This week we were tasked with rendering a high quality shot of two subjects, an alien and our previously created Lego set. We're using Arnold renderer and doing further post-processing in Photoshop, so there is great freedom in what we might be able to do and a huge variety of techniques and settings to choose from.
To begin with, we had to build a basic 3 point lighting setup. I used an AI Area Light for my main light, with a wide scale for soft shadows. This is the primary source of lighting and shadows and thus has a good amount of intensity. My bounce light was an AI Sky Dome Light with an HDRI added, and my rim light was a Maya point light with the intensity turned all the way up after setting it to Quadratic decay.
Here are some examples of the material nodes and the settings used for the alien.
After rendering with some minor settings tweaked, I took these files (as EXRs!) to Photoshop for some heavy editing. The image on the left is where I started. In the end I decided to lean towards a colored pencil filter and then tweaking the results from there to give the image a very hot palette of colors. The alien went from having an almost patina-like skin tone to a healthy copper sheen that wouldn't be amiss in a desert world. I enjoyed these colors a lot more, so after some more experimenting I exported and moved on to the TIE fighter.
The TIE was a lot more straightforward and easy to figure out than the possibility-filled alien bust. I had previously used a purple/blue color scheme in my TIE renders, so I sought to do the same here. After applying a palette knife filter, I messed with some saturation and contrast settings to give the TIE a robust, colorful appearance.
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