Lighting Challenge #6: Candle Light

#261

Don’t forget Oppenheimer!

#262

Hey everyone,

This is my first challenge. Please Let me know what you think

Thank you

Matt

#263

Help ! Arrgh ! Yes Silvia, Oppenheimer too ! (and more people…) Aarrrgh…

Well, It wasn’t a good idea to put Einstein in the frame.
So, here is a new picture, without allusion to something… :wink:

Candles-JCB4.jpg900x500

#264

… yep, there were quite a few people, including my conutrymen Emilio Segre’ and Enrico Fermi. And BTW Einstein is one of my heros, why did you take away his picture??? He was the one that recognized nuclear weapons as necessary (because otherwise the Nazis would have got them first) and evil (he was an active pacifist). I think he was an excellent choice on your part.

#265

I’ll post my info when I submit my next version. I’ve been doing some rigging for a friend, so I haven’t looked at candles in a bit, which is actually good so that I get back on it with fresh eyes.

EDIT*
I’ve been having a problem and maybe you can help me figure it out. I made a test scene just to check what the problem was and here’s the situation. In the test scene, there is a Cube, nothing done to it. Inside the cube, I put a sphere with a blinn. I left the settings at default on the blinn. I created a point light and placed it above the cube, with raytraced shadows on.

So here’s the problem… In maya software or mental ray, the render inside of the box comes out black as expected. Once I increase the light intensity above 1.00, the scene renders black again, except for the sphere. It reflects something white from below and I can’t seem to figure out how, or why it’s doing that.

I moved the light below the cube, and the reflection would switch to the top side of the sphere. If I go higher with the light intensity, the reflection gets stronger, and if I decrease it back to 1, the scene goes full black again. It will also go back to black if I turn off the reflectivity on the blinn. With the light inside the cube, the sphere goes completely white, while the rest of the scene goes grey like it’s supposed to.

I think maybe a file was messed up during the crashes I’ve had lately cuz of this problem. I’ve tried to open the hypergraph and check the scene nodes, but maya would crash almost every time. The times that I did get into it, there was nothing suspicious that could be causing the reflection. Maybe you’ve ran into this situation b4, so any type of help would be great :slight_smile: Thanks to anyone who can help solve this problem.

#266

This is my first challenge.
Thank you

#267

Okay I have been working on another candle image…sort of at the same time as the other image. I still need to render the final for the other one which hopefully will be tomorrow. :slight_smile: Wanted to do one in both renderers…

This one was rendered in Mental Ray and took about 3 1/2 hours to render on a 1ghz Athlon. Nothing really to breakdown. Traditional lighting…no GI/FG. Just lots of blurry reflections. Although the picture frame is a happy accident…was trying to play with a ramp to get more detail in the bump. :smiley: Well fire away…

#268

Nice, reflections look good with the blurriness on them. The candles have a good contrast to them, it’s easy to tell which is further and which is closer, without actually looking at placement. The frame “mistake” also came out nice, fits well with the image too. The “shine” from the candle flames should be higher up. The light mostly comes from the top of the flame, where the yellow is strongest. The other thing is to have the light scatter into the candles a little more. Other than that, it’s looking really nice. :thumbsup:

Just wondering, do you have a bump map on the table? The reflection of the middle candle comes down in steps, so it looks a little weird.

#269

Nice, reflections look good with the blurriness on them. The candles have a good contrast to them, it’s easy to tell which is further and which is closer, without actually looking at placement. The frame “mistake” also came out nice, fits well with the image too. The “shine” from the candle flames should be higher up. The light mostly comes from the top of the flame, where the yellow is strongest. The other thing is to have the light scatter into the candles a little more. Other than that, it’s looking really nice. :thumbsup:

Just wondering, do you have a bump map on the table? The reflection of the middle candle comes down in steps, so it looks a little weird.

Yeah I might have to punch up the candle scatter a bit more. I have some candles here at home that have more of a “leather” feel to them…even when lit. So that was my reference for these. About the shine, it’s a macro I made that just isolates the highlights and blurs in every direction. So that’s why it affects the whole flame and not just the middle. But that can be fixed by rendering just the flames themselves and moving the effect up.

There is a bump on the table though. Making the rings “flatter” might help the reflection effect more. Thanks for your input!

#270

Here’s my final version with alterations as suggested by Jeremy. I also worked some more on the wood surface of the table and made the smoke a little more prominent.

I’m currently putting together a post which shows how I set up the lighting.

#271

Great challenge and i`m watching great works here…congrats friends…but a question please…how much tweaking and manipolating is being allowed?:scream:

thanks

#272

ok, here is another revison.
for the first revision I have already worked on the smoke and the heat ripples.
Now I have added some light to the picture and the little mirror.
I also changed the backround, some textures and the adjusted the material for the candle holders. I hope you like it!

