Only Dating Her

This shot was a collaboration with animator Leonardo Quert. I love the concept of the shot and how he transformed the audio into such a fun sequence! I wanted to create a very bright lighting scenario, in the school courtyard, to reflect the silly mood.

CHaractErs LookDeV

This is basically my "Lazy girl's guide to personal lighting projects." I always try to get the bang for my buck creating extra texture maps Lol

Because I didn't plan on changing any UVs, I did the shading directly on the posed characters. I exported a single frame of the animation, with characters from each shot grouped into separate files. I assembled the shaders until I was happy, then transferred the shaders onto the full frame range alembic cache in a fresh Maya file, minus any turntable geo, lights, extra cameras. Then in my lighting file I referenced the files that had the cache with shaders assigned, so that the lighting file was lightning fast!

I didn't want to add Substance Painter to my workflow for this shot, so for a majority of the shaders, I generated new texture maps in Nuke. Here are some examples of new texture maps that I made and a short description of how I used them.

I did the same for clothes, using color corrects or paint nodes in Nuke to manipulate the albedo texture to produce roughness maps or sheen color maps.

Lighting PRocEss

I couldn't wait to jump into lighting so after I got a pass of shaders I was fairly happy with, I brought it into the lighting file and continued to make tweaks. The bigges changes was lifting the darks in most shaders. I lifted the base colors a bit too, but I also added a lot more information in the specular lobe, adding more variations in roughness and also adding sheen to all cloth items. The eyes were also updated to make the irises brighter and easier to read.

When I started lighting, I knew I wanted to play with having the characters be warm on a cool background, or cool on warm. I wanted to feel a lot of depth in the shots as well. I kept that in mind as I iterated. Love the final addition of dapple as well!