Something I felt I made a lot of progress on this week was my day to night. I was feeling somewhat stuck with it where the scene was feeling too dark but it would look to bright when I made it brighter. I ended up doing a sky replacement and made a starry night sky and made the ground a bit brighter. I feel like it’s balanced out the darkness of the scene well. I applied a similar color correction to my other comps and hope to finalize these or only make slight adjustments if needed. Below I’ve included a video of my day to night, my nuke tree, and the main color correction I’m using for the ground.
We also added a new shot into our scene that cuts into the middle of shot 1. It’s an up close shot of the dragon flying through the sky. I think the specular high lights being made from our key light are too bright so I recently added some new render layers to this scene to sepereate the key light’s direct specular from the hdr’s direct specular. We haven’t rendered this out yet but I hope to test it out this weekend since I think it’ll allow me to bring down some of those really bright highlights. I’m also using the indirect specular to add pink onto the dragon and using a ramp on this color correction as a mask to make it stronger in the back. This is suppose to looked like the light from the particles in the back shining onto the dragon. I have my current comp of this shot below along with it’s nuke tree.
Below is our current edit of what we have.
I also tried testing some lens flare effects on the headlights in Nuke recently. I’ve been using the flare node but it’s still very new to me and I feel like I need to do more testing with it. I just added two small flares on the main headlights, I’m like the one on the left better right now, the one on the right feels too fake. I also think I need to layer more types of flares on top of each other to get it to look more natural. I’ve also been look at the Audi space ad for examples of headlight flares. I put my current test and a lens flare example below.
