Mountain Range (Lighting Studies) (Patreon)

Here’s a look at the finalized stage, along with some lighting studies that I made to experiment with the colors and mood for this animation.

The one with the bright noon lighting was actually the kind of lighting I was originally going for, but no matter where I positioned the sun, the scene never looked as convincing as I intended it to, which is why I scraped it and moved to something a little more diffuse.

Overall I ended up preferring the sunrise mood, which is basically based on the lighting of the most recent animation loop! This also ended up looking best on Zoe herself, with the sun coming from behind providing a nice rim light to her fur in contrast with the diffuse ambient light.

The night lighting was the most experimental one of the bunch. And while I like soft and diffuse scenarios, the scene was overall a bit too dark. Sadly the skybox suffers from a bit of color banding since my renderer squeezes all textures down to 8-bit color depth. This could be fixed by using a different night skybox, but since this is only an alternative study I’ll leave it to that!

Rendering everything later on is going to be a challenge once again, as both Zoe and the environment need to be rendered in a single pass since one is constantly overlapping over the other. Only the mountains in the background can be rendered out in a separate pass. I’m also targeting rendering the entire animation at native 60FPS later on, but I can’t guarantee this just yet. I’ll have to see how far I can optimize everything in the end!