Proj4 and 5

This is a project that I worked on for the Lighting Class in SCAD. The goal of the project is to recreate a scene in one movie by a famous Cinematographer using Maya. For this project, I chose one scene in the movie Happy Together directed by Wong Kar-wai. The cinematographer is Christopher Doyle. The movie was shot in Argentina. Here is the original image in the movie.

Scene Assessment

Before starting modeling and lighting, I assessed the image first. The lines in the picture are the visual cues for modeling and placing the assets in the scene. The color dots indicates what kind of colors I am going for when shading and lighting the scene.

Camera Placement AND Modeling

The camera placement is quite challenging for this image. Since there is no reference box to calibrate the camera, I did modeling and camera placement at the same time.

Camera Placement challenge

There are two major challenges to place the camera. First, all the lines are leaned in different angles. In addition, it is clear that the camera is not placed horizontally in the original scene. So I have rotate camera in Z axis as well.

I first create two cubes that approximately match the two buildings in the front of the scene. Then I tried to place the camera using those two cubes. At the same time, I made small modification on the two cubes and added more details to them, such as adding doors and putting wires on the roof.

Modeling Challenges

The modeling process is relatively straight forward. The only challenge is that the edges of buildings are always imperfect. I could not use displacement map because all the displacements happen on the edge. So I added more edge loops alone the edge that I wanted to add details on. Then I use script to move them randomly in Y direction slightly.

Lighting

Key light and fill light

The color of the original movie scene can be separated as upper level and lower level. The color of upper level is mostly yellow while the lower level is red. So I decided to have two light sources to light upper level and lower level separately.

In the original movie scene, we can also see some yellow light on the lower level. I put a light of the same color as the fill light for the lower level. For the red color, I used light temperature. For the yellow color, I used light color.

Window Light

There is one very saturated window in the scene as I circled in the picture. To get this look in Maya, I shaded the window using the following setting.

It‘s the same idea as I learned from the lamp example in the class.

Bright light on the top

On the top, there are 2 very bright lights. I used one lone and stretched area light to get the effect.

Shading

Overall, the environment looks very old. There are lots of stains and dirt on the wall. I used specular maps, bump maps and color maps. As for the porcelain cover on the wall, I used a grid as its bump map.

Proj 5

The project 5 is to change the mood of the scene in project 4. I did 2 mood alternations.

Mood Change 1

My first idea is to light the scene as a house from a horror movie. The reference I found is TV series the Haunting of Hill House. Here is the reference image.

After lighting, I feel the scene does not look cool enough. So I added aiAtmosphere to my environment.

Mood change 2

My second idea is to light the scene as day time. I used an aiSkydome as the fill light. For the key light, I positioned one spot light where the sun is.

Further improvement:

I am not satisfied with mood change 2 yet. I will make the shadow darker to make it look less flat. As for the modeling, I will add more details to the edges of buildings and doors to make it look more realistic.