Dev Log : Pain In The Ass

After however long developing Behind The Curtain - it finally had to happen.

I'm in the middle of creating the biggest pain in the ass scene I've ever had to do in devving BtC .. Everything that can go wrong .. is going wrong.

First of all : Lighting

It's a club scene. Most of the lighting comes from the Neon that comes with the scene. I don't have an issue with this. It's the look I want.

But supplementary lighting? Forget it. No matter what I do - I'm struggling to get any contrasts in the light. What I mean - add an extra light into the scene to create light, shadow and highlights into a face to give it depth.

Nope! Not happening. The scene lighting is such that, beyond placing a light with the brightness of a star going supernova, everything is coming out flat. I'm basically having to babysit every image that's to be rendered and adapt it each time.

This of course then leads onto the next issue. Light consistency.

We don't want one image lit a certain way and then the next image - from a slightly different angle, perhaps - to be lit differently. It's jarring. It makes us go "huh?" .. We want consistency. And while yes, there's pink neon bits here and there .. due to the contrasting issues above .. lights are having to move from image to image, camera angle to camera angle .. and so keeping that consistency is tough.

The next issue seems to be the set / scene file is bugged out .. Firstly, the set is built in a way that I fundamentally disagree with. Instead of 4 walls and roof as separate models - they are all built into one and separated out as "joints" with one big texture for everything. Bad way to build an environment as it means you can't individually move, copy, delete, edit any part of the scene in any easy fashion.

I always take an environment and butcher it to my liking. With environment elements being "joints" you can't do that. You need to go through the geometry editor and delete the actual polygons if you want something removing .. With this scene I've had to combine doing this with actually copying the environment multiple times, cutting different bits out of each copy and moving and rotating each version so that I can build the scene I want.

So I've basically got the same environment model in scene 5 times just with different bits cut out of each and the kitbashed all of them into one set. Basically, as it should have been built in the first place.

To environment developers: Make your environment elements different models and / or props. Don't make walls, ceilings, bottles on a shelf and floors all "jointed" into one model.

All of this together means I have to babysit each image. I can't set a scene up, add multiple frames with elements in the scene moving around and then batch them off for render over night.

Each image has to be crafted by hand. Test rendered. Adjusted. Edited. Test rendered. Baby sat with a lot of "oh for fucks sakes" happening. Do another test render .. it's 10 minutes in .. might as well leave it to finish and walk away for a 20 minute break. Rinse and repeat. 7 images into the scene .. find you're not happy with the flat lighting or the inconsistency in the lighting and redo the images.

I'm on my fifth version of the same 7 images have set up so far in the scene and I'm still not happy with them.

It's the first time this has happened in BtC .. hopefully the last .. but it's a right pain in the ass and it hasn't been a week I've enjoyed.