Giona Andreani wanted to create a scene with a sense of mystery, and chose Sol LeWitt’s Double Negative Pyramid as the ideal subject.
Read more to see how he put together this haunting image…
This image is a personal project, in particular is the result of a testing Corona Render and iToo’s Forest pack plugin.
I wanted to see how Corona can handle volumetric lighting effects, so I started to look for atmospheric references on the web. Finally, I found a great art installation by Sol LeWitt at Europos Parkas, Lithuania.
I tried to show the installation as a mystical object, something similar to the Monolith of “2001: A space Odyssey” by Kubrick. Volumetric fog is a perfect way to communicate this sensation of the mysterious and unknown.
It was quite simple to achieve this look with Corona – I setup an HDRI light with a low sun, and then with the precious help of the interactive rendering I tweaked the settings of the Global Volumetric Material.
I wanted a pronounced forward scattering, so I set the directionality to 0.8.
The Corona interactive rendering was a great help in all the production phases. The ability to see in real time all the effects helped me to save time during material creation, lighting and for the final composition. It was like being a photographer walking around the project in search for the perfect composition and time of day!
For the environment, I used the Forest Pack Pro plugin. As you can see in the screenshot of the viewport, I placed different layers from Forest pack to create a more natural and complex landscape.
The post-production of this image is quite simple. I preferred to paint the foreground fog in Photoshop because the scene was already too hard to clean the noise for the renderer with just the volumetric rays of light. In the animated image below, you can see the stages of post-production: Painted fog, color balance, some fireflies in the foreground, final grading.
While the process of the scene setup was super easy, I found some difficulties to achieve a clean result in the volumetric fog maintaining acceptable render time on a single workstation. With the new version of Corona implementing denoise and adaptive sampling, this problem is gone.
I really appreciate the Corona workflow in my projects because of the simplicity of use and the accurate and realistic materials rendition. Great work Corona Team!
Giona Andreani
https://gionacg.wordpress.com/