Adding Lighting Tints

After my recent tutorial with Mat, he suggested whilst I was waiting for Hayley to finish up her character, to look at my lighting a bit more. I had the intensity perfected, however he thought that since our animation is set our night, that maybe we should think about how white our lighting is, and what we can do about it to make it more realistic, like an actual carnival.

I therefore made a quick mood board of various carnivals that are set in the evening time and looked at how their lighting worked there. A lot of them had blue hues, and red light reflecting from the objects (ferris wheels, stands, etc), so this is something I immediately tried to incorporate into the environment so give it a funfair and authentic feel. I also wanted to push myself with the lights a bit more. 

To achieve this, I added tints to my existing ambient lights. In the above images, I chose three others colours other than white; purple, blue and green. I think the most immediate visual difference is the green as it makes the scene look darker and more mellow. I find though with this colour that you can tell that the lighting has obviously been set to green which I do not like. I asked Hayley her opinion and she said she liked the purple tint as you could tell that it is night time and the grass especially, looks more realistic. Therefore I think we will be going with that one.

I also experimented with the glow that I had seen on the mood board, from the ferris wheels. On the left image, you can see that I applied too much of a glow, where as on the right I have a little amount which I think is more suitable. I like the idea of having more detail on our animation, but I am unsure as to whether it will just make our animation take much longer to render. Either way, I think I am finally finished with the scenery and now I can start thinking about animating.

This is the final scene with mountains and glowing stars! Hayley made the mountains which I love and I think that they will bring more interest to the environment when the camera is facing the other way! I also added some glowing stars which contrast the background so I might just ask Hayley to make a higher resolution image, or just use a plain navy blue one.