Lighting

So the texturing for scene 1 is done, and scene 2 was textured really quickly by Maik and Malachi. Dave lit most of scene 1 and myself, Joe and Malachi chipped in to light the second scene. As I knew absolutely nothing about lighting I asked Dave for his opinion because he has a lot more experience than me and is pretty good at it. He said that realistically we needed three lights in the scene which was enough for all three of us to do one each. The file was uploaded to adrive.com and I downloaded the file and put my light in first.

It seemed like a good idea to refer back to the painting for inspiration for lighting. The scene was obviously set outside, but it occurred to me that there strong areas of really light and really dark on the statue. The source of the light seemed to be coming from above to the right. Below are a couple of shots of the model Maik created for the scene, which looked utterly spot on! How he's done that I will never know, he said something about NURBS which scared the life out of me so I stopped asking.

There was a problem though. When I downloaded the scene I just couldn't download all the textures. I don't even know why, maybe a problem within adrive, but me and Maik attempted to fix this problem with no result before decided that we would just have to light the scene without textures. The main difficulty this provided was that when I did mentalray previews of the lighting the sculpture didn't show up. But I applied a white lambert to the sculpture so that it was easier to see which fixed the problem for now.

I started by making an ambient light and placing it directly above the sculpture to see how it would look. It lit the scene fairly well, but I wanted to recreate the same shadows on the sculpture that the painting showed, so I continued messing around with different light types.

This was another attempt at moving around the ambient light from the front.

This was a low intensity area light from behind which obviously is no good because it's so dark!

And this was a spot light from the top that I played around with for a while, but I still couldn't get it to look right. So i decided to go ahead with the ambient light from the top, as I seemed to be much more effective. I tried experimenting with the intensity of the ambient light, and below is a shot in which I set the light too strong. 

I moved the light a lot higher up and only turned the light down a little bit, so it was much more like natural lighting, and below is a screenshot of where the light was placed.

This is how it looked after:

This seemed fine for now, and I needed to allow for Joe and Malachi to add more lights so I couldn't make it too bright. However I ran into a problem, which was that I completely forgot how these lights would affect Goon in the scene. The intensity I now had the ambient light set at was far too high, and was lighting Goon really harshly. So I had to turn it down a lot to make sure Goon wasn't being bathed in raw sunlight, and he now looked like this: