After the successful results of the Hitch-Hiker render, I wanted to play around more with lights.
For the most part, up until then my concern with lighting was getting the overall scene lights right. I’d used the point-lights when I rendered the Tumbler from the Batman movies as well, but I wanted to see what else I could do.
So back to Vue, but this time with an entirely Vue-based setup for a castle at night style scene.
Dark Harbor
This one was actually harder than it looked. Trying to get the point lights to come across as distant fires and beacons, and give the impression of torch-lit battlements, meant a lot of placing the lights in the right place then playing with the color and intensity.
As I went through the lights though, they started giving me ideas for ways to expand on the scene. It wasn’t originally conceived as being a “harbor”, but the test renders felt too “empty” and I drifted towards adding more into the image at the shoreline.
A quick visit to more Vue buildings gave me the building at the bottom right edge of the shoreline, and some lights in its courtyard brought that up.
Lastly, I added the quayside stretching back from the dock building to the center of the image, and put a beacon light on the end.
So what started as an experiment evolved, the lighting helped to flesh it out and gave it a ton more realism than I expected. This one is going to end up as one of my “Prints For Sale” when I finally figure out how to set that up on here.
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