[WIP] Enlighten Contest - Golden Hour by Scott Knapp

scottyknapp19

I'm thinking about doing a partly cloudy sunset setup.  Something that has cloud breakup for the sun cast shadows and all the interesting color shift that happens at twilight.  

I've been looking at Alex Roman's "The Third & The Seventh" for inspiration for composition that I think could be interesting as well.  Here are some shots from his short that I think are the direction I'm going for.

scottyknapp19

I've taken a first pass at lighting this thing.  I went in knowing I wanted it to be just around the time the Sun goes down.  I replaced the skybox with a custom HDR, but plan on tweaking that further to get the look I want.  I'm also using pinks in the strips to help unify the palette.  I still need to bring in some more contrast and fix some aliasing issues.

scottyknapp19

So I updated my sky HDRI to a time of day I liked more, and removed the glowing pink strips as I felt they were way too distracting.  My goal is to make this look more natural as I keep working.  I still need to flush out areas of interest and work on getting some nice framing for my cameras.

scottyknapp19

Here is some more reference on how I want to push the lighting.  I plan on doing some more work to my sky to get some more color shift in my ambient areas.  I haven't quite settled on which one of these images I want to hit, but the thing they all have in common are the really low sun angle, and very interesting colors mix with the sky.

scottyknapp19

I've spent some time trying to hit the general mood I want and focused on color and key to fill ratio for the scene.   I also adjusted my sky color and clone stamped in more clouds to add interest.

scottyknapp19

scottyknapp19

bent_vector

Nice work. I like the 3rd image with the stairs especially. Did you hide some lights up top there to get the yellow/orange look?

scottyknapp19

Thanks a lot! Ya I had some spot lights with cookie textures placed up there.