Noroff fagskole: LR3 - Lighting and rendering the hard surface model

This week at Noroff, I am lighting and rendering the hard surface model that I textured last week. Then i will a short animation of it.

Time-budget

 Idea Development

This is my mood-board. For lighting, we are using an HDR image.

I also wanted blue neon-looking lights under the hover-board, but i ultimately decided to drop the idea.

 The three pictures shown above, are the HDR images i wanted to try for my scene.

Work

  Firstly, I decided to adjust the brightness of some parts of the specular map for my hoverboard.

  I did this because the previous specular map made the metal parts too boring and they did not catch much reflections.

After some discussion with the teacher, I changed the appearance of the hoverboard using Maya's Lattice Tool.

The change made it look way more interesting. Before this, the board was more blocky and boring, but now it has more finesse and definitely looks better overall.

As for the lighting, I used a Vray Light Dome and used the HDR images as an input.

Here you can see some of the settings for the Light Dome.

Here are the three HDR images i decided to test out with my scene.

And here are three renders done with the three different HDR images.

I decided to go with this one.

For rendering, I made a TurnTable and a TurnTableCamera, which basically is a camera that goes 360 degrees around one object. In the render settings, I changed the FPS to 24 frames per second.

I am also using 250 frames for the entire rotation around the Hoverboard.

Then I did a batch render (A render that renders frame by frame) of the 250 frames.

After all the frames were rendered, I started a new project in Adobe Premiere Pro.

I imported all the renders as an image sequence.

Then i simply changed some settings to match the settings from the renders and exported the file.

Finished Product

Render settings: 

Vray
1280x720

Sampler type: Adaptive

GI: On
Primary bounces Engine: Irradience map
Secondary bounces Engine: Light cache


I am happy with the result, all though I keep thinking how much cooler it would look with some neon lights.
But, with the change of the shape and everything else, I think it looks good.