Lighting Challenge: Light Bulb

#49

:-/ I wish this were done in messiah, I rendered in LW, using a sub-frame displacement synched to motion-blur AA passes. And one area light - ambient at 20% deep blue. I worked the technique out for my short film “Love.Leech.Tomato” - on which I’m progressing…
I’d tried to get this going in messiah, but ran into problems (ie sub-frame keys). Thomas, your post a while back had me thinking this might be dobale after all, but I couldn’t get those results. I would LOVE to cut LW out of the pipeline - matching cameras and all that - but… can’t get this to function.

@Paul - I am warming up! But mostly with rig / animation stuff. I’m discovering again. And have time to do so. What a feeling!

#50

Yeah, you can’t do sub-frame-key-repeats in messiah, but when I need that, I normally set up an expression. What kind of keyframing do you need? Maybe I can help out?

Fine displacement with some fast animated AoN shaders should at least give you something similar?

If you repeat the same displacement-animation per frame, you should even be able to get rid of the flickering, or most of it…

Cheers!

#51

If you’re serious, I’ll send you a scene. Another problem is that I control the amount with weight maps. I can get around this by hooking up metaeffectors though. me thinks…

Well, ideally, I could set it to a slider so that I could go from no jitter to freaky wild :wink:

#52

Yes, either metaeffectors and the weight shader multiplied with your strength, or you create an uv map and paint the weights on in ZBrush as a texture or something similar.
I personally don’t like metaeffectors.
I wonder if we ever will see weightmaps in messiah?

I never tried that, but with the same displacement animation repeating on each frame, you should get the same pattern for each frame = no flickering. The more you make this discontinuous from frame to frame, the more flicker you will get. Should be easy to bind that amount to a slider…

I still don’t fully understand what you are doing but I guess it should be doable in messiah too…

Is the noise post?

But the thing messiah is missing is an edges shader - I guess you use one in that rendering?

Cheers,

#53

No post on that one. I did set this one to get an alpha, and adjusted the metal / glass with it. Remodeled a bit to get more of the look across in the geometry.

Hey, you wanted xsi, right? Wanna barter :wink:

#54

hehehe - sure thing - “barter” sounds good if I understand it correctly :slight_smile:
I could even put a TLHPro License on top of that deal :thumbsup:

Maybe it is best if you send me that LW scene so I can see if I am able to reproduce it for you in messiah.

“barter” - learned something new today :wink:

Cheers,

#55

Looking good David! Is this still LW?

#56

@Paul - yeah, LW. Thomas isn’t THAT quick :wink:

#57

Careful - I’m already finished :wink:

(“lapin rose decadant” by Christophe Desse!)

Cheers,

#58

how the hell do you get 18 hour renders? lol, i have an FX-60 cpu and it renders in 12 minutes but its not exactly a rocket ship by todays standards… although the AA could be better i admit.

#59

GI was used, and add to that a sphere light casting a softshadow at AA level 4, and obviously all the glass reflecting and refracting the GI and the soft shadows… this on a 2.8GHz P4.

#60

I need some help guys. I started to do some render tests on the bulb for our challenge in Messiah but I can’t seem to get the shadows right. In this render I have a sphere light casting raytraced shadows with a quality of 5 and a spot light with the same shadow setting there is no shadow in the render.

When I switch the sphere light to shadowmaps the quality of the shadow looks like crap. I need some guidance with my shadow settings if you guys don’t mind helping me out. :slight_smile:

#61

Shadows are switched on, right? Why not post your scene so we can help.

#62

Here’s my fxs scene file, I’m sure it’s a stupid little mistake I’m making…that seems to be the trend for me. :smiley:

http://team.subdivisionmodeling.com/pnoland/messiah/pics/bulb.zip

#63

I loaded the scene, linked the missing object and light probe files with local versions I had and hit render. No problem with the shadow, except that it seems very jagged, but that may be what you’re after? Is the above what you get when you render this file you posted?

#64

@ pnoland: I switched from shadowmap on your spherelight to raytrace and got the expected excellent results (dropping quality from 23 to 5). I can’t imagine how a shadowmap on a spherelight can work, since it would spread / stretch the available resolution in the map in a spherical map and severely pixellate the shadow. Shadow maps work fine for spotlights with limited cone angles, unless you really pump up the map resolution or soften the map.

Can you get shadows to render at all yet?

#65

@ pnoland: What version of messiah are you running? Perhaps someone running m:studio 2.4d can also test this scene for you?

#66


Andreseloy

#67

Thanks for the help guys, I havn’t tested since I posted the file as I needed to sleep but I’m going to tinker with it this morning. Yes, I’m on 2.4d currently.

#68

Thanks again guys I think I’ve got it sorted out. In this version I added a little reflection to the floor material and got my bulb base to cast a soft subtle shadow.

Also, I got rid of the spot light (not sure why I had it to begin with) and have a combo of sphere lights for this scene with the GI settings. Might try caustics next…