Inspiration
This time I went for general inspiration and I ended up with these two images. What you will notice is that they do not reflect the final lighting. This is because I used the grayscale and general idea of it, rather than copying it.
Turning inspiration to BW
Turning Inspiration to Opposite Color
Setting up Basic Lighting
I then set up the basic lighting in which we want as few light as possible to maximize the effect, range and intensity. I also wanted the middle light to have the blue and strongest light intensity. And the outer areas to have a orange weaker light to them.
Tweaking Shadow
I didn’t want my usual sharp shadows. I wanted them a bit more diffused so I adjusted the source radius on all.
Key Light as Area Light
I used area light for the key light to get diffused shadow but also a nice soft effect overall to the scene.
Reflections
I tweaked the reflections to get the desired reflection out of the whole area, including ground. For the ground I use planar reflection.
Skylight
I didn’t want too much bright light coming in from skylight, so I kept it to the minimum using the cubemap.
Fog
I then added some orange fog to emphasize the mood and spread the light around a bit.
Key light Color Test
It was important to get the basic color right, intensity and range of the key light. Which as mentioned earlier was an area light.
Camera Angle
I started tweaking the camera angle to decide the composition, depth of field and other features.
Post Process
During all this I also tweaked the post process to pump up the desired effect.
Light complexity
These days I like to check the light complexity to optimize the scene a bit. This is why there are so few lights on this scene.
Lightmap Density
I also bumped up the lightmap density to get more out of the quality, but not too high.
GPU Visualizer
And to ensure the optimization is at its best I check the GPU Visualizer. I try my best to keep the numbers low which means the ms cost and fps is optimized.
Final Shots
