Lighting Challenge #13: Christmas

#81

sick73: Thanks for the help but plugging the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion material into the self-illumination box just gets me a render with a white material and plugging it into the diffuse color option box just gets me a black screen when I render.
I tried putting the ambocc material into the diffuse color option box in a simpler scene and it seemed to render just fine.

Is there any workflow tutorial for this?  I must be making a simple mistake somewhere but I can't figure out where . . .

The first attachment is using the AO shader plugged into the diffuse color option box. The second attachment is using the AO shader plugged into the self-illumination.

Last attachment = x-mas scene rendered with AO shader in self-illumination.

#82

hello Master zap (or anyone else using MR) could you please share some tips for the bokeh effect and how you apply lume glare ? is that to apply on material or to camera ? Thanks in advance
Jojo (just experimentaing with MR)

#83

greyother- my suggestion for setting up the AO would be to do it in a separate pass but if you’d like to do it in the shader itself this is what I’d do. I use maya so this is what I do, but I’m sure different packages work similarly. There’s 2 methods that will do the same thing. If you have a texture or a ramp or anything set on the color value of your shader you can open up to the attribute menu after selecting the texture and scroll down to color balance. Then all you need to do is plug the AO node into your color gain value. The second method is if you use a flat color. In that case all you need to do is plug an ambient occlusion node directly into the color section either setting the white value to the diffuse value or you can use a color remap. Hope this helps.

#84

Nice work everyone, here’s my first try at this, all done in blender (which I’m in the process of trying to learn). Definately needs a lot of work on the materials/maps but the lighting is coming along … somewhat:

#85

Turned up the area light outside a lot. Still haven’t gotten the chance to split out my passes.

#86

kanooshka thanks for your comments.

It gives quite decent results and beats real ao in terms of rendertime. You could also render a lightmap with this setup and use it in the compositing just like an ao-pass.

Anyway I will try the ao-pass again and play around with tweaking it and compare it to the fake-ao

Yes you are right. As I apply this procedure already to the lights to achieve an even more glowier effect, I might as well abandon the halos completely.

#87

Hello

Im using a group of area lights for the sky and moon with soft shadows , the pointlights on the tree are not shadowed also the fire lights cuz really affect the rendertime … the shaders are all default for the moment only did some shading onthe floor wood texture

I hope to find a way to get the occ pass via texturing or something right now i cant geit to work neither in mr on renderman cuz i dont have enough mem on this pc my dads 256mb of ram lol …

#88

Ok here is an update. I tweaked the energy level of most of the lights and I added the shadows back to the tree to get rid of that ambient lighting. I still haven’t separated the AO pass out but I added the skycolor (dark blue) to it to give the impression of a moonlit room and give the whole scene a slight blue tint. Finally reflections in the windows are working.
Here is the current render:

Next are the wall textures and present textures.
I also have quite a problem with my lights. I can’t seem to compose a decent glow effect with the blender compositor so those of you that know blender could you suggest what to improve.
Here are the links to a pic of the node setup and the images before the glare and after the glarenode setup:
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/3568/nodesetup1vb4.jpg
http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/3889/nodeviewerpost1dm7.jpg
http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/1452/nodeviewerpre1ul6.jpg
The lights by themself look good but when I combine them with the other renderpass via the Z combine node the gloweffect looses it’s power. Any help greatly appreciated.

#89

Hi musk. Nice mood you are creating with your image.

I think I might help you with your node setup.
The Glarenode itself looks quite ok, maybe use the add or screen operation in the mix node when combining the light and the blurred lights. You could even further improve the glare if you use a RGB Curves node on the blurred light where you can tweak the blur to introduce variations in color/shape.
To recombine your lights with the image you have to use the mix node with scrren instead of the z-combine. I am using the screen operation, but add might work as well.
z-combine is only useful if you have rendered objects seperately and want to combine them back into one image by observing their z values.

hope this helps.

#90

I had to introduce an old friend…

You can imagine him saying “Hmm, is there competition this year?”, worried - like Woody in Toy Story - some newer, even shinier toy will take his place.

Or maybe he want’s to go back into a parcel?

Or maybe he escaped one? Who knows.

