"Hippopura" began as a modeling project for Caleb Meine, and soon turned into a surfacing demo for Evan Balster, before landing on my desk as a lighting study. This work is based on the concept art by Jourdan Tuffan.
My responsibilities include all aspects of lighting, compositing, and rendering.
I wanted to employ some new practices I had been learning about from reading Chris Brejon's cinematography web-book. For this project, I utilized the warm-edge technique that he mentions here. I think this adds more saturation and interesting coloration to the cast shadows on the ground.
The lighting setup seemed simple when I first looked at the concept art. However, I soon realized the kind of "cheating" that was used to create a more interesting shaping of the Hippo. The concept artist uses multiple lights to act as one light source; also a common goal in the CG world. With that, I spent more time on perfecting the placement of a few lights rather than throwing a lot of them at the scene. I ended up with 5 lights, including the extra 2 that create that "warm-edge".
