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Help to achieve a sunny desert look for animation (non r3d file)

Andrey B

Andrey B

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Hello Redusers!Help me please to achieve a sunny desert look for my animation.I just spend about 3 hours to create the look but still nothing.Can you help please or give me advise?
IMG_2719.jpg
Canon RAW: https://copy.com/JZPmiIyTEwj9
 
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It depends upon what location is being depicted. I am assume by the horse and cactus plants, you want a Californian or New Mexico inland desert "westerns coybows" look. Is it summer or winter as there are some seasonal changes.

My personal preference would be to use a fine grey soil, ash or cement dust for your desert sand for better "apparent" scaling of the soil texture. However it will be much harder material to work with and blowey.

Any leafy bushes may be a less vibrant green. In deserts with lots of sunlight they do not need a lot of chlorophyll to live. I can't really speak for the US as I am in Australia where we have a lot more red in our soils and rocks. The leaf colour of our saltbush, snakewood and karara scrub is more greyish than green. However, in higher latitude beyond the tropic lines, the green tends to be stronger in leaves.

　
There are often dead skeleton shrubs among the living ones. Our summer skies in our inland up north tend to become almost colourless light grey the closer to the horizon. With climate change, we are seeing more of the harder summer skies down to 32 southern latitude.

I assume for your ground-level shots, you will have a painted backdrop or greenscreen for adding in a plate later. I would pastel the colours of your location rather than make them vibrant. That yellow sand probably has to go. Your animated characters can be bright.

For desert, I would favour using a single strong fresnel lamp set well back from the "location" to cast hard parallel shadows as the "sun" source and normal softer fill lights. Rock outcrop colours tend to be in "families" not randomly coloured like you have in your location.

Desert rainfall when it happens tend to be extreme so you find erosion features like washes and scours in the landscape. As far as I know, the western deserts in the US are not deserts made up of sand blows but more worn down country with rocks and flints in the soil. I would drag strands of wet wool attached to sticks for a handle across your surfaces to make those fine washes directly from high mounds to lower gullies which I would finish with the strands along the direction of the gullies after drawing them into the soil with larger pieces of damp fabric. Where your animation "action" occurs will be disturbed - a lot. So I would not texture the surface where this movement occurs at all. To stabilse the textures outside of your "work" area, you may be able to use hair laguer spray in a mist coat. Otherwise your areas outside of the "work" might be made stable after texturing by using a cement dust crushed rock fines mix which you can set off with moisture, steam, not a water spray which will mark and spoil your light textural work.

To achieve mixed detail textures, I might try the ash/cement dust with larger dark grains of sand or washed crushed rock fines mixed in. You might try iron fillings or chips from machine-shop waste to achieve the texture of small stones or even dark coloured course sand grains, maybe some coffee sugar crystals if you are not worried about them dissolving away.

Iron machining waste is handy because you can pick it up with a magnet if you want to thin it out or sweep the magnet across in strips to create bands of texture in the soil by pulling some of the iron out. The iron waste needs to come from machining of mild steel which tends to come off in chips rather than finer steels which come off as a curl. You will probably have to break it up and randomise the texture by blending it ( in a ruined machine with added water if necessary ) or putting in a dollypot with a few hard stones and hammering it - a lot.

The iron will rust, so for continuity you may need to moisten it to start the rust, then break it up when it sticks together, then treat it with phosphite rust treatment to neutralise it from turning into fine dust, then crush it again. Doing your crushing in the blender in a phospite anti-rust wash may save a bit of time but the mixing container will be permanently ruined by staining and abrasion. The iron will also wear the blender cutters down fairly quickly. The phosphite will also make it a black colour which will be good for contrast in the grey ash.

　
How to create fine textures in leafy shrubs is another matter. You might need to look up the builders of architectural models or scale railway enthusiasts who can do plausible recreations of trees and shrubs in small scale.


Please do not take much notice of my comments. There will be proper craftspeople here who will make more valid comment than I can offer. I am not skilled in this, though I have made miniatures in the past. With modern computer generated images and upcoming 3D printers, miniature landscape modelling by handcraft may become a dying or diminishing artform.
 
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do you wanna find/post some references of the look you're going for?

why is the horse needing a green patch?
 
