ENVIRONMENT LIGHTING / FROM IDEAS TO FINAL IMAGE
LOOKDEV/LIGHTING OF LARGE SCALE ENVIRONMENT
Sharing my workflow for Environment lighting and creating some sweet atmospheric within sidefx Houdini.
Using "Dreamland" for demonstration, a scene I developed last year which was based on a ride of an abandoned park in Japan.
Using Redshift for rendering but can definitely use any engine to follow this principles. (Mantra, Renderman etc...) T
This tutorial is about 30 min long and can be breakdown in 3 parts :
01 - Light rigs creation
First challenge is to find and experiment some sweet HDR images that match our reference photos. I found those HDR files either on CG sky of HDRI Haven so definitely checkout those website :
___ https://www.cgskies.com/
___ https://hdrihaven.com/
We'll just make sure all of those HDR are oriented in the same direction to setup a consistent light rig for each one of them. And then we'll play with these rigs to find the most interesting lighting condition for each HDR.
02 - Atmospheric setup
The Second step is creating some atmospheric setup for our scene. Using here a bit of simple VEX to facilitate this task.
I know Redshift can create its own fog but other engines like Mantra, Renderman don't have this feature, I think it's always a good thing to know how to build this from scratch. And besides this method offers more control to artdirect the look of atmospherics.
Then we'll need to tweak its shader for the need of our scene.
03 - Finding the balance
And finally we can start tweaking lighting with the fog volume... and additionally experimenting with post FX to preview some color corrections, bloom, flares that kind of thing.
Note that I am always looking at photos when I work, either to get better lighting, composition, material references.. just not showing them here for copyright issue. But I encourage you to do the same in everything you do !
By the end we can pretty much get our final image without leaving Houdini, so perfect for trying ideas and developing concepts.
I hope this get you excited about environment creation ! Also checkout my past videos especially "Ultimate Terrain Workflow" for more tips and tricks about environments in Houdini.
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