Element 119: Ambience

When I began this project, I knew that it would be a moody scene with rain and neon lighting and that I wanted to experiment more with texturing and reflections. I looked for inspiration to draw from and a back alley seemed to fit the location I desired to create with the right feel, like a peaceful place around which everything occurs. It is a forgotten place, known only to a few, despite the fact that many people pass by it every day. To make the scene, I used 3DS Max.

One of the most important parts of creativity is drawing inspiration from other things. I knew what the scene was going to feel like, however I needed to know what it would look like. I compiled some photos I found online that I liked as well as one of my biggest inspirations for this project, the film Weathering With You (here is a link to the reference I used from the movie WeatheringWithYouReference). From here on, I knew that I wanted to experiment more with rain and try to capture a simple, peaceful, quiet scene.

First, as I do whenever I make a set piece, I made a "rough sketch" of the layout. In this case, a simple layout with a few buildings and streets. The whole scene does not need to be created, just what the camera sees, like a movie set. Speaking of the camera, I placed a camera in the scene, low to the ground, and angled it to make the foreground very visible. Another goal of the camera angle was to hide parts of the scene to make it feel more mysterious, like there is more beyond what is shown, a whole world.

Next, to create a scene that feels alive, I started to add more shape to the buildings and ground, whether it be a ridge lining the bottom of the buildings, or adding a noise modifier to the street. I added a side door to the building on the right, and a vent with a pipe leading into it. I find it easier to go from the biggest to the smallest objects, with bigger objects like the trashcan being scattered about more sparsely than the smaller objects. All of the objects in the scene are not very complex as they do not need to be. They just need to be able to represent what they are and serve a purpose in both the scene and in their functionality in the alleyway. The trashcan, for example, is literally just a few boxes with smoothed out edges thrown together with cylinders for the wheels. It serves the scene by creating less empty space in the background, balancing out the right side, crowded by larger objects, and it serves the context of the world as it is a trash disposal used by the people or businesses residing in the buildings on either side. Next is modeling the smaller objects. Again, these objects do not need to be complex and have hundreds of polygons or have Physics be induced on them. They do not even need to be animated, as again, they are there to serve the scene and the context of the scene. Most of these objects, both the smaller and larger ones used both a MeshSmooth modifier to round off the hard edges. Some other objects used a few other modifiers, like the carboard boxes with a Taper modifier or the newspaper with multiple Bend modifiers and a Noise modifier. I use these smaller objects, like the cardboard boxes, to cover up what I call the double negative space. Whereas before, the negative space was the background which was covered up by the larger objects, here, the double negative spaces are the larger objects. This can then keep going down the line, triple negative, quadruple negative, etc. as long as it fits the scene and the context. There are even smaller objects like the bottles and cans that fulfill the triple negative, and smaller yet, like the flat sheets of cardboard, the newspaper, and the cigarettes scattered across the ground.

One of the final details I desired to add to the scene was a big puddle on the ground. In fact, I created two, one in the foreground, and one deeper into the scene just next of the trashcan. To start, the puddle had to be extremely thin, so as it would not look like it was raised up, however, if I wanted to add a noise to the puddle, then this would look odd. So, I created a copy of the puddle and used a subtraction boolean on the ground to create a divot for the puddle to rest in so as to look flat on the ground while the noise affected it. I made the puddle have many polygons to get more detail when applying the noise modifier and I set the noise to have a high frequency while animating so as to simulate the splashing of the rain on the puddle. After I finished with this, I kept playing around with the frequency and phase of the noise until I found something I thought looked good.

After I had finished putting all the objects and details into the scene, it was now time to detail the details. I applied materials to all of the objects in regards to what they were. Then, on those materials, I applied an extremely high bump map to make the materials appear more realistic and less flat when rendered. I also applied a high reflection on the materials to give the appearance of them being wet from the rain.

Well, the name of this competition is "Make It Glow," so now is finally the time to get into the lighting. To start, I added an overhead light that just serves to slightly illuminate the scene and create the effect of a dim moonlight. I then added lights that would make sense in the context of the world, for example, like the light in the doorway and the street lamps just around the corner of the outside of the alley. Then, I added the "main event" lights, the neon lights that glow at vibrant colors. I don't really remember why, but I decided that I wanted to create a cyberpunk-like scheme, so I chose a bright blue and purple for these lights. Again, they need to make sense in the context of the world, so I created two signs from which the light would come from. I adjusted the brightness of these lights to fit the general mood of the scene (I spent a bit too much time trying to find the perfect lighting).

This was the most difficult part of the process of this project as I had never really created rain, so I had no clue where to start. However, then I remembered learning how to use the spray particle system. So, I just blanketed the scene in a spray particle system and created a gravity force and deflector, linking them both to the spray. I adjusted the bounce height and parameters of the deflector until I was satisfied with the result and set the spray to render tetrahedrons. To make them look good while rendering, I turned on motion blur for the camera and also applied a translucent material with a little bit of emission that would make the rain slightly brighter and more visible to the camera.

I felt as I watched the scene, that it was not lively enough. It just seemed slightly too plain, and so to spice things up, I animated the door light to flicker a bit and added another spray with a bright, orange, glowing texture to replicate sparks. It was a simple change, however it was big enough to add much more depth to the scene and it was small enough to not create a whole tone change and draw too much attention. I also added another camera, again low to the ground, but this time angled upwards with a short focal length to get a frame of the entire scene, looking into the sky.

In rendering, I wanted two, extremely high resolution still frames of the scene, one from each camera, and a long, peaceful video animation of the scene, capturing the movement of the rain, the puddle, the sparks, and the way the light interacted with them all. So, I rendered the two still frames at 8K quality (IT TOOK OVER A DAY TO RENDER EACH FRAAAMMMMMEEE), then rendered the entire length of the scene at 1440p as an AVI which I later converted to an mp4 file and added audio to in post production. With that, I found my new desktop background. Here are two videos of the animation, one with motion blur and one without respectively: Motion Blur and No Motion Blur

I would have ended off the last section with words like "And with that, the project is finished," however I can never really say that the project is finished. After every project is wrapped up, to me, it never really feels finished, there is always that feeling that I could have done something better or added something more to an animation. The hardest part of the project is knowing when to take a step back and finally say that you are finished, at least for me. The temptation to add many more microdetails or fix a bit of the animation I disliked is immense, but at some point, I had to say it was over and say this was "finished." Thank you so much for the opportunity to participate in this competition, I had fun creating this scene and the process definitely helped me improve myself a lot as well.