A Time Apart: Scene 1 Progress 3 - Animation, Lighting and Rendering + The Daily Glitch

Today I have been working more on the very first part of my scene, I have made the characters rock with the train and I was shown a better way of making them rock by parent constraining their world control to the train's animated group which really helped me get that subtlety I needed. Also I was shown today how to light my scenes, lighting is another weakness of mine but like animation I'm determined to do it and do it well. Here is the render which took 5:33, it's made me feel closer to my goal and put a bit of a spring in my step.

Today I began UV mapping the train carriage which I will continue this evening and I also began a new matte painting - the one from before I won't be using because, being realistic - it wasn't great and I'm ditching the watercolour and going for a more realistic look than originally intended. I'm trying out a different method of painting digitally. 

Here are some quick notes about lighting I've gathered today, you have 3 main lights, the key light - where the light source looks like it's coming from - i.e. a sun beam. You have the fill light which is more of a general, mid tone light to make everything visible. You have the rim light which is placed behind the focus of the shot to make it more 3D and pop out the background - it adds that extra layer of depth detail. You also get kicker lights which is extra lighting that gives it, well, that extra kick. 

In arnold there's a white circle button (next to the selected camera) that allows you to see only what that light is effecting and together the different layers add up. You also have to test the lighting out with the textures to see how it responds/react to them, i.e. specular or transparency or SSS on skin. Most importantly there's a handy thing in Maya called light linking which lets you turn on and off lights for certain objects - in my scene for example there's the fill light which is turned off the train carriage so the light can fill inside the carriage where the directional light misses.

Finally, here's the bit y'all been waiting for - the daily glitch!

... That's his neck coming out his eye socket by the way...