Work faster! Work Slower?!
As I go on and on through lighting these sets... 24 down! 3 to go! ^ ^
Over the years since I did WATS I've learned SO MUCH about everything that I'm not making the same workflow mistakes that I did on WATS AND I now know what I need to do to make the images I want to make....so that gives me extra time to focus on tweaking on little things to make outstanding images BUT with this added knowledge now comes all the time to do all the little things my tweaker brain makes me do....example...
The world of "Heart String Marionette" is lit only with torches, candles and the moon... AND I'm following my own photographically accurate rules so there are no phantom lights... if there is a light in a scene its coming from one of those three lighting devices AND I just HAVE to make them behave like real lights and shadows haha... thats what takes a lot of time... I will NEVER use GI because I believe it takes a lot of the art out of lighting which I enjoy so I'm setting up all the light bounces and all that manually...
A side note on technical thangs: Early on in dis blog I wrote about how excited I was about using Subpolygon displacement when integrating Zbrush and Cinema 4d... NOW its still a great method IF your doing still images... SPD needs to be calculated at render time FOR EVERY FRAME and it adds A LOT of time to renders...looks great yeh and allows you to use low poly geometry in the scene but it KILLS at render time SO what I did was go back into Zbrush and load the high poly versions of the objects and I used the AWESOME decimation master plugin to decimate them... so a 4 million polygon object will be decimated down to 25k polys and still retain the detail I want... NOW this won't work for anything that needs to be skinned because Decimation master makes funky geometry ^ ^ but its great for everything else... So I've swapped out all the SPD for either normal mapped versions or decimated versions.Brought to you by professional weirdo M dot Strange.