Lighting Challenge #13: Christmas

#261

hi everybody,

here is my little render test:):slight_smile:

#262

Happy New Year everyone!

another update. added 3dAura to the light bulbs. also a light in the back to try and create some moon light. as before layered the render with a ambient layer.
info from the render
objects: 86; lights 5; master objects: 3; master shaders: 81; texture map surface: 4509 by 4509 pixels, 77.56 mbytes; took 11mins 44 secs to render; number of rays launched: 35107550.

i rendered a scene with no 3dAura and layered it with the above image and created this animation in abode elements 2 :slight_smile:

#263

Full HD version:

A smaller version. For my desktop background.

Blender 3D Internal render.

Mostly buffered shadows spot light and point lights.

Spot light with Haloint enabled, outside going thrue the window. It’s supposed to be the moon lightning. The fog effect of it adds some depth.

Raytracing only on the windows.

Enviroment Maps for the christmas tree balls so no raytracing there.

The lamps shader has emit color. Added a vertice on every lamp with a halo effect, thats been in blender like forever and fakes optical illusions like stars and much more. Thats gives it it’s glow. A point light on every lamp. Done very quick with the DupliVerts function.

Point light on very close to the ground where the moonlight hits. Fakes global illumination quite well. Also two big buffered shadows spotlight only shadows, that gives Global Illumination effect also. Soft thresholt on 100 so the shadows are very blured.

Post pro direct in Blender with nodes. Added an extra blur effect and some contrast and brightness correction.

Rendertime 4 minutes in full hd (1920x1080).
#264

How on earth something like this can be rendered in 4 min?

i am rendering my stuff in modo and it takes 7 hours, also my results are not even close.
sigh :frowning:

I also get errors, damn

btw i like ur render a lot, very moody.

#265

Thanks.
I start by rendering everything without raytracing (or global illumination). I had then 2 minutes rendertime. That way you can test render how manytimes you like.

I know modo has a fast renderer. Preview renderer I’ve heard. So use that to your advantage.

#266

Thanks man, i’ll try that.

#267

Thanks Jeremy,
my lighting is not yet fully resolved, I settle this problem once every element finalized. It was just to get an idea of the atmosphere.

The I try to make a bed of coals with buche flared.

#268

I thought time is up, but hey a new chance to make the images better. Here is my last Max8 default scanline with tiny raytrace reflections:

I clone referenced omnis to the positions of the lightbulps. Therefore the elements of lightbulps would be exploded with Editable Mesh. Then I center the pivot of every lightbulp to its object and use the clone and align tool for the omni references.

After doing some material stuff I thought that the window looks a little bit deep and start to rearrange the scene. Beside the lights for the tree there are 2 other omnis. One for the fireplace with shadow map and one for the bouncing roomlight without shadows.

Objects: 156, Faces: 1097777
Omni Lights: 42, Shadow Mapped: 41
Rendertime on a Vaio-VGN-FE21S without multi pass dof: 2:32 min
With 12 passes: 12:11 min

[img]http://datlantis.org/xdlight2.jpg[/img]
#269

@ bigbad hey that kick ass ! 4 minutes of rendering let me reconsider blender :wink: I thoughtt it was an awesome modeller but with not so strong rendererer i will give again a try other then modelling :wink:
great image

#270

bigbad - Nice job! It would be good to see a little more of the moon light and tree lights illuminating the pine needles and tree itself. Maybe you could fill in the black areas with a little bit of colored fill and colored specular highlights in places, just so more of the scene comes to life. The outside of the star topper could use some reflections or highlights too.

L33tace - Nice job. It would be nice to see more illumination on the pine needles and tree itself. The decorations (balls and star) could use less diffuse, but more reflections and highlights, to convey the idea of shiney metal. The room could use more contrast, going brighter in a few places but also with darker shadows and occlusion. The fire place seems to get its orange light from the outside, and should be lit more from within.

lighthunder - Good start! The room could use more contrast, going brighter in a few places but also with darker shadows and occlusion. If the fire is lit, it needs more light to indicate that. Maybe more of a glow can come from those lights on the tree?

sepehr - Looking good! The walls seem over-lit to me, maybe you could darken them in most areas, except where the tree or other lights would make them the brightest. I’d like to see more reflections and highlights on the balls and star, they are mostly black. I’d like to see more illumination from the lights onto the tree itself, it is black in some areas. There’s a strange glow behind the dresser and along the bottom of the windows that could be hyper-active global illumination, try to tone that down or turn it off. If you’re rendering the tree as a separate layer, include the gifts below it as a matte object, so that the tree stand and other lower parts can appear behind the gifts.

thundering1 - Looking good! The perspective of the light coming though the window looks like a point or spot light just a few meters outside the window, not a distant light like the sun. Maybe you could switch to an directional light for a more believable sunbeam? It would be nice to see more reflections, on the floor or other surfaces. Maybe the lights could have more color in them, and could illuminate the pine needles around them more?

mirmel - Welcome! That’s a good start. Try to get more contrast on the set, going brighter in a few places but also with darker shadows and occlusion.

Jacobo - Nice job. I like the extra furnature and things. Maybe the wood shader (especially on the dresser and table in image 2) is too reflective. I think the shades above the windows should shadow or occlude the wall behind them more. It would be good if you could make some of the shadows of the tree a little softer. You are on a good track there overall.

beverens - Good start. The fire light should be much softer, with soft shadows, a decay with distance, and maybe a less saturated orange hue. The room could use darker shadow areas, especially in the alcoves to the sides of the chimney. The star looks like it was turned strangely, maybe we could see more of it?

