Shave Rim Lighting

[cookepuss]

That's kinda what I gathered from that thread too. AFAIK, it doesn't handle that type of effect... out of the box. That wouldn't necessarily prevent somebody from fixing it in post. No effect is 100% perfect out of the box. There will always be something that your software or plugin can't do. Post production is just part of the job.

[tjnyc]

This is how you can get rim lighting with Shave but you need Solid Spline Pro(Paul Everett's plugin). Convert the hair from Shave to Splines, and then use Solid Spline Pro to make the splines renderable. Create a separate rim lighting pass from the highlights you will get with the renderable spline. Post the affects together in your compositing app. What you get from Shave will be your standard beauty pass, key light pass, fill light pass and your rim highlights pass with Solid splines.

That is what I am planning on doing. I'll give it a go and let everyone know how it went.

regards,

[IanMJ]

Is that it or am I missing something?

[AdamT]

That's it--how'd you do that?!

[cookepuss]

Something tells me that this was all an elaborate setup for him to show us how he did it. :thumbsup:

[tjnyc]

Nice! Yes, how did you do that?

[IanMJ]

Nope,

I just didn't want to sound stupid if I was missing the point of the previous thread. :hmm:

There's a torus with a backlight and another light above and infront of the object.

The setting s took a bit of tweaking but I'll pull them together.

Give me a few mins as I'm still at work (nearly hometime :) ). I've tweaked quite a few settings and I don't want to tell you things that make no diff. I can put up the c4d file if that helps.

[IanMJ]

I'm still figuring out exactly what affects rim lighting the most so forgive me if some of this sounds daft and makes no difference:

. Don't use colours that are too pure/saturated (Shave seems to add white to the colour to create the highlight)
. Decrease Hair count (too thick and light won't get through)
. Increase hair depth (creates tip transparency and allows transparency in shadow maps)
. I kept diffusion quite low (makes non lit areas slightly brighter) but you can increase the effect of rim lighting by increasing diffusion (darkens areas that receive no light).
. Increase the brightness of your backlight (mine is about 450%)
. Gloss and specular seemed to make the most difference to the rim lighting. Too high a specular value and the front picked up too much highlight. Too high a gloss value and the specular highlights were too intense and short.


These are more general pointers:
. Reduce root and tip frizz and kink. If the hair is too frizzy/kinky the rim effect is diminished (looks too thin).
. I splayed the tips of the hair (strand) to spread the tips out more).
. There's a bit of random scaling to allow the tips to separate more.
. The root thickness is greater than the tip thickness (which is zero).



Also:

Reduce the number of segments from 50. Unless you're doing really long kinky/frizzy hair the setting doesn't need to be that high (improves rendering time a whole lot).

Reduce tiles to 1 if you have enough memory. This also speeds up rendering a fair amount.

[cookepuss]

Okay, I'm just getting into Shave2 how. Forgive me for reviving this dead thread. :)

People say that Shave2 doesn't support rim lighting (aka backlit halo effects). Why is that? The manual says that it does. On my first try, it didn't support this effect. HOWEVER, it seems that I had neglected to put the "light tag" onto the light(s) affecting the hair. After I did this, that rim effect showed up just fine and dandy.

Maybe I'm totally off base, but I duped IanMJ's rim lighting test with very little effort.

[IanMJ]

Howdy Cookepuss,

I'm trying to get the time to put some thoughts together on this, as getting a useful configuration can be a bit of a twiddle.

I had a quick discussion with MV re this and he made a good point (I hope its ok to quote you MV):

"The major issue for me is the fact that you can't get specular
highlights from a rear light, as specular highlights in Shave do not
respect the standard rule of angle of incidence."

This is something I want to spend a bit of time working with when time permits.

Let me know how you get on.

:)
Ian

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.