I started on the project by doing some lookdev work on different assets: vegetation and music instruments. I was in charge of lighting most of the shots in the jungle path sequence.

Mathematic was still a small studio, making a 5 minutes in full CG in less than 4 months was challenging.
The set dressing has been made in a way to make the jungle dense. The biggest difficulty we had was making the light go through all that vegetation.

The director wanted a progression from dawn to dusk. The jungle path was early in the video and was around the sunrise time.
The global light rig was a simple dome light and a directionnal light. I didn’t want to add any other lights, worried that I would lose that natural light. It required a lot of manual work. To lit my scene, I decided to view the shot through my light and select all the bounding box visible. By removing those geometries, I was able to get some light where I wanted. I could also keep some to get that dapple look.

Looking back now, I would do things differently. But at that time, with Maya 2014 I didn’t see any other solution.