This project is called “Waiting for the sun” and it is the first one I did after the Masterclass. Before start working on it, I took some time to read over the topics of the course. Since it was my first project, I tried to create a simple scene on which I could apply the information learned as I wanted to add it to my portfolio.

With this project I worked a lot on the scene lighting. Since the beginning, the biggest problem I had was to show the chromatic contrast between the exterior night light and the warm light of the interior. I’ve always been fascinated by this contrast but I knew that for me it wouldn’t have been easy to create it as I had never used those tools before. A few months ago I could have never made an image like this one. I’m really happy and proud of the result.

First I looked for references to get the right mood, then I modeled the scene and lighted it. The lighting is a simple one: a HDRI by Peter Guthrie and a set of artificial lights. I did many test in the rendering stage and many of them didn’t look like the mood I wanted. So, for the first time, I used the V-Ray light select pass and there it was! Thanks to it, in post-production I had more control on the artificial lights in terms of exposure.

The final step was the post-production in Photoshop. At the beginning I had some problems because of the adjustments on the scene’s assets. But I found this part very exciting and in the end I got the mood that I had in my mind.