At this point, quite possibly the biggest challenge with our temple project was not the technical hurdles we have been through thus far, not figuring out the conceptual designs for any of it, but creating a sense of a believable scale with the entire scene. Thing is, Maya was designed so that the 3-D artist would not have to worry about faking perspective, but sometimes certain elements need to be faked or even exaggerated for readability sake, despite whatever physically accurate properties the software application offers. While Phil’s previous post discusses this issue, another concern, taking the buildings hanging from the arcs for example, is that decreasing the size of these constructs creates a sense of “forced perspective.” They may look good from one angle or shot but it may not hold-up so well in another. What happens is that the hanging buildings literally look scaled down, depending on the shot, the closer they get to the temple, breaking the illusion of the faked perspective. So what did we do to get around this? Recently, Phil and I have been able to overcome this obstacle by using several techniques with everything from scaling buildings by only so much, laying out building-specific objects per shot, atmospheric perspective, and by moving objects around by just a little so that it looks good for a particular shot. And, this is not the only concern we have with scale. Other things that have been carefully considered include slowing down the camera to make the scenery feel larger, texture scales, and how their sizes relate to one another, etc.
On a different note, the lighting phase has finally begun for us! One of the first things we have decided to do with this stage of our production is to do it entirely with linear workflow. Now you might be thinking “what is ‘linear workflow?’” To put it simply, it’s a process that keeps the contrast within your rendered imagery under control so that you don’t get blown out areas of brights and darks. In other words, it reduces the computer generated look with more naturalistic colors and lighting. Now while working in Maya 2011, I noticed that Autodesk built their color management tools from the ground up and streamlined the entire linear workflow process. And after talking with a friend, Will, we have discovered this pipeline is flawed and does not allow for the exact desired results one would expect with linear workflow. To get around this, I have decided to borrow and combine certain elements from the way it worked prior to 2011, with a few of the newer tools to create a simple methodology that gets the most out of linear workflow in Maya 2011. Literally, all I did was take Maya’s “Gamma Correct” node and attached it in front of every file texture (Except for "bump" and "displacement" files/attributes, since those don't deal with coloring within your renderings.) and Maya color swatch (Since Maya color swatches are displayed in sRGB.) and gave them a value of “.455,” the inverse for gamma-corrected imagery. This puts the entire scene in the linear color space. Then, to preview everything in sRGB, I went to the Render View’s “Color Management” attribute, set the color profile to “Linear,” and set the color profile to be displayed to “sRGB.” Also, to take full advantage of this feature, make sure you render your imagery out in a floating point format. For us, we’re going full 32-bit tiff with our renders.
Speaking of 32-bit, we have finally implemented our hdr image into temple environment! Check it out below. Please keep in mind that there are no additional lights in the scene, textures are missing from the environment, the city is not in place, nothing is comp-ed (No AO, DOF, raytraced shadows, etc.), tweaks still need to be made to the temple textures, and no modifications have been made to the hdri settings yet. So, what you’re seeing is a quick-and-dirty preview of what is yet to come!
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