This week I finished the camera work with the camera sequencer as well as the lighting. It was certainly an experience as I had never used the camera sequencer and added lights to a scene like this one.
So, I decided to begin with the blocking to then work on the cameras, I watched a few tutorials about the camera sequencer and it was pretty simple, it looks like premiere pro, we just have to set up the frame count and camera.
This was how the camera sequencer playblast looked like before lighting:
The lighting part was the hardest as it was not working not looking like I wanted it, I watched a few tutorials on it but it was not looking the same on my scene, so I decided to try every light maya has on an empty scene to understand how they worked. I still don’t know all of them, but I understand it better for sure.
I ended up using spot lights like my reference footage, I tried to be as loyal as possible to it, although in the end I made a few changes. I set up a line of orange and yellow lights in the back, a main white one in the center and five more on the top front of the stage. I like the final result but I know it is something I should improve in the future. This is what the set up looked like:
This is how the lights look like but for some reason they don’t all show up.
When lights are on the viewport it is not possible to see how all of them are as I duplicated them and there must be a bug, I can only have an idea of it when rendered. Also I changed the skydome HDRI to a night image on a park that seemed better for the performance of Michael Jackson.