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Lighting/Shading & many small problems
Animals naturally also have fur and feathers. We were supplied with splines for each character, which could be used as “guide hairs” in Houdini. Supervisor Daniel Rath’s lighting/shading team was responsible for dressing the characters. Unfortunately, many textures and some shaders were not high enough resolution for the planned camera settings because the right cameras were not yet available at the time of creation. The artists therefore had to rework a lot of it with Mari and Houdini’s mantra.
Most of the animals in this film are small, so the camera was often very close to the ground. The textures were also partially corrected for this with matte paintings. Furthermore, various types of noise were superimposed to create even sharper details. Studio 352 built very detailed models in ZBrush; the displacement of these models was replaced by decimated meshes in Rise. On the one hand, this increased the level of detail, but above all, this approach made it possible to manipulate the meshes afterwards. In many settings, the characters had been positioned on a lower-resolution geometry. When switching on the displacement, it therefore occasionally happened that the characters suddenly hovered above the set or disappeared with their feet in the ground. These problem areas could be corrected with the decimated meshes.
The actual lighting was simple: Lots of surface lights were used in the caves. In the outdoor sets, classic directional light was used for the sun. In order to realise the art director’s ideas, the artists often rendered extra rimlight passes. These were separately customised rimlights in which the fur or feathers also cast shadows on each other.
For the general look, this was not the case for the rest of the lighting setup. These extra rimlight passes were particularly important for extreme lighting situations – examples of this are strong backlighting in a cave or bright signal lights on an aeroplane, which illuminated the characters very strongly. A big advantage of the lighting pipeline in Rise in Houdini was the ability to edit and render all FX simulations directly in the same scene as the characters.
If volumetric lights were required, these were always rendered separately. To minimise render times, a compromise always had to be found between acceptable render times and the quality of the renderings. This meant that many individual passes had to be denoised later in the compositing process.
More about cpmositing on page 4
