Lighting!
After having the recent experience of doing lighting on our short film Sunny, I decided to take my lighting skills further and take another lighting class this spring semester in 2025. I really enjoy learning how to composite shots in Nuke and furthering my skills with lighting shots in Maya.
Car Project
To make this project work, I had to record actual footage outside and take my video at the parking lot of the UTD campus. I had to then use Nuke Studios to turn my video into a usable backplate for the car. The car model was not made by me, but I used the Arnold standard surface material presets to surface it. I set up my lights and rendered several passes of the car to send to nuke. I had a shadow, chrome, beauty, foreground, and background glass, and crypto for both window passes. It was composited in Nuke for color grading and making any final changes.
This was the first project I did this semester. None of the models are made by me and I lit the scene in Maya. The sand shader was made with a preset in Substance Painter while the water shader was made in Substance Painter by me. I had to render several passes to import to Nuke. I had water, land, lighthouse and house, and lighthouse light passes. The final render was composited in Nuke. The backplate was
Lighthouse Project
My node graph in Nuke, and close ups of the different parts of it. The images of Top to bottom, from left to right are the order of it in the full graph.
Lighthouse final render.