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View Full Version : An Experiment with HDRI lighting: Count Dooku's Lightsaber

combey
09-08-2005, 07:54 PM
Hi,

I’m about to start my 3rd year of a degree in Multimedia Design and Digital Animation at Cumbria Institute of the Arts. I’ve been viewing cgtalk for a while and thought it was time I joined and put some work up.

I’ve been playing around with HDRI lighting on Softimage XSI and have become completely hooked. Over the last week I’ve been building and lighting a simple model (Count Dooku’s lightsaber) and produced a few test renders. I’m pleased with the results but I must admit, the render time was crazy. Firstly, I’d like any opinions of the results as this is my first attempt with environmental lighting. Secondly, I have a few questions…

Looking closely at shiny metal, it tends to have lots of minute scratches and the odd bump or two. I’ve pretty much missed this off my render as I couldn’t get my own attempt to look any good. Does anyone have a good shader or bump map I could use?


Does switching off transparency, reflection, etc. on materials speed rendering up even if they are set to zero?


Depth of field can produce very grainy images at times. Can this be ironed out or do I simply have to render using an insane amount of anti-aliasing?


The environment map works great, but is there any way to switch it on so that it is visible in a viewport? It would be useful to see it’s orientation without having to do a quick render.
Cheers

Steve @:O)




http://www.combey.com/dooku/dooku03.jpg




http://www.combey.com/dooku/dooku01.jpg




http://www.combey.com/dooku/dooku02.jpg
silentsamurai
09-08-2005, 08:50 PM
looks good, the only thing I will say is that the blade needs to be bigger around.
ThreeDeityMike
09-08-2005, 10:23 PM
I love it. Good work man :thumbsup:
3DChobo
09-08-2005, 11:12 PM
so how long have u been modeling? 'cos i really like this render!!
combey
09-08-2005, 11:23 PM
Well, we started with Cinema 4D 6SE in the first year of the course. We then moved onto Softimage in the second year and spend a 10 week term learning that. Our final year project is down to us but I'm going to specialise on an 3-5 minute animation using XSI. It's a brute of a package and quite hard to pick up but it's capable of some stunning stuff.
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09-08-2005, 11:23 PM
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