Lighting and Rendering

Once the animation is complete, the scene is then set-up in the appropriate lay-out ready for lighting.  As with live action filming lighting is one of the most important aspects in producing a high quality production.Understanding the use of coloured lighting, gobos, shadows,  reflection  and refraction are important aspects of bringing the final scene to life.  Without quality lighting an image can look flat and dull.  There is always a balance - the ideal lighting uses radiosity to bounce lighting around the 3d world as it would do in the real world, however the render times can increase exponentially, producing amazing results but at a huge cost in time and raw processor power.

“Lighting is vital. Without that they’ve got nothing. And, of course, color and texture. When they showed me a little piece of Finding Nemo, I said this has got to be the biggest hit. ”
Joe Grant

Optimising for Rendering.

Creation Studio Productions have a large renderfarm which is the equivelant of over 150 computers, but even with this power, if the scene, texturing, models and lighting aren’t optimised, rendering time can take days. By optimising the scenes render times can be bought down to minutes. When you consider that 1500 frames have to be rendered to produce one minute of animation running at 25 FPS, optimising scenes is important and an art form in itself.