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i'm having trouble with raytraced shadows of a sudden.
i put the bulb inside a bottle. made the bottle material translucent.
can light through translucence cast a shadow?
the rotation of the bulb light shouldn't matter, wouldn't think
or mebbe a 2nd bulb set to ignore the bottle. no that's silly. 1st bulb should ignore the bottle.
i'm so tired, don't know if i'll remember these experiments.
Yes, the light should come through the translucent material. The amount of translucency will effect the amount of light, and if you are using a shadow buffer for shadows instead of raytraced soft shadows, that could be an issue.
This image of the Cygnus from the movie, The Black Hole, uses Anything Glows lights attached to long objects inside the structure of the ship to illuminate it from within. The "glowing" part of the superstructure is translucent- in fact, all the self illumination on the ship is because of those inside lights. I only used shaders with glow channels for the little running lights. I didn't use soft shadows in the rendered image, but I did experiment with them, and they worked fine. I didn't use them because of the render time.
thanks
was thinking, if terrain editor can make those mountains where gandalf is battling a balrog
playing with putting a gray scale image on terrain editor tee hee
last one is the original image inverted.
time to try out 300ft scene with ... Skullcove or the London set :D
there's no way to know how many feet the preset scenes are?
and gonna try maya doll.
found the Antonia 1.2 in rdna freebs
Open the scene and set the grid in top-down view is the only way to know how big it is, I think.
My Hemlock Folly set is 200ft x 220ft, but I can't say for anything else. The current set I'm working on is "just" 100 x 100. Somewhere in my WIPs folder I have a 500ft x 500ft set, but that's a real behemoth!
"The current set I'm working on is "just" 100 x 100." Does this mean you will be offering another Carrara set? Love the tower.
Um, I couldn't possibly say ;)
Here's a room scene I'm having a little rendering problem with -- somewhat similar to MistyMist's initial issue at the top of this thread. I've tried several techniques to light it, but none looks totally convincing, and they all suffer from render artefacts to some extent (look at the floor and the walls particularly)
My light prop has a "bulb" cylinder set to glow (about 2500%), inside a translucent cover - standard fluorescent strip lighting in other words. First off, the brightness of the light is way out of proportion to the amount of light it provides to the scene. There's no shine on the walls etc, and the artefacts look horrid.( A single "real" point light in the middle of the room produces much nicer light.) I've tried putting shape lights under the light props, anything glows objects with no alpha etc. They just seem to increase render times or shuffle the artefacts. It's driving me a bit bonkers, in fact . . . (and yes, I've rewatched PhilW's tutorial several times)
Oh and I'm really struggling to get a shader that looks like stainless steel, rather than "grey painted metal" too . . .
If you're using the Glow channel to provide light, then you're using Indirect Light. Are you also using gamma correction? I'm not a huge fan of it myself, but it seems to help with glare like you're getting from the bulbs.
I'm going to also guess that you may be using caustics, which could also cause that huge glare from the lights, and those artifacts. Reduce the intensity or maybe filter size to see if that helps. Maybe try turning it off to see if the artifacts go away.
With the different lighting you've tried, have the render settings remained the same?
If I may offer a suggestion, if you try an AG light on a tubular object for a bulb, make it very simple. I've had good luck in the past with an octagonal cylinder, with each face of the octagon a single polygon down the length of the tube. I've found this reduces the artifacts from having a ton of facets and also speeds up the render time as there are less calculations. If the octagon doesn't provide enough facets, increase them to ten or or twelve faces. Add a shader with a glow channel to make it look as if it is glowing, but lower the intensity if using Indirect Light.
The shader for the steel may look better when there is less diffuse light, but I think the issue is the reflectivity and the Highlight/Shininess.
Gamma is on and set to 2.2. I'm not deliberately using caustics - at least I've done nothing specificlly to enable them. The lampshade shader is a modified version of bump glass (although with just simple noise in the bump channel, and reduced transparency). The render settings have stayed the same, although render times vary wildly between different lighting types (from 1 hour with a glowing cube over the whole lampshade to 2.5 hours with real lights inside the lampshade).
Take that back about the caustics - they were enabled.
lightbulb light doesnt usually obliterate the light fixture in r/l hmmm
For any kind of metal I usually set all the channels to none and start building it from the Reflection channel. Some sort of colored reflection plus a bump is all you need for metals.
Maybe play with the Anistropic lighting model too, although I don't know much about how that works. For stainless, use a very light grey color in the reflection, with some blurry reflections enabled if you can afford to take the render time hit. If you are going for the type of stainless with the fine lines going in one direction instead of a polished version, take a good picture of what you want (I've gone into home improvement/DIY stores and just taken pictures of wood and tile before and they're pretty cool about it, especially if you tell them you are thinking about redecorating ;) ), up the contrast a bit and pop it in the bump channel.
One thing to be careful of with metal is the Highlight and Shininess channels - if your Shininess is too low/broad and your Highlight too low/weak it can make your metal look like a painted surface - this may be what is happening to you.
Here's a quick image - all the channels are set to none, except Reflection which is set to reflection, with a light grey in the color:
The render settings are low quality and I didn't smooth or properly UV map this quickly blocked out vertex shelf which is why is looks so noisy in spots I think.
noisy spots add to the grunge look
playing with the ocean plane. scaled the 'z' kinda looks like ice for a fortress of solitude.
tried converting an infinite plane and an ocean privitive to vertex obj. it converts into tris,don't see how to make it do quads. mebbe some kind of decimator?
Thanks Mark -- I think you hit the nail on the head: I was trying to do stuff in the highlight & shininess channels rather than reflection, and as you say it looks more like paint than metal. It'll be a couple of days before I can get back to it, but I'll give your suggestions a try (and anyone who sees a fat beardy bloke wandering around B&Q with a camera... don't be alarmed!)
