Citizen "Power Of Light"
I was hired by "Mad Ruffian" as the lead CG watch artist for this project to create the final CG watch reveal. From mesh cleanup to sophisticated lighting and material setups, it was my job to find ways around challenging situations and make it look appealing in the end, all of which I'd like to share right here.
For more details about the project, check out the project page on the Mad Ruffian website:
https://www.madruffian.com/selectedwork#/citizen/
A closer look at the watches...
Technical Breakdowns
To keep all the values accurate, I designed a small XPresso rig for the second hand.
In the first shot for each watch we ran into a problem where with so many super reflective surfaces and lights placed around the scene to make the reflections look visually pleasing, it created... let's call it "light pollution". The shadow visibility were not only inconsistent between surfaces but also almost invisible on some.
To come around this problem I prosed the idea to create a shadow matte, so that we could composite the shadows in post and create a consistent light reveal for this shot which was a requirement. So we went with that and it worked out great.
For the female watch we ran into a problem where the diamonds looked almost black (preview on the right) before the light hit them and even when it did they looked more like glass cutouts instead of shiny diamonds. And regardless of the materials used in the real watch, we have to make it look expensive.
To enhance the shine factor we decided to put tiny lights under the diamonds as well as mess with the material properties past the "realistic" values to get light to scatter around in a beautiful way and create the shiny look
