A Redshift Production Breakdown and Experience Sharing from Lighting/Rendering Artist Jiaxuan Wang

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In this article, Fox Renderfarm, the best could rendering services provider, will share with you a Redshift production breakdown and experience sharing from lighting/rendering artist Jiaxuan Wang.

Introduction: Hi, everyone! This is Jiaxuan Wang. I’m so happy to have gained some popularity for my artwork and have seen my progress along the way.

We were given a pretty complex theme, especially on the modeling and lighting. I rendered it with Redshift.

Render without Lighting

We can separate the models into 6 sections: foreground, the bridge, architectures on both sides, the cathedral, background and the crowd. When I started dealing with the rendering, it took a very long time since there were too many polygons. Before I could optimize the models, it took nearly 6 minutes just to read the models. So I decided to separate the models. Coincidentally, I found that after dealing with some unnecessary UVs, and combining some models, the time of the input process and the size of the files both would shrink drastically. This allowed me to manage the lighting and rendering with all the models. Thus, for the second time, I input all the 6 files into one to render with Reference. Speaking of texturing, most of the models are attached with textures. Some silhouettes and simple models, I chose to use simple color texture to save time. And the lighting part, besides the radiating window, there are 240 lights in total. A lot of Area Lights were used. Through adjusting the position, strength and so forth to add more details.

The first render is not that satisfying. Since this is my first time dealing with this kind of fantasy style, I paid too much attention to working on the fog but ignored the importance of basic lights. Additionally, I just simply multiplied the lights without finding the main light source, which turned out to be a lot of shadows and strong contrast without fine details. My teacher recorded a long video to give me some advice, telling me details like the foreground is too bright, it is too hollow under the bridge, there is no visual focus in the image, etc. I was more experienced on my second render. And I began to think like a concept artist, considering the position of the lights and how I want the shadows and contrast to transit in the picture. Then comes the ambient adjustment, about the fog. Most of them were composited in Nuke afterwards according to my teachers’ advice.

Nodes Tree