-jeremy

#271

Hello

such a nice subject for a lighting challenge, would be a sin not to join :wink: so here’s my little entry (or at least a start of an entry). I always like watching shadows thrown by a christmas tree, dont know why, but all the lights and shadows give a warm feeling, dont You (CG Society) think ?

Pretty much everything done in Blender (some post glow added in Artweaver).
A lot of raytracing: Area lights in windows for some minor star/moon light illumination, point lights on the tree and a little of Ambient Occlusion to show darker areas.
Rendered in blender internal on a Windows XP machine (Intel Core 1.8GHz, 1 GB RAM), about 20 mins, surprisingly fast.
Ill focus a bit more on materials now and hopefully post some update soon.

on a side note:
I dont know about other applications, but in Blender, unless You hide the needles on the tree (or move them to another layer), the 3d views are barely refreshing due to the polycount :wink: i always break scenes apart and throw groups in layers, but in this scene it’s simply a must to be able to work.

comments & crits more than welcome

  • Kroni
#272

Hi everyone,
I see a lot of excellent lighters in the forum. Great stuff all of you, especially pbalsic, very good lighter.
My Scene setup: Didn’t use GI, FG.
8 mr lights (1 outside, 1 illuminate tree, 2 fire lights, 2 ceiling light, 2 table lamp lights)
40 Christmas tree mr lights (including star) with glow
5 candle mr lights with glow

    I render 720x480, with high sample rate (31mm lens)  2.5hours (very high settings)
    Occlusion pass  16min
    
    Software: 3DS Max, Photoshop

#273

Biofreak says that he went very light on the raytracer, that’s the main reason… Using light inclusion and exclusion to your advantage also helps. You should maybe consider going back to your starting point and try and aim for the a solution in modo that won’t take away from the ambience you’re trying to achieve.

#274

Hi everyone;

Thanx Jeremy for the input. I agreed with all your crits and tried to implement the changes accordingly, except for the curtains :slight_smile: They are made of fabric and they have a certain translucent quality to them, hence even the occlusion shadows they cast on the walls shouldn’t be as opaque as solid objects IMHO, but nevertheless, I went ahead and toned down the translucency factor by 50%, and the curtains seem a little better now… I also did away with the pesky shadows on top the tree that apparently resulted from sloppy light inclusion/inclusion :slight_smile: I toned down the translucency factor of the pine needles by %50, cuz it tended to look too bright…

I also made the revision I had in mind like toning down the bounced light that reflects onto the fireplace. I also did away with all of the shadow map casting lights and turned them into area lights, cuz at the end I have decided to render out the final images thru fPrime and it really does a great job anyhow :slight_smile: I’ve decided to get the volumetrics out as pass plates and composite them onto the fPrime outputs.

As beautiful as it’s render engine may be, unfortunately LW does still possess many limitations in terms of flexibility other software above its class offer by default, like point lights can’t emit soft shadows, area lights can only be planes and only spotlights can emit mapped shadows… This hurts your workflow a lot and is also another important factor that affected the decisions I made which I mentioned above…

But all in all, I’m quite happy with what I’ve achieved so far, as it is what I had in mind when I started out.

#275

Could anyone explain to me how to get my image right on the screen instead that tiny icon to click on. Thanks

#276

Nevermind, I figured it out.

#277

Thank you so much for the feedback, Jeremy! I continue to try to improve my scene - I’ll certainly work on the suggestions you posted.

In the meantime, I tried a different camera angle to something a bit more interesting. Took two different angles, I liked them both.

I changed the bottles to something transparent, to see how the light would play on the glass.

I tried rendering this with and without radiosity. The first one is with radiosity at 37 passes in Fprime and the second one is without radiosity. I’m using fprime because of its quick renders and ability to refine over time. Right now I’m letting LW do an HD render and its telling me 9 hours left. Fprime made these 1024x768 renders in about 2 hours, but I can see some blotchiness. I know that for sake of speed, the render between LW and Fprime does differ sometimes, so we shall see what happens.

The lights are the same as in my previous image, all I changed is the camera angle.

The pine tree lights are point lights arranged around the bulb objects, using the luxigon feature in Lightwave (creates a light from each and every polygon you select). Since the bulb objects are built from quite a number of polygons, I ran a polygon reducer to get the number down to about 10 polys per bulb. I still wound up with 710 lights. :-D. While this does add to the render time considerably, I liked the way the colors blended on the walls.

To recap, the bulbs are represented by 710 point lights grouped where the bulbs exist, and colored to match the bulb color (though they are pretty intense and glow white anyway, they case the proper light, which is what I was looking for). Outside is a large Area Light for the window, though I see that I might be able to get rid of it as it doesn’t seem to add much to the image. Not visible in this shot is the fireplace lit with a point light. I will work on getting the fireplace looking like a fire in there, and not like someone hanging a light inside. Ambient is set to 12%.

See what y’all think :slight_smile:

#278

ok i will :thumbsup:

#279

i will thank u for you’r responce on it :thumbsup:

#280

beverins Hi;

I might have a few suggestions, if I may. I’m looking at our xmas tree right now, and the bulbs seem not to emanate as strong a light to cast such strong shadows onto the walls around it as in your work. I would decrease the intensity of those ornament lights and have them falloff quickly and then put individual lights around the tree that only affect the room to mimic the highly diffused and weak wash of mixed light colors that radiates from the tree’s bulbs and take it from there…

take care;

AJ