh Tracks was no exception. My biggest challenge while making Fresh Tracks was the scale of the environment. The more I worked on it, the more I could add, but keeping a project to a reasonable scope is extremely important. I had to step back from working on it a few times and ask myself, “what in this environment can I make better instead of adding more”. This lead me to change my cliffs and rocks. Originally I was using a darker cliff rock and after stepping back and looking more into references with my overall feel, I felt as though more warm colors were needed. I searched for cliffs and mountains with snow with no real inspiration until a family member returned from a trip to Deer Valley in Utah. They had taken some great reference photos of a beautiful beige cliff. I went back to work on revising the cliffs to be more flakey and weathered. Re-textured them to have a lighter, warmer feel. It added a lot more color into the environment. The photo below shows before and after adding the new cliffs and warmer lighting. This was just because I stepped back to think about how I could improve what I have and not continue to add what I don’t particularly need.