Lighting, Rendering, and Compositing

One of the reasons I did Amazing Adventure as my thesis project is that this world does not require complex lighting to create a believable place. 8-bit games really had no lighting, so the only real goal was to make sure everything was lit from all angles, eliminating the stark shading that can occur on cubic objects in Maya. My solution: one directional light pointing straight down that casts shadows (a 'la Super Mario 64) and nine other directional lights to fill in the space. It's simple, dirty, but I think it works just fine. I also added lights for special shots, like the bomb wall shots to make the area behind the crack in the wall darker. I also changed the key for the shot where the Princess walks up to Jeff so that her shadow could be cast over him.

The only really big problem I incurred with lighting was that Jeff's skin did not diffuse the light in the most pleasing way. The solution to the problem was in the lack of sub-surface scattering for the texture, and unfortunately I couldn't find a way to get a good result without losing all of the detail of the texture and exponentially increasing render times. So I worked with what I could to lessen the problem. Definitely a lesson learned from the project, but this is all part of the educational process.

For the living room, I did a more traditional light set-up, with the key being the light coming from the television. I wanted the lighting to be simple here, but more complex than the game world so that the two places feel different to the audience. Most of the fill lights are just shadow lights to help darken the space outside of Jeff and the couch. To accomplish the effect of the flashing lights, I duplicated the set-up and changed the color of the keys. I rendered the scene multiple times and then could flip between the two set-ups with opacity in After Effects.

To render the short, I used May's Mental Ray plug-in. I rendered at 1080p, which is was the heaviest factor in the rendering of most of the short. I also used final gathering in the living room shots at the beginning of the short to help differentiate it from the videogame world. In testing motion blur, I noticed that putting it in made me lose a lot of the snappiness of the 8-bit characters, so for consistency I did not use any motion blur for the entire short. I rendered the castle sequence at home on my computer, my laptop, and my girlfriend's computer over the course of a week. Then, in an effort to save time, I took all of my shots, ready for rendering, to the render farm at Academy of Art. Everything rendered in a couple nights. I'm so thankful for being able to use this resource.

Some render tests (for light intensity, occlusion tests, shadow tests, color tests):

For compositing, everything was done in After Effects. For the shots where I would rack the focus from the foreground to the background, I rendered the shot in layers and manipulated them with camera blur effects. Other things, such as the explosion after the handshake, were just layers of lines I animated, as well as other effects, to give the idea of moving really fast.

An example of the layers for one shot to help with the camera lens focus in After Effects: