After placing all the objects together in Blender, I exported everything into Marmoset Toolbag 4 for rendering.
Working on Marmoset is fairly straight forward, so it was generally a smooth process. However, due to my PC’s specifications, it started to get slower as I advanced, so I had to resort to viewing the model in wireframe in order to make sure my process was more smooth. This did impede on the speed of my process but it did make it more possible.
I gathered several references for the lighting that I wanted to achieve. I wanted to make sure the lighting was suitable for the themes and environment the character was in. Since my genre was dark fantasy, gothic, and mostly taking place on the sea, I wanted the lighting to be very dark and cool, with lighting that looked as if it was coming from the moon. I also wanted to use the emissives and glows from the lamp and the sword to give it a more interesting and eerie composition and with this in mind, I made a couple of initial renders.
REFERENCES FOR LIGHTING
I added a solid shape within the lantern and gave it an emissive effect as I noticed it looked quite empty without it. After observing these renders and having some feedback, I decided to make the lighting more in theme, and looked into the present backgrounds/skies provided by Marmoset. Along with this, I managed to find a suitable solution to make the lantern look the way I wanted, as the solid block within it was not to my satisfaction. I did not like how it looked, so I used a preset glass material I found within the library, and the results were much more satisfactory.
The process for rendering turned out to be very tedious due to my own computer specs. I found that I had to go back and forth between the wireframe and highest quality version of the viewport as my own system would run very slowly on the highest quality setting. Eventually, I managed to get a lighting setup that I was satisfied with for my project, with many processes of trial and error.
Eventually, I settled for this lighting setup:
As I thought it was the clearest, as well as having the same atmosphere that I wanted to achieve. I also experimented with using fog in the scene, as I like how the lighting from the lantern looked, as well as making it look like he is walking somewhere quite misty or haunting, which was fitting for the scene.