Week 4- HDRI Test and Lighting

 My first priority this week was to address an important note from the mentors. It was pointed out that the car paint looked very ambient and the range of values between the highlights and shadows didn't have enough contrast. Initially, I thought the problem might have been with the Ai Car Paint shader and the way I was using saturated colors for Light Facing Color and Flip-Flop in Specular. But upon further inspection, with Professor Gaynor, we realized that it was because of the way the HDRI was set up in my Lookdev rig. After I used the following .hdr setup with a clamp on a geodome, the shaders looked better.



I then moved on to setting up HDRIs and lighting for all the shots with the latest layout and animation. Since our team felt that Shot 05 was the highest priority shot, that's the one I approached first. For this shot I wanted to try using a skydome with the HDRI, so I plugged an HDRI exr file into the Arnold Skydome Light. I tried adding an aiClamp node but I liked the results better without it. This is what the car looked like in Shot 05 with just the Skydome Light. 



This felt flat and didn't get a lot of reflections like we wanted, so I adjusted the position of the HDRI to get better reflections throughout the animation. I also lowered the exposure so it wouldn't feel so blown out. I then proceeded to add an Area Light that would hit the beveled edges of the model in a way that would enhance its shape definition. I also added some Point Lights as street lamps, to help add an extra kick.





I created render layers for the beauty and shadow passes. This is what the beauty pass looked like-



Based on the way I set up Shot 05, I assembled the scenes for Shots 04, 03, 02 and 01 and created their render layers. I submitted all the shots to test them on the renderfarm. I passed on my maya scene files to the FX team to carry out their tests. This is what the renders looked like after Camilo composited them on his color graded plates.




































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