Character Lighting

Hey everybody! It's been a while. I've been out of working on stuff due to complications regarding a major surgery I had to undergo but I'm back in business! I've been in need to focus on refining my skills with character lighting. The image above is an exercise I've been doing with HDR images and setting up my maya files to work with images that have HDR's to produce real world reflections.

The HDR images and back plate that you see within the picture are from moofe (http://www.moofe.com) and the creature within the scene is provided by Digital Tutors from digitaltutors.com.

I made the chrome ball as reference to make sure that the HDR is behaving within the scene. This is just a low res, no-post-production shot of what I've done with tweaking things after a few hours. My ultimate goal with this (as well as other various character projects I've set for myself this semester) is to integrate the creature in the photo to make it look like it's actually part of the scene.

That's it for now but you can be sure to see more postings in the very near future with further updates. Let me know what you think or how it can improve in the comment section below!