Lighting Challenge #13: Christmas

#61

Musk - Nice work, but your tree looks really bright in relation to the rest of the image…might want to tone down that spotlight a little bit!

#62

I think you are looking for “multiply” not add or subtract.

Also - use “levels” to control the spread of the ambient occlusion. Not as accurate as actually changing the AO settings but an efficient way to control your AO pass.

#63

Buca - Welcome, that’s a nice job! I like the look of the fire. I’m glad you’ve got different colors on the ornaments, maybe they could be more reflective and less diffusely lit. The light son the trees are nice, maybe color variety there also?

kanooshka(1) - The big 1970’s style lights were chosen the same reason I chose to make a Blue Pine with the long needles: fewer, larger objects are more efficient. Some of us have memories of those old-style lights, even if they are considered fire hazards today.

Phantom-vfx - Welcome! Nice start. See if you can do more with the tree, maybe reflect the lights in the windows, let the lights on the tree illuminate it more? The light from the fireplace could be softer and distributed more through the area. I think that some shadows or occlusion would help on the gifts, some of them seem to lack a sense of contact right now, like the gold one behind the red in the center.

jojo1975 - Go easy on those optical effects, man! The fireplace has shadows, they could just be a little softer. Everything looks too bright to me, and around the tree the light doesn’t seem to cast shadows: look at the wal beside the gifts. There are 3 circlular shapes near the tree (one on the side wall, two above the tree) that could be smoothed out or toned down.

eldritch48 - Welcome! Lovely image! Maybe the camera could come from a lower angle. This way the shadow of the boy could be bigger in frame, and we also could see the scene more from a child’s point of view. It gets so black in the shadow of the bottles near the fireplace, but then in other parts of the scene there is a lot of fill light. Maybe just do a fill light pass with colors from the tree, the window, the bounce light, etc. start with that, multiplied with some occlusion, before you add the main light with the shadow of the boy.

sick73 - Great work so far! Keep going with that!

kanooshka(2) - The scene’s looking great! I don’t know about the mix of light types in the same part of the tree, I guess that’s working but the smaller ones are kindof drowned out.

loramel - That’s great! See if you can get more illumination from the lights on the tree, and maybe make the star at the top more visible?

MasterZap - Nice work! You might rotate the tree more towards the camera, the back-side is so much sparser than the front that combined with being blown-out in the lighting, it really seems to fade away. I’ve seen situations like the ball in the foreground, where the refraction looks completely different when DOF is turned on that when it’s turned off. I bet even if the DOF were adjusted so that the ball was in focus, it would still look different. I’m glad you’re using bokeh. To sell a scene with convincing DOF usually you have to have something that the camera is focused on, so then it looks natural that the background or foreground falls out of focus.

theshakoone - Welcome! I guess we have something in common, Greyother was one of my students. Keep going with your scene, I look forwards to seeing more of your work (and more of the tree.)

mJunaidb - Welcome! That’s a good start on the scene. The fire looks inverted (dark where the flames should be, bright were there are no flames.) The light from the fire looks too bright and hard as well. See if you can make the lights look a little more red, like their reflections.

greyother - Nice scene! It looks a little under-exposed to me now, I wonder if you could get more out of the tree lights.

musk - Your new scene (post #60) is a big improvement. I think the tree looks like it has too much ambient light on it. It would be better to let some of the needles go dark in places where they aren’t near a tree light, and let the star and ornaments be more reflective instead of diffusely lit. Some color in your tree lights might add to the scene as well. Feel free to post in other forums, but please link to where you got the scene and let them know its a part of the light challenges.

-jeremy

#64

I wanted to try a different angle for the lights, so i can get some light coming out of the fireplace. i turned my area light really low, i also put some redness in the sun so i can get that early dawn/dusk feel. with a tree! :). i need to turn up the light coming from the fire. im still test rendering and seeing what angle looks the best. i can use some help there. also, as you can see, i don’t have all the materials on either. i hit render and left, halfway through it i came back to find that Greyother’s awesome neon lights were on there still (because he gave me the file). so i was too lazy to start the render again.

edit - (the top one is the newer one) fixed the neon lol. i added materials to the fireplace, but i have to fix some. still no material on the wood in the fireplace, will do soon. i was starting the point lights for the lightbulbs and put 2 in, but they didnt come up in the render. oh well. its too late right now to go and fix them. added some variety to the colors of the balls on the tree. should i exclude the tree from the area light thats inside? im not feeling that shadow very much, but i am still running shadow maps for now no raytracing yet. also, what are sky portals?

render time - about 40 min with fg on low.

#65

Ok started some try with MR. skylight portal and mia for light… onw problem that I dont0 understand is that I setup a mrsky but I continue getting white environment under the windows. Any idea ?
Tomorrow I will post some example
Help appreciated

#66

Haven’t posted here in a while. Have been working too hard and need a break and a creative challenge.

