Museum exterior

I am currently making pinwheel island for our project and the last scene of our video will finish according to my story board (below). Basically the scene explains our paper city is actually maquette on the table of museum. Therefore I took the job of making the exterior of museum/gallery.

Modeling the room and props were not tricky but it should much more focus on the maquette on table so lighting is the key theme for this room. The spot light was essential because it gives focused feeling as itself and I played around many lights for room itself.

This is the plain room I made without any lighting.

spotlight

This is the rendered image of the room with spot light only. It is dark because there is not any other supportive light. Plus, room and props were not textured yet at this time.

spotlight + 1 point light

This images shows work flow with one spotlight and one point light. Point light emits light from one point so I thought it would play as light bulb. It certainly lightened the room but it looked weird because I couldn't see the shadow under the table and ramp's shadow on the wall.

spolight + 1 point light + 1 directional light

So I added another light which was directional light on the corner of the table to make the table's shadow. Although the table looks much brighter and has two layered shadow underneath, however, this directional light made lamp's shadow on the wall in a weird way which i didn't expect. Afterward, I REALLY struggled with this directional light and others like volume light and ambient light for the right shadow, but all didn't work as I wanted.

spotlight + 2 point light

So I just added another point light near the table, and it was just right shadow i thought. I was little bit worried it looked too soft and smooth but props has not connected to right material and texture, so I tried to stick to this lighting combination and textured them first.

spotlight + point light (black shadow colour)

spotlihgt + point light (brown shadow colour)

 The first picture above has white as light colour and black as shadow colour so it looked a bit artificial to me. Room was too bright and shadows are too dark. So I dimmed the light colour as light brown and brightened the shadow colour as brown. It turned out the atmosphere of the room itself looks much more focused on the table but table shadow got too lighten. I still needed the final touch. I re-checked the shadow options of spotlight and made shadow link with spotlight and table. 

Finally, the table has two shadow, the bigger one is from the spotlight right on the table and the smaller one is from the room light on the ceiling. 

Overall, modeling and texturing were very simple job but lighting was very tricky and even slight colour change gives so much different mood. I assume that trickiness makes lighting as either burden or interesting work.  I reckon it will need more lights when our paper maquette is on the table, I will be happy to work on lighting again.