Christmas Lights

#1

Hey CG crew I’m working on a Christmas advertisement and they want the opening shot to be a building with some Christmas lights to wrap the building and that sounded simple at first until they said that each bulb needs to have it’s own glow or atleat look like they do since one shot is a close up and it need to be a clean zoom so there isnt a point where i could swap sense easily.

So really what i would like to know is there any easy way to make a string of Christmas lights and each bulb have there own light emission. Hope I explained the properly and someone out there will be able to help me

thanks,
Joshua Welt

#2

Can you make an FG pass which uses the lights to illuminate the areas around them and use that as a separate pass?

#3

Make the physical string of lights. You can’t get around that part – the work has to be done.

Make a matte pass of just the bulbs and composite in AE with trapcode starglow plugin, or some equivalent.

#4

How about:

  1. Make a string of colored point lights with attenuation on. A quick way to distribute on a curve is select a bunch of lights, then apply a path constraint, using L(1,100) for % on curve.

  2. For the bulbs apply a constant color shader. Most lights like this (including LED’s) tend to saturate their colors. I usually push the rgb values off scale to at least 2 or more.

If you are using FG, be sure to turn off secondary light or you’ll probably wash out the bulbs.

Hope this helps,
Ohmanoggin

#5

How “real” does it need to be? If not 99.9% real even to a cg artist, then you could probably get away with quite a bit when you comp it just using a few additional passes.

If you must use FG, then use dumby objects for your emitters to help keep rendertimes lower and make sure it’s their own pass- maybe one pass of each kind of pass per each light color, just in case the client changes their mind about the colors and their intensities.

Since this is a moving shot…if you don’t have all the time in the world to mess with FG, or are not a mr gi expert I’d go for using AO and point lights etc.

Do you have the snow all worked out?

#6

Thanks for those ideas guys ill take those in to consideration when i get to the rendering. im currently working on textured the lights and i create a phone that i color and then increase the transparency and i can see thru it in the view port but when i go to render it’s a solid object is there something i forgot to do iv done it that way before on other projects and had no problem.

#7

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