I have used:

4 area lights
1 radial light for sun
a luminance map for the embers in the fire place

Software :Electricimage and Photoshop
Rendering time :Way to long (12hrs)

http://www.gooddesign.com.au/Christmas_project_1.jpg

buggsy

#67

Hi everyone, amazing work so far!
Here’s my contribution so far. Thought I’d give a daytime render a crack, so here goes.

This is just with a white material to get the lighting done first.
Then I added materials.

Rendertime was 1hr42mins at 1024 x 768, rendered with mentalray using mia materials and some lamberts. Used sun/sky with portal lights and fg and gi. I’ve got plenty of things to fix in this render.

Edit: I forgot to say, I made a hole in the wall opposite the fireplace to let more light in.

#68

is there any compulsion to use 3dsmax default renderer? coz i can see maximum people are using Mental ray! and i am not good at that,can i use vray…:shrug:
one more question,is it late to participate?

#69

No it’s not too late to partecipate and you can use every software you want :wink:

#70

@greyother:

Thanks greyother for the suggestion but I think blender doesn’t offer me what you are suggesting. To use multiply I have to bake the AO Pass to a texture cause blender only allows add, substract or both for the built in AO calculation. I’m not sure if I want to do that cause UV Texturing the tree is going to be a pain in the b…t. I will have to experiment with it. I allready changed the AO Energy which gives a satisfiing result.

I do not understand what you ment with levels. Do you mean use AO on different render layers and composite them together later to control what actually gets AO and what doesn’t? Or is this a special feature of the software and blender doesn’t support it? Could you please explain.

@Jeremy: Thanks for the critic, just what I needed. I’m allready working on the treelighting. About the reflectivity of the ornaments, I added ray mirror and it seems that the mirror effect just doesn’t display. Currently I’m experimenting with the fresnel effect on the raymirror shader and it seems to work on the balls but not on the star. It just doesn’t come out that well. I’ll post a pic as soons as I have access to my private computer.

#71

[/quote]

Thanks Jer :wink:

Well, uneven trees is a fact of life. I was going for realism here, not so much “art”. Hence the properly blown out “sky through window” and everything, all that is “fixable”, but would diverge from what a real photo would show.

Besides, since I tend to chop down my own X-mas tree in our own rather small forest, I tend to be a begger more than a chooser, so we have all sorts of crazy shapes on our trees :wink:

Well, to be fair the middle image isn’t the exact same image as the DOF ones… it’s just an earlier incarnation I dragged out for comparision to the two DOFfy ones, it doesn’t have the exact same materials nor lighting.

If you truly want a DOF on/off comparision, it’s here:

Bokeh effects are fun, but does require quite a lot of DOF samples to be de-grained.

I’m planning on trying a variant with chromatic Bokeh for kicks. Stay tuned.

True. I was going to put in a gnome or something on the shelf that would be natural to focus on, but I didn’t have time.

Instead I tried this variant, which indeed gives me something to “focus” on. This yeilds a new problem, tho; I need to furnish the room :wink:

/Z

#72

@musk

Hi musk, since I also use blender with this challenge I think I can give you my 2 cents concerning ao.
I think when greyother referred to multiply he regarded the combination mode in which the ao-pass would be applied to the image. You can do this in blender by also enabling the ao-pass in a render layer and use the compositor to apply the ao-pass there. The Mix-Node has a multiply operation.
The remark about the levels hints at the level-tool found in all image manipulation sw. Again you could use the ao-pass in the compositor feed it through a RGB-curves node ( which will provide you the effect found in the level tools).
I am still experimenting with the ao in my entry. I might completely drop it in favour of a ao-fake with a hemisphere of buffer shadow spots. Set up correctly this speeds up rendering time by a factor of ~20.

hope this helps.

#73

Hi all,

some nice stuff being done here…great challenge too.

heres my shot at it…

max9 and vray

and the lighting setup

and a snowwhite version

#74

Hi All,

This is the first time I have started a Lighting Challenge here and I’m really looking forward to it!

This is just a rough composition/layout I have at the moment to get a feel for what it might look like; however, it is probably bound to change over the next few weeks. The idea is to make the fireplace the point of intrest and have the rest of the scene (Christmas Tree) out-of-focus and having a nice Bokeh effect from the lights. The time of day at the moment is night with the Christmas Tree illuminating the majority of the room. I’ve decided that I won’t be changing or added any extra models in the scene as of yet becuase I was hoping to make this a lighting and texture exercise. But this might change… :slight_smile:

Anyway… all crits welcome!

