The first task I undertook was finding a decent bump shader for the dinosaurs. I tried using a noise function but the results where really bad because the noise function I used mapped to a 2d surface which was more concentrated in areas with a lot of faces. I ended up using a cloud noise function with a 3d mapping instead as 3d mappings don’t necessarily care about concentrated vertices or faces.
This yielded a pretty decent result. However, I should have done this after placing my camera because you can’t really notice the bump map when you are far away from the geometry.
Next I experimented with ambient color and realized that I was playing God… so I stopped and changed all ambient colors back to really dark colors and turned the reflection down to avoid results like this:
After getting my materials close the the final color and surface settings I started working on lighting. I wanted to do a night scene with moonlight coming in through the side windows using spotlights like such:
As you can see this created some really long shadows and not a very nice composition:
Then I decided to try the spotlights from directly above and that provided an all around better visibility of the geometry and a more interesting composition:
However, the shadows were proving to be a difficult problem with the spotlights so, in favor of realism, I decided to try a directional light to represent the moonlight which did alleviate the shadow problems. I also added some dramatic lighting for an opened door in the foreground:
The moonlight on the museum floor was still too distracting so I tried shifting the directional light angle to lay it anywhere else. However, every permutation I came up with was just too much high frequency detail going on and not enough framing of the geometry. So I ended up loosing the directional light in favor of some spotlights that were actually positioned directly underneath the roof to avoid the shadows of the overhead windows. In the end, my raw final render (without post work) looked like this:
I then rendered an ambient occlusion pass to add some more local shadow detail:
Finally, I rendered a zDepth pass to try and fake a depth of field effect in photoshop:
The final, after some level adjustments, looks like this:
