[WIP] Stylized Forest Cabin – Lighting Experiments (Maya/Arnold)

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  Eric Chadwick admin

  6:09PM

  Neat scene. Do you have a set of references you are looking at?
  
  It would help to have materials in the scene before digging too far into lighting, since the materials will influence your global illumination bounces quite a lot, especially transmissive surfaces like all those leaves and grass which will brighten considerably from subsurface light bounces. 

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  PlagueMichael66 polycounter lvl 5

  6:24PM

  Eric Chadwick said:

  Neat scene. Do you have a set of references you are looking at?
  
  It would help to have materials in the scene before digging too far into lighting, since the materials will influence your global illumination bounces quite a lot, especially transmissive surfaces like all those leaves and grass which will brighten considerably from subsurface light bounces. 

  
  

  Thanks for the feedback!

  Regarding the references — I do have a solid ref board for the house model itself, but everything else in the environment and the lighting scenarios are being created from my imagination.

  As for the materials, I’m actually not planning to texture the assets anytime soon. The final goal for this specific project is to present it as a clay render, focusing purely on form, composition, and mood through lighting.

  Knowing that it will stay a clay render, do you have any tips on how to push the lighting further?

  
  
  

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  Eric Chadwick admin

  7:20PM

  Then I would keep the leaves gray and simply add translucency to them, so they transport the light from behind them. This will greatly improve the "glowing" and magical feel you're aiming for.
  
  I also highly encourage you to seek out lighting references, rather than just from your imagination.
  
  You could even desaturate whatever you find, and do some simple paintovers with light colors to try things out in a very quick manner. This is why concept art is a thing... it's vastly quicker to iterate in 2D than it is to iterate in 3D.
  

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  Eric Chadwick admin

  7:37PM

  quick little paintover!
  
   

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  Eric Chadwick admin

  7:43PM

  Also, some of the surface look very soft and un-detailed, like the upper tree trunks and stairs and the rock under the basket. I would consider at least adding a tiled bump map to those, just so they don't stand out so bad, looking like marshmallows!

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  PlagueMichael66 polycounter lvl 5

  8:09PM

  Eric Chadwick said:

  Also, some of the surface look very soft and un-detailed, like the upper tree trunks and stairs and the rock under the basket. I would consider at least adding a tiled bump map to those, just so they don't stand out so bad, looking like marshmallows!

  
  

  Thanks. You're totally right about the 'marshmallow' look. I'll add some tileable bump maps to fix the details and polish the scene. Btw, you asked about references -a while ago, I used AI to set up some lighting scenarios. Here are a few of them. Regarding the trees -I exported them as aiStandIn proxies, so I can't tweak the shaders right now. I don't know where to access them and haven't been able to find any info on how to do it yet. Maybe i would try Arnold Operators, idk

  

  
  

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