Research Goals

The goal of this lighting project was to focus on, well, lighting. The material shaders and textures in this Maya scene are very primitive, so that time could be spent on the lighting and compositing. I do plan on using these lighting rigs in my thesis project, the primary goal of which rests on lighting. I will be updating the shaders so that each final image can speak as a whole, rather than just the lighting making the statement.

I was keeping real-world visual effects production in mind as I was modeling this scene. I knew that rendering at 1920x1080 was going to require a time budget of its own, so I wanted to make sure that I covered all of my bases with the modeling first so that I would not run into any rendering artifacts when it came time to actually output an image. In the past two semesters, I found myself getting unexpected shadows, blobs and other seemingly random aberrations in my images when I was using raytracing and global illumination. Seeing that both of these render tactics carried somewhat heavy calculations, I did not want to have to render and re-render things to fix errors.

Ultimately, I wanted to have as much control as possible in the compositing stage. Knowing from previous experience that a few simple renders could be combined correctly into one more complex image, I planned on lighting objects in such a way that they could later be isolated from one another with matte passes.