3drender.com Challenge :)

I chose a pretty old rendering challenge from 3drender.com to help practice texturing and lighting to create different atmospheres in environments. I chose the simplest one I could find for now, as I wanted to focus on lighting and effects at first rather than texturing for hours on end!

http://www.3drender.com/challenges/candles/index.htm

So this is pretty similar to the still life project I did earlier in my second year for visualisation in DP3, a few objects on a surface, but this time features the addition of candles.

I approached it quite basically in terms of lighting, by adding a main directional light source from the right using shadow maps, then some omni lights for the candles with added glow effects. I also added some fills to add a slight impression of light bouncing off other surfaces. For example, a brown tinted light from below the wood surface and a pale beige one both above and from the left, both at intensities of about 0.3-0.5.

In my first example, I tried to create a cold, dark night atmosphere to the image by basically tinting the main lights with quite strong blues and using a lower intensity (0.5-0.7). I used a similar technique to create a warmer, brighter mood in the second example, by using yellow/orange tinted lights with stronger intensities (1-1.5). In both examples I also used render elements to render out zdepth maps, which I used to create a lens blur effect in Photoshop, adding depth of field.

This is quite simple for now, but I plan to experiment more, perhaps with my previous work for my second year (still life, character animation, chess player, etc.), as these are already textured so won't use up too much of my time! I am also constantly still finding resources for this project and completing more reviews of cinematography, which I will post soon. :)