Forest Lighting

[flexo]

Anyone know a good tutorial or happen to know a good method for creating the effect of lighting in a forest/jungle type setting. What do you think the best way to go about doing that is?? I'll be needing to light my scenes here in a while... just throwing out the question in advance. In my scene the character will be composited into real footage soo there won't be any 3d trees to actually shine light through. So if anyone has any thoughts let me know thanks alot!

Thanks for helping

~T

[tparty]

Maybe create a texture in Photoshop of a shadow-like pattern you might expect trees and leaves would make on the ground...blur it out a bit...then apply that texture into the colour attribute for your designated light source.

Play around with that idea...it might be to your liking.

good luck

[flexo]

Sweet... I'll definatley look into that. Thanks for the suggestion. All other theorys are welcome

[seb-morin]

Also don'r forget the haze (Maya fog) that almost always
comes with jungles and forests. Study the live plate,
and take cues from it that you can use in your CG lighting.
The prior suggestion of the foliage image in your light's
color attribute is great, and should help get you closer to
reality. If you really want to be anal about it, create some
paint effects trees (they don't have to have any lighting
on them, just make them fully luminousl)
and render out an
animation of them blowing in the wind. Be sure to fill the
screen with the foliage, and get many overlapping layers of
trees on screen. This sequence of animated frames could
then be used in the same way that the prious poster was
suggesting, except this would be moving slightly, and
may really up the believability factor. Remember to invert the
color of the sequence, or else you'll get the wrong results.

Good luck!

-Perry Harovas

the LIGHTHOUSE
Visual Effects, Post and Animation
617-491-3060
Boston, MA