Come Clarity

Since The End of Things is officially complete, please see the blog for my next project: Come Clarity.

Can't have a light, Without Dark to Stick it In.

The film is complete as of October 9th. Until I am ready to post it, I will update this blog a few more times with information regarding the techniques that I used to produce it.

Today I will discuss the creation of the tower’s light beam – the most central effect in The End of Things.

Blocking

There are several steps that I must take before I create the light beam in the scene. The first step is to block it out with a transparent poly-cone.

Blocking the light beam.

This particular scene is built to scale. The camera must truck in slowly and I do not want the tower to be moving at all. Thus the beam has to start far far away. This will cause some problems later when creating the shadows (though I did not know it at the time).

Note the gaps between the ocean waves; it is unnecessary to fill the entire scene. If placed in correct relation to the camera, only four waves are needed to create the illusion of an entire ocean.

Light Setup

The shot’s lighting setup.

In this step I hide the poly-cone and begin to light the scene. I start with the strongest light source (1) – the light beam which emits from to the top of the tower, where its eye should be. Then I place a wide-angled spot light (2) high above the scene to simulate the light coming from the sky or moon. I use a spot light instead of a direction light, because I like to have the illumination taper off towards the edge of the frame.

The third light (3) is an additional spot light that shines on the wave around the boat. This forms the circle that the light beam casts on the ocean’s surface.

Right above Hatchiman, is another spot light (4). This one generates a shadow for the character and the gondola and casts it on the water. Realistically, the shadow would be cast from light #1. However, I thought that the image would be more interesting if the shadow was cast towards the camera.

The two final lights are a directional light that is used as a rim light for the tower (5) and a point light (6) that is hidden behind one of the waves. This one subtly lights the tower from the bottom, creating an interesting gradient that I could later manipulate during compositing.

Tower’s Eye

The tower’s eye is a simple point light with default settings (color white, intensity 1.0). I added a light glow and modified the settings (see image below). The eye is then rendered on a separate pass with a black background.

The tower’s eye and its settings.

The Beam

The light beam’s main shape is a spot light with a fog added to it. Since the light source is quite far away, I’ve extended the decay regions all the way past Hatchiman. I didn’t however, turn decay on. I prefer to extend the decay instead of scaling the light, since scaling seems to cause errors when I map a texture to the light.

The light beam’s main shape.

For this particular light, I mapped a ramp to the color so that the edges taper off in a smoother fashion. The intensity is controlled by an intensity curve, simulating a slight decay.

Like the tower’s eye, this light is rendered on a separate pass with a black background.

Note: With the exception of particles, the entire film is rendered using Maya Software Render.

Fog

Originally, I tried to create all of the light effects on the same light. This caused a lot of problems and produced some undesired artifacts when rendering the animation. Thus I decided to split the light beam into several lights, render each in its own pass and composite them all later in After Effects.

Fog Light and it’s texture settings.

The fog light is identical to the light beam in its settings, except that the fog density is mapped with a volume noise.

Dust

The dust from the light beam is actually a volume noise texture, mapped into the density of the fog. Originally, I tried to use a granite texture (like in this tutorial), and although it looked nice in a still image, it did not animate well.

Dust Light and it’s texture settings.

Using volume noise with small amplitude and an animated time attribute produced a very nice result. It looks more like glitter, which is it what it actually is, but I still refer to it as dust.

Shadows

The light that emits the beautiful shadows in the fog is placed right in front of Hatchiman, and not in the distance where light beam begins. This is because the distant light seems to conjure up flickering artifacts when the shot animates.

The shadows!

In After Effects, these shadows are masked using the original beam shape and thus they appear to be coming from it.

Depth

I projected a black to white ramp on a cone, and scaled and positioned it to cover the beam. Later in After Effects, I used this cone in order to give the light beam a depth of field effect.

A simple cone with a ramp mapped to it.

Animation

Below is the animated light beam in after effects. I’ve placed each pass on top of each other using the Add Transfer Mode.

Click to play QuickTime.

As you can see there is still some flickering in the shadows projecting from the bow of the boat. I tried to raise the resolution on the shadow map and increase some of the quality settings, but was unable to find a satisfactory fix. Thus I ended up lowering their opacity in hopes that they will not draw too much attention from the viewer.

Compositing

Click to play QuickTime.

The colors of the beam are tinted to a golden color, in order to compliment the dark blues and purples of the ocean. This was done using After Effects’ CC Toner effect, which can be found under the color correction effect menu. I’ve also added Compound Blur and a CC Pulse Ripple to create a subtle intensity shift in the light, making it feel more organic. Finally, I tied it all off with a Fast Blur set to 1.0.

Below, you can see the final composited scene:

Click to play QuickTime.