Lighting
In my previous works, I usually used only one or at most two light sources for lighting. However, in this project, I used multiple light sources for almost every shot to make the characters appear more three-dimensional on screen. Because the entire work has four acts, each representing a different meaning, this required a higher level of attention to lighting. The use of light is a very profound subject, and I only used the lighting techniques within the limits of my abilities for my work.
I felt that light provided most of the color, so I decided to work on light and color grading together. First, I used different color schemes for each scene. This gave me an overall intuitive feel for the scene. I defined the first scene as melancholic yet rational, so I set blue as its main tone. The second scene is the Imaginary, and based on Lacan’s theory, I set purple as the main tone because it’s my favorite color. The third scene is the Symbolic, representing institutions, language, symbols, and also what Freud called the Superego—oppression, a direction to strive for, a ladder to climb. So I used red. And for the final scene, I used the sun’s own color, yellow or gold, which represents my beautiful aspiration for the Real.
Fog
When I was thinking about what elements to include in my work, my first thought was fog. I was heavily influenced by The Mist and Silent Hill, and fog can represent confusion and disorientation. This perfectly fits the theme of the story. However, many problems arose during the production process.
- The first type of fog I created was made using a material ball, which is a moving material ball. So it only has surface material, and there is no fog inside. However, my character can pass through the fog, so this method is not feasible.
2. The second type of fog is what I found online. It can change its size, shape, wind speed, and brightness, and it can interact with light, but it cannot interact with my character.
3. The third fog I created was quite complete. Although it was also made using material spheres, it had its own volume, interacted with the character, and its size and wind speed could be adjusted. However, the entire fog appeared pixelated when zoomed in, so I had to abandon this approach.
4. After that, I searched for various tutorials online and finally created a fourth type of fog. This fog was made using Niagara, and it perfectly solved all the shortcomings of the previous fogs. It can interact with the character, and can be zoomed in and out. It can not only change the fog’s range but also its density. This will also be the fog used in the final animation.
Rain
There’s no particular reason I added rain to my work; I simply like rainy days, and they lend a melancholic mood to the overall atmosphere. Initially, I used Ultra Dynamic Weather in Feb, which has very powerful effects, so I used it frequently. However, I encountered a problem midway through animation production: these raindrops don’t interact with ABC format animations, resulting in no effect of rain splashing on the characters. So I had to find another solution.
Ultimately, I chose to use Houdini to simulate raindrops. My understanding of Houdini has always been somewhat limited, as mastering it is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. However, this time I wanted to try using Houdini. I did encounter some problems. After completing the simulation in Houdini, I needed to import the simulated particles into Unreal Engine. The method for importing was using the Niagara Houdini plugin for Unreal Engine, but it crashed every time I imported it into Unreal Engine, which was incredibly frustrating. My compromise was to convert the raindrops into ABC format animation files before importing them into Unreal Engine. However, this created another problem: the imported animations didn’t render with motion blur in Unreal Engine. I tried importing the V values from Houdini into Unreal Engine, but that failed. So, I changed my approach; I adjusted the shape of the raindrops, turning them into lines, which prevented any awkwardness in the Unreal Engine rendering.