This is the first time jumping into Octane to do a full out concept, but I was impressed with the results and it's super convenient considering it's an addon for Blender. The main focus for this project was to understand the render engine of Octane and I was heavily inspired by Destiny and by Rutger van de Steeg's work and wanted to make something of his similar style.
The scene setup was pretty simple in which I had two different walls to block light and the rectangles of light were simply just grids with an emissive texture applied to them. I found from various sources that most users doing lighting in Octane with this workflow for their lighting, rather then using lights that are prebuilt, such as area and spot lights. I also had a big box that covered the entire scene that scattered a specular texture to immitate fog. This worked pretty well and saved time, rather then painting it in Photoshop, it also looked more natural with the lighting to have the fog as an actual material.
As for my colors and material selection, I wanted to make the color scheme have a sci-fi feel, so I thought blue, teal, and yellow tones fit this really well. I also had in mind for each shot that I wanted the environment to feel rustic and abandoned. To accomplish this I took a color ramp and plugged that into the roughness attribute in the material node for my floors and then added a noise texture to the color ramp. This gave the floor a wet and rough look and by doing this it allowed me to mess with the color ramp and strength of the noise to add variation and make the floor look wet in some spots and less wet in others. The wall material was a simple dirty brick material that I found off of Textures.com and I plugged in the maps and again added noise to the roughness to make the bricks look more dirty.
I did this same process for each shot and made sure for each shot that my character was smaller then normal to give the illusion that the walls and lights of where the character was walking to were extra large in scale. This technique worked super well of adding character and a general atmosphere to each shot. Once my materials, lighting, and camera shots were all set up, I messed with Octanes post-process settings. I liked how simple it was in which you could adjust the glare and bloom of the camera to make the shots look even more dramatic. This worked super well with my fog texture I initially made by making the light look as if it's bouncing through the fog. I then changed some render settings around such as the sampling of my specular, diffuse, and glossy passes and rendered out the shots!
Octane also rendered out all of my render passes, but I'm still learning the correct way of going about painting them inside of Photoshop, but after a few more projects I should have it down to a tee. I also grabbed the character model off of Turbosquid.
Hope everyone enjoys and I plan on doing more lighting and rendering in Octane in the future!
