വെട്ടം!! (The Light)

Back with another one of my personal work. This time I tried to achieve the photoreal look as much as possible. The concept came to my mind when I was searching for some free footages for another work. I saw a footage of a bulb which is just hanging on wire for 2 seconds and then turns on. I wanted to try and create the same thing in 3d. From the initial planning I wanted to create as much detail as possible in the model itself. So I approached some of my friends for modelling but they were all busy with their works. Finally I ended up creating the model by myself. I downloaded a simple bulb model from cgtrader.com. Then I did some re-modelling of my own. The most detailed part was the inner glass mount from where the filament wires are coming. Most of the references of that part glass a really sculpted shapes. So I used sculpt tools in Maya to create some of that details for it. Second thing was to create details in shading. As usual I used procedural shading (can't stop doing it. still zero at texturing, uv mapping etc....). This time I used some dust and scratch maps from internet and used it procedurally. I was keen on creating the scratches and dusts because when the light turns on those were the things that's going to create that realistic look. For the lighting I used a single HDRI (LDRI actually). I created a rough 360 panorama jpeg image of my home interior and used it in dome light. And it worked perfect as bulb has only reflections and transmission. Then i converted the filament mesh to mesh light. I animated filament and mesh light visibility to create light turning on animation. I created a atmospheric fog layer with the mesh light. I rendered bulb, BG and atmosphere fog in separate layers. I rendered bulb with depth of field turned on as the bg visible through refraction stays on focus even after adding zdefocus in nuke if rendered without depth of filed and thats not physically correct. There was some back and forth test renders for realising all this things. Then I recorded a video with my dad in it with sound telling him to turn on the light. The sounds enhances the naturality and realism in the output. I got this idea from an old cg footage I have seen named "The exciting job of a traffic light' by Immortal Arts. I was responsible for modelling, animation, look development, lighting and compositing of this project. modelled, animated and rendered in Maya with Arnold and did the post processing in Nuke.