(http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/TMNIGHT2 NULL.jpg)I have wanted to try a late night render for some time and I got an excuse to do so recently. A lot of the time went into getting the final gather and global illumination to behave correctly. There are two area lights outside the windows lighting the scene along with the two point lights; one in each lamp. The lamp’s point lights have their colour temperature controlled by a mib blackbody node set to around. The floor panel is a flat plane using a 2D bump (no normals) to pop out the individual floor planks. Underneath it, a wood texture to support this.
The ottoman in the middle of the room is procedurally textured using the 2D Texture Cloth node to create a fine bump across the surface as well as to define the diffuse colour of the fabric. Some unevenness is applied to the 2D Placement Node of the ottoman’s material to simulate uneven stretching of the fabric. This effect is applied subtly though. A stronger effect is the light shining through the surface of the lamp shade. This was achieved through using Maya’s default translucent property on a simple lambert shader. A yellowish colour was then picked for the diffuse and I turned down the diffuse value of the material to around “0.4”. The area light to the right of the scene is colored with a dim blue light to simulate the way your eyes desaturate colours in low light conditions. A blue tint was also added afterwards to the whole image in Photoshop. To achieve the final gather I wanted I used three point lights that didn’t cast diffuse or specular light. These point lights simply cast photons (around 300k each) to paint the rooms with final gather points. One point light was placed in the middle of each room. Before rendering I made sure to save out both my final gather and global illuminations passes. The cat on the couch was done using Maya’s native fur system. If I were to change anything I think I would paint a custom fur length map for the cat so the hair wasn’t the same length all over.
In Photoshop I applied an ambient occlusion render over the entire image, set it’s opacity to around 30% and changed it’s layer’s draw type to multiply. I rendered this image out and an EXR and it gave me the ability to really pull the values of the scene in a wide range due to the raw nature of an EXR. To select the individual objects in the scene I rendered out a mask pass to make selecting the individual elements of the scene much easier. The mask pass was made as a separate render layer. I made 5 different Maya surface shaders and labeled them: red, green, blue, black, and white. I then applied these shaders to everything in the scene and made sure that no to objects with the same colour overlapped.
If anyone has any questions feel free to comment below or to contact me about the questions. Have a nice day :)