Arnold's Fantasy Land from Pixey

 

Here's the foggy land scene from 'Pixey'. Watch it here.

There are some very simple geometry that made up the scene and a pretty complicated model such as the statue at the back. The background is a normal plane with a sky texture plugged into the incandescence. I will talk more about the statue someday. 

Callison describes to me that this environment resemblance the mind of Arnold. The green plants are shaped like Arnold's hair.

The lighting setup. I used only 2 lights for it. The right one(directional light) is the key light or my main light. It is casting ray traced shadow. The second light on the left(area light) is casting the rim light. Shadows set to ray traced. It is meant to add more form and also to separate objects from the background. 

 This is rendered with mental ray with no GL or final gather. The final shot is being composited in After Effects. In this case, not much of compositing is happening. The original lighting in Maya does most of the work in setting up the mood.

There's one really cool technique that can make your rendering looks better. It's not about the lighting but with the materials instead. I will share it someday too.

Here's Pixey facebook page

The Pixey fund raise