CGSociety

The Bojangles Bar after closing time.

This is a render of the bar area of the Cosmo Theatre, the setting for the Thaumaturgy Studios website. The character leaning against the bar is Benny, the bartender. One of the many animated mannequins of the universe.

All modelling was done in Maya and rendered in Mental Ray. Benny's hair was created via Maya Paint Effects. The scene was rendered in colour and converted to black and white in post to give it the feeling of an old film (which matches the decor).

For lighting, I used entirely practical lights in-scene, placed in the theatre during its design phase. I then tweaked the brightness of the lights to convey the mood using the technique I wrote about in the second section of this blog post here: http://galaxycityradio.com/2011/11/23/pass-contribution-maps/

In short, I rendered out a separate render pass for each group of lights and then added them together in varying amounts in post to get the mood I wanted. Compositing was done in Autodesk Composite.