One of my favourite projects so far from my final year is the industry masterclass. This is a special assignment that is set and marked by industry professionals. Bournemouth University invites various professionals to set a brief that mimics a typical task expected of an artist at work. There is a variety of briefs covering disciplines such as animation, environment modelling, character sculpting, scripting in Maya, scripting in Unity, Houdini FX, programming/developing and lighting. I naturally chose to undertake the lighting brief set by Ian Comley, a CG supervisor at Framestore who has just recently finished working on Gravity! It was scary to think he was marking my work! You can find his work here.

The brief was particularly interesting, a twist on the brief set last year. We were asked to create two CG integration shots – one day and one night – but without using HDRI to light the scenes. He highlighted that there was often a heavy reliance on using HDRI, which shouldn’t be the case. Even though HDRI give a solid base to start from, they often prove problematic, particularly for shots in which the CG elements move through a scene (as the lighting and reflections remain constant rather then changing in reaction).

He provided a library of live plates for us to use but also gave us the choice of shooting our own. We were advised to integrate a CG chrome ball and a diffuse ball, and were asked to pay close attention to getting the balls to feel like they are moving through the scene via the lighting/rendering. I decided to shoot my own plates as I find it a fun element of VFX and it provided me with the chance to gather my own data about the light sources affecting the plates. I chose Bournemouth beach, (just outside Harry Ramsden’s) as the base for my day shot, and the park for my night shot.

A group of us made a day of shooting our footage at the same. We used the 5D MKII’s from the store, and booked out a number of different lenses, grips and tripods. We also booked out a lovely 8mm fisheye lens made by sigma, which proved great for capturing a spherical image to use as reference as well as for projecting onto proxy geometry for reflections. We ended up getting down to the beach at around 6am and caught an amazing sunrise – perfect for an interesting lighting shot! I was also very happy with my chosen night shot.

Night time reference shot.

Daytime spherical image.

Once back from the shoot, the footage was tracked and proxy geometry created of the scene. This was a bit of a laborious job to get right but necessary if I wanted to get the shot looking correct. I made sure the scene was at the right scale by lining up some dimensions we took on site. Once the geometry was created, I then assembled the spherical images by unwrapping and stitching in nuke. They were then projected onto the proxy geometry so that reflections would line up and “move” accordingly, as well as any bounce lighting being correctly tinted according to the material colour. A note for the future is that I should consider painting out main light sources in the projections so that any bounce light is doubly tinted/exposed (CG colour + colour in the image).

Example reference ball

The next step was to examine my notes and plates to begin creating lighting sources to match. I chose to use VRay as my renderer as I wanted to make it as physically based as I could. I paid special attention to the reference photography I took, as well as making shadows to give the CG a good grounding. Once lighting was done, I did some compositing to ground the CG into the plates, and to match some pesky lens ghosts I caught in camera (I did this via a little comp trick involved keying the brightest points in the plate, transforming them -1 in both X and Y to flip and flop them, then mixing them over the CG).

Final Night Shot and Final Day Shot.

In all I was very happy with the result and scored a whopping 80% – very happy is an understatement! You can find the breakdowns below.