Richard

[u]Render info

[/u]Software: Maya2008
Renderer: Mental Ray
Orginal image size: 1024x786
Render Time: 15-20min[i] (ish)

Composited in Shake

[/i](DOF and slight Barrel Distortion is a 2D effect at the moment)

#75

Thanks that helps a great bit. I think I’ll stick with the AO since the rendering time isn’t that much slower without it on my machine. What really kills rendering time is radiosity so I’m currently only applying it over night :smiley:
Raytracing also adds a lot but I need it for my ornaments and the reflections in the windows. Maybe if I limit it to certain renderlayers it will be faster. hmm gotta try that.
Thanks again and great work so far everyone.

BTW for those interested I also put my stuff up on the blenderartists forum (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=112196) for more software specific critiques.

#76

Here my next stage.

 I created separate render layers for the following setups:
 - scene lit fireplace lights
 - scene lit moonlights
 - scene without tree lit by tree candles
 - tree lit by candles
 - tree lightbulbs

 [img]http://loramel.gmxhome.de/xmas/render_layers.jpg[/img]

Furthermore I used object masks to extract the star and the glass balls to additonally tweak their appearance (make them more brighter, color correction etc.) and mixed them back in.

 With this setup done I can compose the final image and can tune for my desired balance
 of the various lights.
 
 I tried to use an AO-pass as well, but until now are not satisfied with the results and even more so with the render time. theshakoone calls his p4 3ghz crap :eek:. What do you call then an athlon 1500+ with 768MB RAM :sad:. Anyway I settled with a fake ao by using many spotlights with buffer shadows.

The render time for a 600x800 image including all the compositing is now at 2 mins.
 
 The next step will be to introduce mirroring in the windows and find a better shader for the
 tree lights. The current method of using halos has the significant drawback, that halos do not seem to be raytraced and hence do not show up in the windows.
#77

Yeah. What I mentioned has to do with compositing. Specifically you can use Shake or After Effects or any other compositor to “multiply” the darker values in the AO pass over your beauty pass. I tend to adjust the AO levels and change the opacity or add gaussian blur if necessary.

Jeremy, you mentioned a long time ago that a AO pass is unnecessary if you are rendering with GI and FG . . . is this true?
I have been using a “skylight” in max to generate AO (seems to be the only function for that light) but I wasn’t sure if it was necessary since the other lights in the scene are “photometric” and they are calculating GI and FG automatically.

EDIT: You can use a shader to generate AO in max. Here is a link on how the AO shader works in Max:
http://www.christopher-thomas.net/pages/free_tutorials/tut_ambient_occlusion_shader/ct_tut_mentalray_ambientocclusion_shader.htm

Also, I am going to try splitting out my lights into different layers and I was hoping you could elaborate on the “3 pack” you mentioned at the Gnomon Workshop. Are you splitting out each light into an RGB pass or each light’s shadows? Is this just for making masks for easier compositing?

EDIT 2: Has anyone successfully rendered out an AO pass out of Max?? I have tried using the skylight and I have tried rendering out the AO with the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion base material. No luck. I just get a black screen for every render.

#78

First page, first post i rendered an AO pass out of max but only for reference so needs a lot of adjustments.

method i used for the AO pass: set a standard material on everithing set diffuse color to white. add an Ambient/Reflective Occlusion material to the self ilumination box. on the environment, set the ambient lights to 0 (cero). MR renderer, no gi no fg no lights, hit render. all the adjustments necesary are within the AO material.

cheers.

#79

Here’s a couple more experiments…

Trying to get some “feel” into it, warm/cold light, whatever… just tryin’ some angles… material/light setup pretty much as before…

/Z

#80

Hey everyone looking great just a few suggestions to try to help out-

theshakoon- looks good I like the floor a lot. And the material on the gifts. My one suggestion would be to make the sky more of a darker blue or purple color to capture the dusk feeling.

tuffmutt1- I love the saturated blue light coming through the window I think that inspired me to do some more of that. Any idea where that light is coming from? I personally think that it could use some softer shadows.

zatrix- Hi and welcome to the challenge! =) Good start but the way your composition is the image is split right in half. I’ve always been taught that you don’t want to do that. As a fix maybe you could make your piece a vertical image and see where that takes you.

[color=Yellow]loramel[/color]- sounds like an interesting approach to AO. What I think is nice about an AO pass though is that for a still image you only need to render that once unless you change placement of objects or the camera angle. If you’re set on the angle I don’t think that should be too much of a problem.

For the glow issues I’d suggest turning glow off in your renderer and do it post processed. Jeremy showed a great trick of taking your image blurring it placing it on top of your sharper layer then setting the blend mode to screen. It requires some tweaking with levels but it looks good =)

masterzap- I like seeing the experimentation with angles. I know I said the same thing to zatrix but I think for both of your images a vertical composition would look spectacular, especially the bottom one. There’s a lot of “dead” space on the left side.