ON GUARD
Responsible for Lighting, Camera and Layout
AIM
Depth in the scene was one of my main aims, where the soldier is,“on guard”, and is manning one of the mechanical rigs (mechs) where he stands “Guard.” This is a port of deployment like the one from the Pacific Rim's final Shatter dome. As he stands he notices the flying mechs fly past him, these rigs are being deployed using eight helicopters attached to the body of the Mechs. I have created a dense fog to provide the viewer with a dynamic perspective of scale.
“On Guard” is a passion project that was inspired by Pacific Rim and its visuals, a true Guillermo Del Toro masterpiece. I got the opportunity to initially work on this project as a part of the class assignment mentored by Professor Nancy S. Wallis , her work in 2012 inspired my overall motivation to create the look of the project.
CInematogrphy
I chose for the soldier to man on the left rule of thirds allowing for a compelling a well composed shot while being hovered by one of the mechs providing a comparison of scale. The shot is further framed by a cut of the port giving a sense of space and gives the eyes a ramp to the view of the mechs moving into the shot. And lastly the elephant in the room are the giant mechs moving into the shot from right to left allowing the viewer and the soldier in the shot to react to their immense scale and unusual direction of approach. I chose to stick with the 16:9 aspect ratio because it allows me to give a wider field of view.
Softwares used
Autodesk Maya 24
Foundry Nuke
Davinci Resolve 19
lighting breakdown
where initially I had created this project to push my limits on my knowledge of Maya Arnold, I used Area Lights to the utmost limit using the spread, color temperature, exposure. My professor Nancy Wallis, she is a true Maya Arnold genius that has helped me through my journey in the CG world. She was also a mentor of mine for a larger scale project Tooth and Nail.
My technical aim for this project was to use several lights in optimisation to avoid absolute noise but provide a great depth in image. There is always motivation to add mist, smoke and atmospheric fog in compositing in Nuke but where is the fun in that?.
For the lights I used Area lights as disks to provide a more natural look, lowering the spread of the light and adjusting the exposure to match the overall scale of the environment. A piece of wisdom that I received was to always work to scale in Maya to allow Arnold Lights to do their best work.
Another aspect of the scene was to get the Lazer look life-like and using the light decay property. Using multiple references I compiled an overall look for the light. All the helicopter lights are quite simple; they are parented to each helicopter and then these helicopters are parented to a group which is being key animated to move the rig and these are the main lights lighting up the Mechs.
Render Settings
Here are some render statistics, for optimisation I disabled Transmission samples and subsurface scattering samples. The samples were quite standard with no extra optimisation required.
I chose to go with AiAtmospheric Volume instead of aiFog since in the night time the fog is on the darker end and the look of the shots was improved.
