The Dreamy lighting of the desert

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Pillow Shots

When watching films I have always been obsessed with cut-aways.
B-roll, pillow-shots, establishing shots without much to establish.

I experience them as a break. A section on the film’s timeline dedicated to taking it all in and catching a breath from the story. And I love them!

A thought from the book Beauty by Roger Scruton stuck with me.

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Scruton argues that the importance of beauty and its transcendental nature can be found in anything that’s real.
For example, nature can be appreciated as beauty pure by itself.

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The organic shapes and colours of nature carry enough wonder to be considered beauty by itself.

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How I made this render

First things first, we need a high-definition desert.

I’ve been using Waleed Nabeel’s Desert models. For the purpose of small scale 3D-renders they provide enough detail to look believable.

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The asset above is the one I’ve used for the renders below:

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Positioning the camera was a matter of storytelling. In Operation: Deli Platter UN-soldiers have landed in the desert.

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The story is mainly shot on a 50mm lens.
Deciding what lenses you will be using is an effective time-saver that connects the narrative visually.

Having dynamic lines in the frames, especially diagonals, is also a key part of Deli Platter’s visual language. For that reason, the camera is placed to follow the curve of the dunes.

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Let’s talk lighting!

I knew I wanted something dreamy.
And I knew I should listen to Roger Scruton.

For that reason I broke down the lighting into having two objectives.

• The Keylight should be there to emphasise the curves of the dunes
• The fill light should be there to feel surreal and emphasise depth

Simple enough right?

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The Keylight

The left side of the dune felt more appealing to me at first. I’m sure the lighting could’ve looked good from the right as well, but the shape-language reads left-to-right to me :)

To not break the night-time illusion I opted for a soft light-source.
This could be a military spotlight or any other source of artificial lighting.

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The Fill

Now onto the surreal. The effect was quite easily achieved with a variety of Area lights pointing down.

The idea was having pockets of ethereal light illuminating the distance.

This was easily achieved with a Cloner and a Random Effector.
As long as your lights are high up in the sky, they will cast volumetric light-streaks. With a bit of Scale, Rotation and Position randomisation you can achieve a pretty beautiful effect.

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Finally, I used a Global Volume in Chaos Corona with a soft density by setting the Distance to 500cm. And that’s it!

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Once this set-up is completed it can be used for any shot in that scene.
This next shot for example used the dark side of the dunes to create a backlit effect. There is a little bit of spill from the lights that provides the detail in the darks.

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The stars were made with our Organic Starfields pack that includes 32-bit (high-dynamic range) star maps extracted from real NASA stars.

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