Selected Works

dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune dune

Friday, March 21, 2014

Friday Paintover!

One of my Academy students, Emre Ekmekci recently turned in a prop assignment for critique, and it thought it would be good opportunity to talk about some lighting concepts.

here's his original:


As you can see Emre has a solid start but we could probably tighten up the lighting a bit help with his render and also the overall feel of the piece and push it even further with some simple tricks.




To start with I'm putting down a couple markers to remind me where the lights are coming from. The Warm key light is coming from the left, but it feels a bit patchy at the moment. The Key is generally the most important light in the scene, so it's a good idea to make sure that it's consistent and unified on your subject.



On an new layer I've brightened up the light side, paying special attention to any edges or plane changes which might catch a bit of extra light. It's important to note that although I've chosen to brighten the highlight on the barrel of the gun for this demo, the important part of this step was to unify the lighted surfaces so they feel consistent. I could have stayed with his softer bright spot but it would have been a subtler look and not as obvious for the purpose of the demo.



Likewise, I did a pass with the secondary light, making sure to hit all the surfaces that are facing downwards. I also gave the light a bit of overspill on the upper surfaces- this is not really accurate to the position of the light, but I just wanted to give a bit of separation from the background.



As a final step, I went through and adjusted some drawing issues, such as the ellipse on the scope and scope hood{A}(it's still off, but hopefully you get the idea), as well as fixing the perspective on the butt of the gun{C} grip.
Finally, I knocked the lighting down a bit on all the front surfaces of the gun {B} since this would be receiving the least amount of lighting overall

I purposely didn't address design issues this time around because as a baseline, your concepts should communicate the forms clearly-you don't want your render to be a distraction! Perhaps in future paintovers we can talk design more!I hope this has been useful!

j