Those Who Wish Me Dead
Luma Pictures, Melbourne | Lighting
This project was intermixed with others but I primarily spent focused time on it in mid 2020. Intended to be all 'invisible' effects Luma was given a large swath of wildfire spreading scenes which act as a recurring memory across the film, along with a lot of remote national forest establishing shots in which is centered a livable fire watch-out tower, all done in full CG.
More so than most projects I've been on, this was primarily a deep exercise into rendering vastly complex and memory intensive scenes within Arnold. Despite all kinds of optimisations, layering, and culling approaches there were certain shots that simply blew up on the render farm trying to to sort out so much vegetation at an acceptable quality level. It was a fine line balancing renderability with acceptable quality and those shots which were failing on both ended up being rendered with half a card in front of the camera, splitting the image and memory load into two. I've never had to do that, and thanks to Michael Yates (lighting lead) for suggesting it! The spreading wildfire shots were triple the complexity due to all the fx layers, emissive lighting, and aovs, and so it stills feels like a miracle that it all was rendered out.
For actual creative lighting the majority of day shots were functional with a standard sun/sky setup although the watch tower needed custom angle control for catching edges better. The night shots were more fun because with the camera angle so wide a directional moon became difficult to nicely edge light the trees for the whole frame - good on one side but blown out on the other. So the forest had to be divided into different zones based on camera with each getting their own moon lights with slightly different angles - and then subdivided into all those rendering layers in order to get it out : ). Although dealing with all of this vegetation was a challenge for lighting as well as fx and layout, it did prove worthwhile as it made all the forest work on Spider-Man: No Way Home much easier with an established workflow.
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