Pre-Lighting

After first texturing the exterior of the apartment building, I felt that I had spent time creating textures that, once are lit, may not eventually need as much detail as I gave them. I do know that the textures will hold up on their own even with basic lighting, but I want to put my better strength in lighting to good use when I approach the other scenes, because it's what I am most comfortable with, and what I enjoy the most. Equally as importantly, the lighting is what I have wanted to use to help emphasize the mood throughout my film. In approaching the interior scenes, I decided to pre-light them using only basic shaders as well as low-resolution geometry, so that I can see how much the lighting is accomplishing, even with the most primitive and unrefined of geometry and textures.
I lit all of these shots with a combination of photon mapping and very basic direct lighting rigs. In addition to the beauty pass, I only rendered an ambient occlusion pass, and did not use any shadows for the lights. I composited these in Nuke, in which I also added lens distortion, vignetting and film grain. The models you see are smoothed versions of the "master" Maya scenes I have created, and the faceting and jagged profiles are for the purpose of speeding up my renders in this pre-lighting phase, and will certainly be much more precisely smoothed out when I do my final renders.

I wanted to see how far I could get with lighting and even basic compositing before starting the texturing. I feel that I have a much stronger understanding of what I can get away with once I start shading things. These two images are updates from my post a couple days ago, with the simple addition of lens distortion, vignetting and film grain:
In terms of modeling, this is easily the most basic environment I have in my film, so I know that I will need to give it some special attention so it does not appear to be so simple. I'll accomplish this largely with the shading and lighting, and will use both to create an interesting composition from such primitive shapes. I'm very happy with the way this pre-light went, because it was very quick and still contributes to the somber mood I'm going for (this is the shot that appears when my mother says her mother died.)
Similarly, I'm very happy with how far such a simple lighting setup went here. Even though some of the geometry is simple proxies (I know that a TV is not a sharply angled box) and there are props that will be added in, I feel that the light plays around the existing contours nicely, and the glow makes things somewhat ethereal. The color is also meant to go for a somber mood; this shot follows the one above, and is when my mother says her father died.
Although I rendered out proxy models such as the TV above, I did use very basic smoothing (1 subdivision for objects that took up less screen space, 2 for the ones that were closer to camera) for many other models. In doing so, I could also help gauge how much smoothing would eventually be necessary for my final, full-quality renders.
In Nuke, I used a Radial gradient to help highlight the stairs, as they are the focus of the dialogue in this shot:
I did the same for the bannister here:
I had a lot of fun pre-lighting this one, because I was placing lights so that their sources were apparent, yet still not directly visible. In other words, I knew that light would be entering through the entrance at the end of the hall, from a window on the left side behind the wall, and there would be some diffuse light entering from the room slightly ahead of the bicycle.
I used a similar approach to lighting this shot, and was able to punch up some contrast in Nuke where I wanted the viewer to look, namely at the stairs and bicycle, and not down the hall, where there is very little detail:
The camera pans from this...
...to this, so I knew that I did not want to draw much attention to the lamp and closet behind it. Therefore, I put it more in darkness and lowered its contrast so it would not attract any unneccesary attention.
I wanted to go for a late afternoon/early evening lighting and color scheme here, since this shot is used when my mother is describing her mother's dinner cooking. That's a wok stove, by the way...plenty of people have been asking me over the course of this project.
This is one of my favorite pre-lights because of how much I got out of such a basic lighting setup: a sense of texture (even without bump or specularity maps) and scale because of the ambient occlusion's size and diffusion.
In pre-lighting, I'm roughing out the basic lighting rig, getting the colors and intensities into ballpark range.
Of course, I'm positioning them too.
Since I have grouped my lighting rigs and appropriately named them in Maya, I can simply export them and re-use them in my full-resolution geometry scenes, and use them to help adjust my texturing. Because I have rendered from multiple angles, I have a much better idea of where I need texture/shading detail and where I do not, and also know where I can re-use lighting rigs across multiple shots.