Hello! Thank you for your answers!!!
First of all I forgot to say that I just wish to get not very realistic look. This is a small animation project in limited enviroment and all we have you can see on the shot. Green patch not needed at all. We just trying to shoot backgrounds separate from the main objects and heroes. Cowboys, horses and other stuff we planned to shoot separately on the green screen with getting the same lighting and angle of view. We have now a lot of the backrounds and we trying to cc it a bit to create a look for our film. I have created one another shot but it has a sky. This was pretty easy to do because the sky visible. This one a much harder to me to create. I will show you what kind of a look I wish to create. This is just short funny animations for the ad and I sware it not photorealistic ;) Just funny sunny desert look. Something like this:
IMG_2628.jpg

Is it looks like a sunny desert? Or shadows must be much stronger?
Thank you for you response Robert! I am very appreciate it!
 
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paulherrin said:
do you wanna find/post some references of the look you're going for?

why is the horse needing a green patch?
Click to expand...

Hello Paul! I used a patch to catch geometry (perspective) from the shot. I have two shots by my link. One of these has a horse with the patch and one without it..
 
Here is my two cents without reading the rest of the thread.

In the top photo it's fairly noticeable that the light source is close to the subject. Since the sun is very far away, the shadow lengths should be consistent. Also light strength should be equal from the upper left to the lower right. This is the trouble with close lights, however you can use a flag to even out the lighting somewhat. To keep shadow length the same, put the light as far away as possible. Also, I believe the shadows should be darker, and a little cooler. Finally, I would take some yellow saturation out of the sand.

On the second photo, in addition to the comments above, the sky looks a little too cyan to me. The blue especially toward the top should have less green. Also, with the sun so low, you might want some orange tinge in the horizon.

Just my two cents.

Hope that helps,
Phil
 
that latest shot of yours looks a lot better, but i would try to reduce the fill light to get stronger/darker shadows. also, you may wanna do something about the sand, detail level is kinda large - you can isolate it and work on it in post or adjust the set to smooth things down. it reads as 'desert', and based on how stylized your character is it definitely 'works'. reminds me of a wile coyote cartoon (:

https://vimeo.com/60618
 
Andrey B said:
Is it looks better now? :)
Click to expand...

it does. (btw, 'does it look better now' ;) just trying to help)

just be careful comping those shadows, the first one is too soft and the third is too sharp, plus it needs to be corrected for the DOF. i would use ramps to control the blur across the groundplane. and make sure those things are solidly matched up or you might as well be shooting it all in one take. the second image is perfect, although you may find you like some atmospheric fog/blur and maybe even heat distortion if you wanna get fancy. also, in the first one, you need more backlighting, big time... you can do a lightwrap/edgeblur or if you're shooting again put a practical light in there and do a luma key or grade it in. good luck (:
 
It is looking better. Now for a small nitpicky detail or two. The cloud background in Frame 2 seems to be lit from the opposite direction as the subjects on ground. There is already mentioned by another reply, sharp shadow detail of the horseman where you have pulled focus to the character on the rock and the very important direction of all shadows which must be driven by a common source or the illusion falls apart. - I am sure you are aware of this as you are doing concept tests.

If you have any evening shots in the story depicting after the sun has gone down to early twilight, maybe try lighting the background sky to a very dark almost invisible grey-blue with a soft transition into a more visible blue-gray, maybe mauve-gray nearer the horizon. The sky can be a backlit look like you have in your searing sundown telephoto in Frame 1 but should not be bright.

Your landscape itself might be lit with a warmer diffuse glow from direction of camera but still with a bias towards cool light, maybe light the hills warmer and stronger as they tend to stick up into the available light in the real world.

Character subjects, if shot in close view like a head and shoulder image would be lit from direction low, almost behind camera with a soft diffused warm, almost orange wash as if the fading horizon glow from sundown behind camera is catching them. This is a cliché romantic desert/tropical look which is artificially constructed.

With real film, I think they achieved this look with tungsten-balanced film of about ASA320, with an 81EF filter and lighting the subject from behind camera with soft tungsten light. Sombody like David Mullen who posts here could tell you in correct detail.

One fun thing about comedy animation is that film-makers seem to satirise cliche looks and play the comedy both with and against them.
 
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I have swapped the background horizontally and it looks much better now! Shades are right on their places and directions:

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Thanks a lot! And I have blurred cowboy's shadow in this shot. Looks more realictic of course!


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I took stones of different types and this was my mistake. The stones of one type look more realistic and much easier for colour correction. Thank you mates!
And I wish to share more shots with you. We have a lot of fun here! :)

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haha, lookin pretty good

will be glad to see your perspective on hollywood-american western and cowboy/indian genres
 
QUOTE: Hannibal Smith from the original "A-Team" - "I love it when a plan comes together."
 
A gem of a post this one.

The Bare & the Hare bts and spot warmed me up big time.

Were at minus 30 Celsius on average up here in Canada :P

Thanks folks great for the great topic and sharing the links :)
 
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