TOUCAN
I took on this project to practice character lighting and look dev. It was also an excellent opportunity to work with lighting assets I had not experienced before, particularly with the fur and feathers.
These are the reference images for my project. I wanted to create a colorful and warm feeling surrounding the baby toucan.
By analyzing the references, I established a couple of tasks for the project.
Have strong directional light guiding eyes of observer towards the toucan.
Dapple light coming through the trees.
Saturated, colorful assets, in contrast with a darker environment.
Include a feeling of humidity and scale.
Emphasize details on the objects closer to the camera.
Darker greens and browns to aid the character stand out.
I created a solid directional lighting setup for the bird. I did some work on the shader of the leaves; since they were going to be so close to the camera, I wanted to have great detail on them. I also hand-painted the bird's beak to match the reference, as it was a focal element for my piece. I encountered a challenge getting the bird to read without getting blown out. The fact the character has black and white in its body made that hard. I created a different shader for the black fur/feather, as it wasn't picking up any lights in the set correctly. In Nuke I added some defocus to the background and added a flare that helps direct the eye of the spectator to the character.
Scene is available in the Academy of Animated Art's marketplace.
Modeled by Plascencia Jorge
I was responsible for Look Dev, lighting, compositing.
Software used: Photoshop, Maya, Arnold Renderer and NUKE.