3D Moodboards - Eerie Lift Scene

I know I said that I would post up my previous work, but I thought I had to post this up first.

I had to do a moodboard for a panel I did for my storyboarding project. It was a lift scene and it had to be a night, scary and eerie scene. So what I did was I took a few photographs from my handphone camera for the sake of reference. I was going to re-create the entire scene in Maya from scratch, so I needed the details for the model and the textures.

So based on the reference photographs, I began modeling in Maya. The process was pretty simple. I made low poly models and then converted them to high res models. Once the model was done, I set up a camera for my scene and fixed it in place. From the start, I had decided to use mental ray for rendering since there is that reflecive surface of the lift. Thus, I went on to using the dgs material. But I wasn't very familiar with it, thus I stuck with the normal blinn materials. I made the texture maps in Photoshop and mapped them onto the respective objects in Maya.

The real challenge I faced in this mini project was lighting and rendering. I had to give it a scary look at night. Night lighting was a little bit tricky and I had never done it before in a 3D package. For this scene, I used a directional light as my keylight and about 3 point lights for secondary lighting. I used final gathering and global illumination and rendered it.

The images above are my 3D rendered stills. Rendering time was pretty long for each frame - approximately 5 minutes per still. But I was quite happy with the results. However, it still had to look scary and it hadn't achieved that look. I brought the rendered still into After Effects and edited it till I felt happy with the results. Here's the before and after look.

Before



After - Final Image

I added a blurred background in the black space, did some color correction to individual parts of the scene and added foreground ground mist to give a dramatic effect. Finally, for overall correction, I gave a greyish-blue color grade to the entire still. I was done and happy. My friend Jake told me that it's the best work I've done so far. Well, what can I say? I was at the top of the world :D

I'd like to give a big thanks to Jake and Greg for giving me constant motivation to do this short project and for giving me feedback to improve and get it done to this level (=