Lighting |
A Vangogh painting is not a completely flat entity. The oil paint is typically applied thickly allowing the brush bristles to create noticeable grooves in the raised surface of the paint. Also the canvas, depending on it's weave, will effect the topology of the painted surface. Click to View Shader Code Related to Lighting It has been important for me to light my scenes in a way which will show the above qualities in my final renderings. My Vangogh shader - with it's glossy specular highlights, transluscency and bump mapping - has been mainly responsible for creating this effect. Also since the shader allows for self-illumination of the objects I had to be careful not to overlight the scene. I had three lights turned on at any one time - two fill lights and a sun/moon. These were all point lights so that they illuminated in all directions. The sun/moon light backlit the entire environment which enabled the transluscency element of my shader to work effectively. One notable thing about Vangogh paintings is that it is often impossible to tell where the main light sources are - since he tended to uniformly light his paintings. This actually made my job easier. My final rendered images did appear to have a similar look to Vangogh's work. However it was necessary to enhance the bumps and grooves of the imitation oil paint in post production - which was done by multiplying the colour image by it's greyscale equivalent (thus increasing the light and dark areas). Finally I had to colour correct the images in post to make the colours slightly more subtle and faded. |