ABSTRACT

Lighting and Rendering For the lighting, it was not necessary to create a complex rig; we simply needed to insert some light to recreate an outdoor atmosphere, and then added a sun to recreate a nice rim of light on the back border of the head. In reality, a reection is created when light hits an object, and for this reason we needed to add an environment map in order to simulate reality, complete with natural outdoor details and cool variations. With a bit of imagination, this creature really could come to life (Fig.04a)! Final Gathering and caustics can help achieve the look, but this increases the render time, so we’ve recreated the look in our image by diffusing light all around the character, varying its intensity depending on the lit areas. We tried to imagine rays of light falling on one

object and then bouncing off a second, and this was the phenomenon we tried to apply to the character (Fig.04b-04c). Rendering was done using Mental Ray in Softimage XSI.