The Deserters

#1

Hello everyone. I’m starting a WIP thread for this project I’m working on and I’d love to get some critiques. My main focus for this phase of the project is sequence lighting. I’m going to be making three lighting setups each with multiple shots with the goal of making cohesive lighting across the multiple shots.

Here’s the first one. I’ve done the preliminary posing and asset placement for this shot, but it still needs a final sculpting pass and fire. I’m getting the feeling that this one’s looking fake, like a diorama rather than an animation shot. I don’t know if it’s the lighting, the shaders or something else.

And here’s an earlier test with a daylight set up.

#2

As a light setting I would say, the fire should cast WAY more light in that cave. Like casting strong hard shadows on the walls.

#3

The way she holds the rifle, it looks to me that she aims at something to his right side and not directly at him.

For the lighting I’d say that the blue ambient light is too strong and should have a stronger falloff towards the inside of the cave.

#4

Hey, Julian.

I agree with Scote. If your main focus is on the lighting right now, the issue is the lack of intensity on light from the fire. I think the fire should cast really dark shadows and the distant rocks and edges should fall into darkness. Plus, the light on the rocks themselves should be much more red/orange in hue. Like this.

Overall, I like the composition. One question, the man sitting, is he supposed to be impaled? It’s just unclear if that’s an issue with protrusion or if he’s supposed to be dead. Either way it could either be fixed or adjusted to read better.

#5

Thanks for the critiques everyone. Really appreciated. I tried increasing the intensity of the fire light to reach the cave walls, but the foreground elements got way too bright. The cave is actually pretty big. The cave wall is around 10 meters away from the woman. I can get the light to reach the huge rock on the left side of the screen and it does help things. The thing protruding from the man’s shoulder is the sling of his gun. I haven’t sculpted it into place yet.

I won’t be able to work on this for a few weeks, but I really appreciate the critiques and I’ll be addressing them once I can work on this again.

#6

I found some time to work on this a bit. Here are two slightly different lighting variations. One has stronger blue ambient light.