Great advice, but I would also point out, that for some metals you don't need reflections. You just need to come up with a good Highlight/Shininess ratio.
These two pictures achieve a metal look without reflections. For the jousting image, I am referring to the knight in the gray armor
- Go into the Vertex Modeler
- Select All vertices
- Go to: Model > Untriangulate (as seen in screenshot)
That can add a lot to the render time - in my opinion, unnecessarily.
I know that, using Global Illumination with Full Indirect Lighting (as per Realism Rendering course and other studies) may help us to use more real-life philosophies when setting up lighting in our scenes, but this can truly add a huge cost of render time or possibly not being able to complete the render at all. For this, I am glad that I've adopted a faster, more cheating style for setting up lighting for my animation scenes.
Basically it goes like this:
Use the right lights wherever I may need them in order to get the illumination I need
Adjust shaders and other lights to make 'illuminating' props look right
Using that method, I try to keep most of my render times as tiny as possible - since I often have many hundreds of frames to render. So for an example of this, let's examine a simple light fixture on the ceiling. I want the light to emit from the fixture not only downward, but all the way straight out the sides as well. So for this situation I'll use a spot light set to 90 degrees half angle with a slight (10-15, maybe up to 33) half-angle falloff. Since light from this spot light will never reach the ceiling, I'm not afraid to keep it safely below the shade of the fixture - knowing that I still need a second light. Since that spot light is now in the right position, I simply duplicate it and rotate the new duplicate 180 degrees to face it upwards, directly at the fixture. Leave it at 90 degrees with the same falloff, but lower the brightness quite a lot. Now I test the scene.
According to the test, I'll often select both lights and adjust the range to get the fixture's illumination just right. Sometimes I'll need to change the upward light's range a little lower than the main spot, but I start by adjusting them both together.
Also according to the test, I now taker the time to work out my shaders for the fixture. Does it include a separate bulb object as well as a shade? If so, is it really that important for my audience to 'see' the illuminating bulb within the shade? Quite often the answer is "yes", so I make the bulb glow and the shade transparent, etc., Translucency in Carrara shaders is for allowing light to pass through an otherwise opaque material and will add a lot of time (quite often when cheating - unnecessary) to the render. Since I'm 'faking' the upward illumination with a spot light, I don't feel compelled to make sure that my materials are "real world" accurate - I just need them to look right for what's going on. So I might add a very mild glow or whatever it takes to make everything look just right.
Anyways, if the real-world lighting is what you're after, make sure that "Light through Transparency" is checked in both places in the render room: Both on top amidst the upper radio buttom selections, as well as down under the Sunlight options.
In this example, the main spot light is tight against the ceiling, set to not affect the fixture. I am also using Ambient Occlusion for a subtle IL:
Very true. Also, there's nothing wrong with triangulated meshes in Carrara. It's primitives are triangulated by default. Many other 3D apps prefer triangulation for lighting needs as well. Carrara has no such limitation that I am aware of.
does ocean plane haz a trick to make a ship wake?
mebbe a particle fountain, or a localized wind effect
squirrels on water skis :D :D
luv ambient lit. was afraid it would wash out shadows, but tested, added spot light, shadows okay!
unTriangulate seemed to work okay. Thanks!
ooo, reverse polygon normals, was hoping for something like that.
decimate isn't doing what i presumed it would do.
is there a quick way to merge it to one facet?
confundled, ocean - vertex - decimate
this doesn't seem to work.
set selection mode to vert.
i selected the verts at the 4 corners.
invert selection.
delete, expecting to see all the selected verts to delete,
but it deleted the whole mesh.
clicking scissors from the preview window menu doesn't do anything.
it seems like i can only zap one vert at a time?
There's no way to delete all the selected verts (selected by invert selection) at once?
thanks.
hmm, right-click brings up a menu with delete on it.
doesn't delete the verts, it activates the zap/delete tool.
Use backspace rather than delete. Ctrl-A to select all the vertices, then hit backspace. You'll be left with just a ring of vertices around the edge. I've never found a way to deal with those other than one at a time.
You can do that with edges too -- say you have too many rings around a cylinder: just loop those edges, backspace, and they're gone.
backspace?!!
thanks :)
slow start this morning, thinking up a bunch of tests to try,
need a master list of what store content works and doesnt work in rara, with comments regarding partially works
can somehow make camera show closer to the mesh before it sinks into mesh?
converting infinite plane to vertex, wont let me chhange fidelity setting
cant figure out what model, decimator supposed to do, doesnt seem useful
how to setup erc control in .car file?
exoerimenting with converting poser figure to .car skinning
really wish could use edit, duplicate on a figure
Fenric has a plugin to duplicate rigged figures. You could try a search of the store here, or his personal store. I think it is called the Fox Den or something.
Perhaps adjusting the near plane in the camera settings to something lower will get rid of the clipping? I wouldn't use that as a render camera though.
Another way to avoid clipping could be to use a zoom or telephoto camera.
I'm not really sure why you would want to convert an infinite plane to a vertex object. I imagine it is a plane primitive that Carrara tiles in the scene and is not truly infinite- sort of a CG optical illusion. I would be thankful that an un-adjustable mesh was the only issue you encountered when converting it, and not a crash or some other wonkiness.
Not sure what you mean by, "model," but using the decimator in the vertex modeler reduces the number of polys in the mesh. Depending on the mesh, it can work well, or it can be like using a chainsaw to carve a turkey, and leave the mesh in a mess. If you have already set up shading domains, they will collapse (as would be the case for adding or removing polys any other way) and need to be redone.