Inspiration
This time I went for general inspiration and I ended up with these two images. What you will notice is that they do not reflect the final lighting. This is because I used the grayscale and general idea of it, rather than copying it.
Image from the book mentioned on the image above.Turning inspiration to BW
Turning Inspiration to Opposite Color
Setting up Basic Lighting
I then set up the basic lighting in which we want as few light as possible to maximize the effect, range and intensity. I also wanted the middle light to have the blue and strongest light intensity. And the outer areas to have a orange weaker light to them.
Tweaking Shadow
I didn’t want my usual sharp shadows. I wanted them a bit more diffused so I adjusted the source radius on all.
Key Light as Area Light
I used area light for the key light to get diffused shadow but also a nice soft effect overall to the scene.
Reflections
I tweaked the reflections to get the desired reflection out of the whole area, including ground. For the ground I use planar reflection.
Skylight
I didn’t want too much bright light coming in from skylight, so I kept it to the minimum using the cubemap.
Fog
I then added some orange fog to emphasize the mood and spread the light around a bit.
Key light Color Test
It was important to get the basic color right, intensity and range of the key light. Which as mentioned earlier was an area light.
Camera Angle
I started tweaking the camera angle to decide the composition, depth of field and other features.
Post Process
During all this I also tweaked the post process to pump up the desired effect.
Light complexity
These days I like to check the light complexity to optimize the scene a bit. This is why there are so few lights on this scene.
Lightmap Density
I also bumped up the lightmap density to get more out of the quality, but not too high.
GPU Visualizer
And to ensure the optimization is at its best I check the GPU Visualizer. I try my best to keep the numbers low which means the ms cost and fps is optimized.
Final Shots
