Moonlight - how?

[svenip]

never done that but you can achieve the ray of lights with an area light and in front of that a geomtrie. also add light to it and play around with the settings. a good thing may also be to add a particle system to the scene that is simulating the little dust that becomes visibile in that kind of light situation.

[wireFrame]

Try adding some volumetric light fog to the color of your light that casts shadows. You can achieve camera effect like glowd and flares to compliment the rendering.

This should be raytraced scene.

[alx]

add some light fog.. but if u want shadows it has to be a spot light... only the spotlights light fog has fog shadows...or if not u can add a texture to the color and then make the light w fog then it looks like its shadowed but w no shadows.. and thena nother light w sahdows only if u want a interesting look...
just an idea..

sincerely

alx

[Stahlberg]

Not sure if you mean the rays themselves, or if you mean the 'look' of moonlight, which is known to be tricky. You need to get a silvery slightly bluish effect. The secret is to change the colors of all your objects, I guess most easily and controllably in their respective shaders. For instance, grass isn't green in moonlight but grayblue, red orange and yellow become different shades of gray, etc... and make sure there's no ambient light in the scene. Shadows should be large and solid black.

[Faeroon]

Thx for all the comments - gonna give them a try after
the work today.

@Stahlberg:

Yep, you are right - not just the rays of light should be blueish,
but the whole scenery should be illuminated by the pale grey
moonlight.
Is it really necessary to change ALL the colors of ALL the shaders? :surprised
Isn't there a way to do this with lights?
Changing all the colors would be :thumbsdow , 'cause I've
had a hard time getting the maya shaders look like I wanted
it :hmm:

Hell... this thing is going to kill me... so much work for this damn moody moonlight... :annoyed:
*gets himself a coffee and hopes that his 21'' screen arrives today*

[Stahlberg]

Well an easier way would be to make the light bluer than you'd normally make it, like say maybe almost full strength blue, then desaturate the whole image in post, way down, until only a faint blue remains. Haven't tried it, but that ought to do it.

[MJV]

As long as you light with the proper color then I don't agree that there should be any need to change any textures or saturation.

[Stahlberg]

In low light the human eye stops seeing color. (Moonlight isn't even blue, that's just a Hollywood convention.)

So you want to create a scene that's almost perfectly monochromatic, maybe with a slight blue tint if you want to use that convention (which can be useful).

But try that in the computer, light a scene with a blueish light, and you'll see it doesn't work the same. No matter how dim you make the light, Santa's 100% red suit will stay 100% saturated until the light goes completely black. And only if you go to almost maximum blue will the scene become monochrome.

[MJV]

>In low light the human eye stops seeing color. (Moonlight isn't even blue, that's just a Hollywood convention.) <

Moonlight is the same color as the sun, which relative to incandescent light or candle light is blue, so it does make sense to portray moonlight as being blue.

>So you want to create a scene that's almost perfectly monochromatic, maybe with a slight blue tint if you want to use that convention (which can be useful). <

Based upon the assumption that the human eye stops seeing color in low light, then I can see why you might want to approach it like this. I'm going to start paying more attention to how I see color in the dark and get back to you. Do hi speed films and light sensitive video cameras also exhibit this behavior? In other words, does killing the saturation also result in more photorealistic images, or does it only approximate human optical perception?

>But try that in the computer, light a scene with a blueish light, and you'll see it doesn't work the same. No matter how dim you make the light, Santa's 100% red suit will stay 100% saturated until the light goes completely black. And only if you go to almost maximum blue will the scene become monochrome.<

Well I did try it in the below image with fair results. I don't see how desaturating the colors would help that much, but I appreciate your view and will give it some more thought and pay more attention from now on how art and technology represents low light color and keep an open mind. Do you have some samples of your process in action?

[Stahlberg]

Ok here's a quick sample, I just took your image - hope you don't mind - and desaturated the moonlit parts, colorized them slightly blue, and darkened them a bit at the lower end of the range. (The rest I added a warm tone for contrast, along the same lines as what you mentioned). Now I just did this in Photoshop, if I was working on a real 3d scene I'd do it a bit different but this is roughly the effect I would be going for.


http://www.androidblues.com/moon.jpg

No I don't think film and video perfectly mimicks the way the human eye sees light, there are both physical differences and psychological. When I have to choose between the two I often try some sort of compromise.

[MJV]

:thumbsup: I see your point now. Especially the trees were bothering me and desaturating them helps greatly. I think I'll try setting up a comp in AE that desaturates by luminance and see how that works. Thanks.

[Faeroon]

*smiles*Seems that i've given ground to a nice discussion here ;)

I'm going to try this too - gonna illuminate the scene with
extremely blue light and after the rendering desatured the
picture with Photoshop...right...hmm... :hmm:

Remember - I'm still a newb with this, so have mery with me :p

[Neil]

Why don't you just do the changes in saturation and color adjustment as an after effect? You'll have a lot more control of it.
If it's a still, use PS, and if it's an animation, use AE.

Similar to what Stahlberg did, but put more time into it.

[Faeroon]

@Neil:

I've created a suitable effect using a blueish spotlight;
you can see one of the tests in my "Enchanted Forest"
Thread (the link's in my sig)

If there is still something to change and I cant get it
to work in Maya, I'll use PS - but I'll try to get the things
right in maya, just to learn the software :)

Thx for all your help. :beer:

[Faeroon]

I know i know - I shouldnt ask so much, but I cant figure out
how I can solve this prob.:blush:

As I was saying before: I solved the moonlight thingie,
but I'm not done with the ray of light /foilage shadow beast.

Does anyone know how to accomplish the look of foilage shadow
on the ground? - I know that this can be done with a spotlight
and somehow adding some sort of texture to the light color, but
I havent done this before and after some hours of testing I
really dont know how to do this.

On the other hand, I dont know if it is possible that there
are the "foilage shadows" and where there is light there are
rays of light - just a bit of a blueish light ray, mainly transparent
and it must not even reach the ground.

I've tested this with env fog , light fog and geometry in front
but all I got was a dark shadow ray - I've changed the shadow color and
tried to get it more transparent but it didnt work well.

Just in case someone got time - any suggestions, tips, clues?
:shrug:

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