[WIP] Enlighten Contest - Golden Hour by Scott Knapp

scottyknapp19 · Jul 2016

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 · Jul 2016

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 · Jul 2016

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 · Aug 2016

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 · Aug 2016

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.