/Z

#91

Hi,
here is my attempt to this scene. After having problems to render this one in maya (my machine is a bit outdated) and seems that maya requires a lot more memory to render scenes with over 1 million polys I had to switch to Luxology Modo renderer which seems to work pretty good.
This is my first try using modo to render a scene and of course I still have to discover and learn quite a lot about the program.

The light setup used:
1 spot (moon light)
1 point (fireplace light)
1 spot (fill light)
40 point (tree’s bulbs)
2 color gradient for a bit of environment.

The render took 2h on P4-2.4ghz with 1.5 of ram.
Played a bit with curves in photoshop to give some more contrast.
I’d like to add something like a toy on the left side of the image close to the fireplace but still thinking about what and if I should, added a chair which I did for Hunted Hallway Challenge and works pretty well in this scene.
That’s it so far…
Happy Holydays!
60

#92

Wow.Great work everybody.
tuffmutt1: I love yours.

#93

wow, some great stuff goin on here. I’m definitely gonna give this xmas challenge a whirl! I’m really digging the amount of feedback in this thread to, its a fantastic thing to see! I’ll see if I can’t help out asap as well!

#94

Hi!
Here’s another version, I changed a few things but I kept color scheme and cartoony feel. I didn’t use GI or FG because I want more control. I have 8 lights for the scene, and about 40 tree lights.

Great renders guys!

MasterZap: Very interesting angles, I like your renders… and your friend is cool!:slight_smile:

tuffmutt1: That’s fantastic! Maybe try to get a little bit more shadows.

#95

Thanks for the offer Jeremy. I’ve managed to create groups in Carrra and export what I need to work on in Daz|Studio. I haven’t had much time to do anything yet, done some tests in materials and lights and still deciding which program I want to use. :rolleyes: :slight_smile:

Really great work being posted here - keep them coming. :slight_smile:

#96

i added lights to my tree. took me forever to figure out how to make them glow the same color. this is actually an assignment for class so i dont have time to vary the colors right now (due tomorrow for extra credit), but will do so as i have more time during our break. also, i think the falloff on them is too near and they are not giving enough blueness to the tree (i could be wrong?) but then i see the blueness on the wall? is that from the strength of the light or the falloff?. im still using shadow maps, but i will put a render on when i sleep with raytrace shadows and see what i get. i need to fix the clouds outside, they look kind of weird.
rendered with mental ray, max 2008, fg on low, took about 40-50 min.

Master Zap: i tried the photometric exposure (i left the default values in) and it made my render really dark. if i use it do i need to pump up my lights or do i need to change anything under the photometric exposure values?

#97

Hey guys and gals!

Saw this challenge today, love the idea. Love christmas! I wanted to do this really quick for some fun. I apologize for not having much time after this, I am trying to manage this project, and last minute shopping haha. Trust me, I am a seasoned professional at late shopping :). Let me know what you think, Vray and max9. Love your guys’ stuff. Decided that my first one was way too cold, so i dropped it. :slight_smile: Then I went another direction :).

See you.
Jon

#98

thanks man…am still working on putting a bit more life in it…more lively.
may be i ll post the new ones in a day or two…:slight_smile:

#99

@pbalsic: Great render love the style with the light from the window. I just think the tree lights need to influence the color of the room some more.
@60WE: Great scene but I think the fireplace has too much bloom. It looks like you have some electircal lighting in there.
@loramel: Thanks for the info I’m allready experimenting. to see what I can do.

Everyone great work.

#100

Hey Master zap you didin’t answer me in how to obtain glare :wink: but I guess I’ve figured it out… this are my first MR try and I really have to admit which is very powerful (and also faster than I thought)
The light seems almost ok for the mood I wasnt to obtain
So there’s the settings
=>MR sun + MR sky (night)
=>Photographics exsposure MIA materials (still to add textures but satisfied with the shaders)
=>One omni light (multiplier 100) in the fireplace
=>and one fill light (Multiplier 50) in front of the xmas tree
I’ve tried two angles (one is similar to first master zap since I wanted to test Glare)
I will still have to add DOF and probably I will use FumeFX (in scanline for the fire)
Comments are wellcome (especially about which angle to choose as final even if the mesh of the tree is not too good for close up)
When everything will be fixed I will try to make a sun animation