Lighting and Rendering a 3D Scene

Hi! My name is Autumn Mohring. As an aspiring lighting artist, I set out to get a still image I could use as a splash page for my 3D Digital Lighting portfolio. I only had a week to work on this, so I'd love to keep refining this later. However, I just wanted to get something started, and show you my process for lighting and rendering a 3D scene. The biggest challenge in this will be converting Blender files into Maya, but other than that, this project was pretty standard!

In this project I used Blender, Autodesk Maya, and After Effects. I also bought two files: Tia character by TomCAT and Old Office 3D by 3dReach.

No lighting project of mine is complete without a mood board for reference and inspiration! For this one, I wanted to create a mysterious mood and use my favorite visuals to best represent myself. For the lighting itself, I was inspired by the otherworldly lighting in my favorite painting: the Young Martyr by Paul Delaroche. For the visuals of the scene, I pulled from the dark academia aesthetic as seen in Harry Potter and Good Omens. I also wanted to pull from Lofi Girl the mood of someone calmly working at their desk.

Now that we have a clear idea of what we want the scene to look like, it's time to find or create the models! For this project, I chose to buy a 3D modeled scene and character rig to save time and ensure quality of the models. You are free to create your own assets or find free assets! You may notice that the assets I purchased are made for Blender. I will also be showing you how to convert Blender files to Maya Files, as I have more training in the Maya Lighting Workspace.

To transfer the Blender file into Maya, we must export it as an FBX. Since there are extra things in the scene like cameras and dust particles that I won't need in Maya, I only select the items I want to export and make sure the "limit to selected items" check box is on when exporting.

The character is a little different when moving from Blender to Maya since the programs won't interpret the controls the same way. Since I'm not animating the character, I decided to pose her in Blender, and export that into Maya. While you should already be doing this anyways, make sure to increment and save with this approach so if you need to edit the pose at all, you don't have to start from scratch. Once I was happy with her pose, I selected the mesh, and applied the rig modifier. After the modifier was applied, I could follow the same procedure as the scene. I selected the objects I wanted to export and exported only the selected items.

After importing your FBX files into Maya, the only thing left to do is reconnect the textures! Make sure you have copied all the texture files into the Maya sourceimages folder. Then go to windows>general editors>file path editor and repath the broken texture file paths.

To make the scene more cohesive, I changed the colors of the preexisting scene. I though the colors of the fan stood out too much, so I turned it to a tan color. I also hid the banker's lamp in the render since I thought it distracted from the main lights, and I didn't want to change it's iconic green shade! I also changed some of the textures on the Tia character so that she looked more like me.

Here are the lights I used:

1. Window Light: I liked the light rays streaming though the window in the original scene, so I kept it, adding an Atmosphere Volume in Maya to get the look of the dust particles and visible light rays. It also created a clear silhouette of the character.
2. Point Light: I suspended a warm point light above the desk, that the character is reaching out to. I made sure the volume visibility of this one was at 1, because I wanted to clearly be able to see where the light was.
3. Fill Light: I didn't want the character and scene to be completely dark if not lit by the window light or point light, so I added a subtle pink area light pointed at the character. I put the volume visibility of this light at 0 since I only wanted this one to brighten up the scene and not look like another light source in the dust particles.

Since I only had my laptop and was running out of time to refine the render, I decided to add some effects in post production. In After Effects, I added the following:

1. Bloom: By duplicating the image and masking out areas I didn't want to affect (the window), I was able to add a blooming, glowing effect to the floating light. I added a fast box blur and changed the blend mode to screen.
2. Saturation/Color Correction: I desaturated the edges of the photo and desaturated colors that didn't fit with the warm color scheme.
3. Chromatic Aberration: I added chromatic aberration, especially at the edges of the image.
4. Blur: I added blur to the edges to fake a shallow depth of field.
5. Vignette: Since the edges were already in shadow, I wanted to create a retro film look and bring the attention to the middle. The vignette also helped make remaining noise in the render look like part of the vintage effect.

After every project, it's always a good idea to reflect on what went well and what didn't. For this project, I really liked the models I bought so I'll definitely keep using them in the future. I also liked the vintage vibe I achieved. When I come back and refine this, I want to add more subtle lights to better light up the scene and rely less on the window light. I might also spend more time posing the character.