During yesterday's session with the Mill, Billy suggested getting rid of the extra light because the shadow on the ground doesn't really make any sense with the sunset/dusk sky that we have now. He also suggested that we should have a lot of the lighting in our scene come from the lightning itself. It will be tough be should look great if we can pull it off.
So after this new direction, we wanted to get a test of it done as soon as possible to see how it will work. David gave me some test geometry of the lightning from Houdini and I began setting up the render layers. I have a "beauty" layer for the lightning bolts themselves, a layer of the light emitting onto the car like a key light would, a layer for the reflections in the car, and a layer for the light emitting into the ground. I have two sets of lightning bolts, one set used for the beauty layer of the actual bolts, and another set that emits the proper amount of light. I found that the more I increase the exposure and intensity of the lightning to properly light the ground and car, the bolts were grounding in size and losing detail because they were so bright. So I separated the two purposes so we can have as much control as possible. As for the light emitting onto the ground, I actually used an ambient occlusion shader on the ground with the lightning bolts visibility turned off. I found that it was giving me the same shape and values as when I was lighting it in the masterlayer. So we will use the occlusion as a way to bright light onto the ground instead of a shadow.
Beauty layer of the lightning bolts
Key Light onto the car
Lightning bolt reflections into the car
Occlusion as the light emitting onto the ground
Below is the composite that Abby did to test how these are working so far. There is still tweaking to be done but I think it is working well so far!
The next step for me is to figure out how to do the headlights and the tail lights. I know that we discussed before with Kyle that we might be able to get away with not having them on, but our lighting has changed significantly now and it looks strange to me that the scene is so dark but that are not on. I will find more reference to see how these Tesla lights look when they are and start testing that.
Below are some reference images of the look of the lightning.