Rooftop Shot Breakdown
Responsible for: This scene was created in Maya and rendered in passes in Mental Ray. I used Final Gather only in Occlusion Pass and Image based lighting only in the IBL pass. I chose to render this scene in passes to give myself finer control of the lighting and colors due to the number of
light sources involved. This scene was broken up into the following passes: |
|
 |
Direct Light Pass: This pass was created using only the moon as it’s source of light. Being the key light source in the scene shadows were turned on for this light as well as Bump information left in the shaders. All specularity and reflections have been turned off. |
 |
Fill Light Pass: This pass only has the fill lights turned on. These are
ficticious lights only used to better illuminate the scene and help shape the objects. This pass was added to the Direct Light Pass in Shake. |
 |
IBL Pass: This pass was created using the Image based lighting feature of Mental Ray in which I used a ramp texture to simulate indirect light from the sky as it fades off into darkness as it reaches the horizon. This pass was also added to the previous two in Shake. |
 |
Occlusion Pass:
This Occlusion Pass was created using final gather and the mental ray ambient occlusion shader. This pass was multiplied over the previous passes to create the basic environment lighting. |
 |
Secondary Key Lights:
This pass was created for all the static lights in the scene that also represented real light sources. This included the inside of the building, street lights from the streets below as well as the lights lighting up the billboard behind the building. |
 |
Car Headlight Pass:
This pass was created for the head lights on the
hover-crafts that fly by. It was added over the previous passes in Shake. |
 |
Car Hover Lights:
This pass represents the lights underneath the hover-crafts
as they fly by. It was added to the previous passes as well. |
 |
Base Color Pass: Finally after all the light information was tweaked and brought together it was all multiplied over the Base Color Pass. I decided to do this instead of a Diffuse pass because I didn’t want my color information rendered out with my light information. |
 |
Reflection Pass:
I created this reflection pass by duplicating all the objects I wanted to have relfections and applying a DGS material to them. This allowed me to optimize my render times by controlling the blurriness of my reflections through the DGS material instead of Mental Ray’s reflection blur on the maya materials as well as only rendering a single
reflection pass. I then used seperately rendered matte
sequences to further control each reflection. |
 |
Specular Pass:
Finally, I rendered a specular pass using Maya’s Speclar Render Layer and added it to the previous passes. |
| After assembling these passes together, I also replaced the background and added a glow pass to the rocket burners of the hover-crafts and traffic lights. A seperate reflection pass was created for each car as well as the reflection of the cars in the glass building in the background. This process of compositting a scene together allowed me to have real-time control of the brightness and color of each light as well as the overall contrast and color scheme of the entire image. | |
