Who Likes Light?

So let’s have a hypothetical right now. What should you do if you want to film something at night, but might not be allowed to film at night?

My solution, switch the sun off.

Yes, I know we could change the script if we can’t, but where’s the fun in that. Though I thought I could do it, I wanted to do a test - especially because this up coming project was is a team project so I didn’t want to over promise. Though this was a test for a team project, through other variables the concept was changed - making this test irrelevant - but I had already started it and been wanting to try this for a while. So I finished it.

So with all that being said let’s get into how I did this.

After getting the plate I initially tried a 3d method, with attempting to remake the environment with cards, but found that it wasn’t achieving the result I was after. So I tried something else.

In short, I made a few rotos and made a different grade for each. But if the long version is what interests you, here you go

Because of the sky was so cloudy, I was able to grab a decent key, so I was able to replace the sky with my own sky. One more… dramatic, and yes there are dragons, but before we get to the dragons, let’s talk about the clouds and sky. The sky is just two colour constants, that use a noise node to pick which colour is shown, while the clouds use the same method, with two colours filtered through a noise node for it’s alpha. Then for a bit of atmosphere, I applied a glow node controlled by an expression, to make some lightning.

Now the dragons… aren’t pretty. This was something I added after the test was no longer needed. As the test was just to see if it was possible, and I continued it as a personal project I decided to add some more flare that wasn’t necessary for the test.

So since the dragons were kinda last minuet and all my animator peers were busy as well as all my 3D peers had tasks to do and I didn’t have time to model a dragon and I don’t animate. I decided to get some dragon shapes and using a transform node, I used expressions to animate the images. I know it was not the best option, but it was the only one I could do this time. It does give a fun wee puppet motion to the dragons.

So after making what used to be my animator friends cringe, I moved on to the next step, and that was making the night grade. In all honesty I have no idea how to make this sound professional, soo….

I just made multiple roto masks and used a grade node to make it night.

With it night, it was time to make the light all atmospheric, for this I just made a really low effort lens flare gizmo, where I used a controller noop to control the width and length of the flares.

With that gizmo, I was able to add the light blurring and slight flares on the lampposts.

And with that, I added the final grain and that’s it. All done. My attempt at a day to night was done. It was a fun challenge, though it was only meant to be a test, it ended up being an educational process. What started as a 3D process, became a 2D task using the basics of Nuke and composting.

Is it perfect? No.

I only spotted once I rendered it out that there are parts that looks like the mask slipped, and the artefacts of the gamma shifts kinda scream out to me, but with the time to work on the shot running out and the team project picking up, I have to leave it as it is.