Temple Front

The Big Orange

 

 

 

 

I call this colour palette mood The Big Orange. We had the idea of just placing a big fire in front of the temple initially but we thought that a big fire doesn't make any sense to get the feel of something big and bright in the centre of the set as Andrew first suggested in the colour palette during the pre-production planning. Anne-Marie suggested the idea of lava flowing and that leads us to the idea of building a structure that is built on top of the lava to illuminate the bright yellow and orange light.

 

 

 

 

This structure was modelled in low-poly in Maya, using only simple shapes of cube and sphere. The main shape is just a cylinder shape with 8 sides. The process is quick and easy. The entire modelling and UV mapping took just 2 hours. I added extra elements like woods and stones around the structure to give it a more messy but natural look. Textures are of the most basic image file downloaded online. I changed the colour and hue saturation in Photoshop in order to have all the materials of the structures to blend in nicely. 

 

 

I use Crazy Bump to extract a normal map to add details to this structure. Did a quick black and white map in Photoshop for the tiles pattern in the crossed bridge of the structure. At the base of the structure is the lava itself. Just a simple plane mapped with a lava picture. We will add a specular map to the shader where the yellow will be brightest and red is secondary. The dark will stay dark. This gives the illusion of lava giving out light when the scene is rendered.

 

 

 

 

I placed some point lights around the structure and we will be placing some fires in After Effects. Two main point lights will be place in the centre of the structure, one that has linear decay and cast shadows, while the other with a less intensity with no shadow. The idea is to brighten the whole area with yellow and red lights to give the effect of 'The Big Orange' in the scene. Depending on whether we are going to animate the character in this scene, we might animate the lave moving slightly to show the flow of the lava underneath.