Gart230 Blog- Week eleven, Final lighting touches 

This week was heavily focused on bringing the scene back towards the aesthetic shown in the film, the most important aspects which were lacking at the start of the week were the distinctive red and blue lighting and the numerous small light sources dotted around the scene itself. I started off by deleting all the lights in the scene and then going through systematically placing lights where I saw them in the film, the first lot to go on were the pool lights which is just a point light in each of the pools providing the majority of the ambient light in the room. next was set of red up-lights which line the outside walls of the room and cast a red hue upwards.

Following that was a set of inset lights on the side of the far right fire escape which break up the wall and provide some high level lighting. The last of the base lighting was a set of spotlights at the end of the room, three warm lights pointing down from the top of the columns illuminating the brickwork and bathing the far baths entrance in light and then another four bright red spot lights pointed upwards at the front of curtains, I have done my best to make these appear as if they are behind the curtains to try and fake the illusion that they are translucent and backlit although the degree of success I have had with this is questionable. In the film are a set of spotlights which shine down from the roof and cast bright red spirals which rotate slowly on the floor, initially I loved this design choice but as I got more invested in the project I have found it increasingly more gaudy and tacky so have made the creative decision to leave them out as they would seriously detract from the piece in my opinion. I did however make these lights and test them in the scene but as expected I hated the look they gave. As a result of this decision the scene is now a blend of both the film set and the actual location so I am no longer going for a fully film accurate representation but instead a more faithful recreation of the actual space with the influence of john wick in the colour pallet and layout. An aspect of both the film and environment I did decide to incorporate this week was the abundance of smaller light sources like candles within the environment, the two main forms these took were candles in cylindrical glass jars and candles within wooden boxes with a series of holes cut in the side to distribute the light, although it is late in the process to be modelling new assets I quickly modelled and UV unwrapped both these objects and began distributing them around the scene in the locations scene in the film (any locations not seen specifically in the film I used reference images to determine the locations of light sources)

once all the candles were put in place the scene really took on a new atmosphere as the lighting became more cohesive with the candles blending the boundaries between red and blue light. I was however unhappy with how static the scene felt even with the caustics dancing across the ceiling and walls and decided I wanted to make the candles flicker. It would have been far two costly to have all the candles flicker in real-time as there are over a hundred of them within the scene and with ray tracing enabled anything other than baked lighting would be extremely performance intensive, for this reason with the help of the lecturer I created a quick panning texture which varied the emissive colour of the texture of the top of the light to give the illusion of the light flickering even though the actual light that was being emitted remained constant, this worked beautifully and helped add that bit more action to the scene without causing performance to slow to crawl.

Next week is the final week and I am pretty confident going into it that other than a few final tweaks here and there the project is almost at a level where I can shoot the cinematic, although there is more I would like to do to the project mostly focused around adding smaller details such as towels and other common spa items, I would rather turn in a polished version of the scene in this state than push too hard for more detail and risk jeopardising the overall look. I plan on setting up the cinematic within unreal next week and nailing down the camera settings I want to use to try and capture the look of the film so that the screenshots and cinematic show off the environment in the way its intended to be viewed.