Rendering Environments with Lighting (Samples)

Lighting Sample #1

During my continuation with lighting techniques and appliances, my tutor showed me a unique way of rendering a photorealistic scene with a skylight, using a multiplier and setting an ambience/diffuse to create a sombre effect over the lighting and shadowing of the environment. The effect of which is to soften the overall scene, reduce the sharpness of the edges and textures. For the following screenshot render, I had dropped the multiplier for the skylight to 0.72 applying a yellow back ambience and using an omni close to the right column in order to generate a soft scene, alothough the lighting was not quite dark enough and the rendering took far too long, animation wise this would not be sufficient.

Lighting Sample #2

Using omni's and applying an ambient blue to represent the cold environment more. Omni's made a great effect with ustilising shadows and the normals form the texture maps where bumped with their presence which also confirmed my suspicions that a bump map cannot operate withoout a lighting source other than a skylight, which makes sense, through my understanding a normal map needs to be defined by a normalised vector calculation of direction therefore the normal could not be multiplied by the vector matrix in order to create the bump mapping impression. Also, the blue effect was too heavy creating a rather blue overlay that didn't fit the scene, the yellow warm ambience I believe didn't break the setting of a dark environment and also complemented the yorkshire stone colour.



Lighting Sample #3

The ambience coloured yellow for the sandstone appearance.

Lighting Sample #4

Volumetric Lighting,

T-Shirt design vote!

Today we began on selection on voting on the t-shirt design. We moved around each member noting each point we liked and disliked about the trailer. The team especially seemed unfond of black, due to the game graphic being of a black background it seemed ineffecient in order to generate a black image on a black background that needed a general order. However, might was quite cheap to create, compared to the others, on a budget that would have been a defining factor.

In the end we selected pretty much between Curtis and Joey. Curtis has gone for a plain white t-shirt, however the emphasis on text and not in the base image was a massive turn off for me personally, and it seemed for several others in the team. We selected Joey's design, who has gone all out in my opinion he choose a unique color (well unique, I consider dev t-shirts to be black but i'm old fashioned). We may add our own names to this shirt, taking Curts idea, however, depends on the overall costs and budget we are bound too. I am concerned about the general cost of the actual t-shirt but it is nicely designed, and expresses alot of what we do as developers, besides, it may be possible to get a discount.