#273

Ok hee is my second pass, I made a few changes

#274

Wanted to post my final for the previous entry. Hopefully I can post a breakdown of it soon…

#275

ACamacho - Good work ! I prefered the precedent picture, it was very nice,
but this one is great. The candles are better, but there is a strange shadow
of a flame candle on the frame. So if you keep the precedent picture
and its textures (wood, tree on picture frame…)
with the candles light of this one, it will be excellent.

JCB

#276

After much discussion of this issue, I took some pictures. I’m sorry that I couldn’t rig a light as hard-edged as the lights used in many of these scenes (I used the smallest bulb I had at home as the light source, but it isn’t infinitely small) but here are some shots:

Shadows2.jpg640x640

Shadows1.jpg640x640

-jeremy

#277

Here’s my promised explaination.

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/jormstrom/cgtalk/demo_full.jpg[/img]

My tool of choice is Carrara 5.1. I'm basically a hobbyist with no allusions to working in the industry so this package suits me fine (especially the price). Below you can see some of the stages in the process of attaining a somewhat convincing candle.

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/jormstrom/cgtalk/demo.jpg[/img]

1. I set the flame objects as area light emitters and turned on soft shadows - I basically set the soft-shadow light diameter to about half the height of the flame. The light fall-off was set to "Logarithmic". The flame's shader is a gradient starting at the bottom blue/red/yellow with glow and some alpha transparency too.

2. Then added some SSS, using a tan colour to the candle sticks - looked a bit better but there wasn't any obvious "hot" spot near the flame so...

3. I added a very bright point light (that didn't cast shadows) inside each flame and restricted its illumination diameter to only 2-3 times the height of the flame so it didn't illuminate anything besides its own candle stick. The flames became a bit too bright but the wax looks better.

4. Turned on the Ambient Occlusion option in Carrara's GI render room. This also globally brightened all the SSS in the scene. The small candle holders had a little SSS too as they were meant to be porcelain or marble look.

Cheers,

Martin.
#278

Breakdown for the first image:

Renderer: Maya Software (7.0)

Lambert Test:

There are about 15-20 lights in the scene so it would be overkill to post all the lights seperately. :slight_smile:

Beauty Pass:

Tried as much as I could to do everything in Lighting. Although I do like to color-correct in post anyway to play around with different ideas. Sometimes I do go back and do the changes back in Maya…depends on time.

Occlusion Pass:

RGB pass:

Simple pass I used for color correcting.

Wanted to show the rim light pass because I have gotten some requests on how I achieved the “painterly” look in my fruit bowl entry (and it’s also here albeit more subtle) and the rim lights in general. It’s actually very simple to create:

Rim Light:

http://www.angelcamacho-torres.com/files/challenge/candle_mayaSW_rim.jpg

Shader setup:

http://www.angelcamacho-torres.com/files/challenge/shader_screen.jpg

This is the basic setup and by no means do I take credit for both of these (good friend of mine had shown me the rim technique although his is a bit more complex). I add a multiply node before I plug the rim into the surfaceShader to kind of act like an intensity value. I try not to use the light gradient by itself but combining it with my file/2d/3d texture through a layered texture node.

About the transluscency (sp?) on the candles, it’s pretty much the default settings in the blinn shader. Minor tweaks to the depth and focus.

Final Image:

Total Rendertime: give or take 7-8 minutes on a 1ghz Athlon with 1gb ram. Pretty light scene even with reflections.

Post work: glows, some color correction, sharpness.

Will post final for mental ray render soon and breakdown sometime after. :slight_smile: Hope it helps…

#279

Jeremy - Well, you’ve shooted interesting pictures. As our brain was expecting,
the flame is a ghost, and don’t create shadow on your photographs.
It strange to see it in close-up, there is a lot of things we don’t really see
with attention on our physical earth.
But if I remember well, I’ve seen flames of fire casting shadows on a wall.

JCB

#280

hi everyone again :D, I’m late… 'cause here in Brazil it’s independency week… and I don’t go to work… but Jeremy I do all changes, take a look. I feel the image better.

Acamacho, your image it’s very very good. congratulations! :smiley:

here the image

I use, maya, render mentalRay, in this image I remove the DOF, and I had one problem with the shadow of man in spot light, the shadow was like pattern :scream: , I solve this problem when I turn off the scanline on render options. :thumbsup:

I see in the others works the smoke it’s make on edit program, I try to use only the maya, if anyone have a suggest to I improve my scene, are to much welcome. XD

hug for all :smiley:

jD