Need lantern lighting help...
eiliestl
Posts: 100
Ok . I have a few lanterns in my scene and I need little help lighting them .
night_watchman_3d_render.jpg
800 x 500 - 69K
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Comments
Iray or 3delight?
How do the lanterns look, with an opaque glass surface, or regular glass? (a default lit test render would be helpful)
Does it have a "fire" inside, or not?
They are lanterns in the DM's Fairy Lights 2 pack from renderosity.com .I guess it's regular glass . With fire on the inside.
Using the Iray render right now but I mostly use the 3dlight.
Okay... in Iray, if the flame is a separate material zone, you can apply the emmissive shader to it (press shift-Ctrl while applying and "ignore" textures). Set it to two-sided emission, and crank up the lumens until you are satisfied with the light.
If there's no separate material zone, I'd recommend using the linear point light, and place it inside of the landern, right above where the flame is.
An example for the light is here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/820990/
and used inside a lanter here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/821008/
You'll have to play around with luminence and light temperature. Luminence is important in how far your light reaches, and temperature is about the color of the light. See more about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature
I'd recommend that you apply Thin Glass shader on all glassd surfaces, though - it will help the light transmit better.
For 3delight, I'd also use the linear point light. With the upper setings, you can tell it how far it can reach, etc. You also can tell it what kind of shadows to produce, what light color and such.
Please let me know if this helps, or if you need more detailed information. I can do screen shots, if neccessary. :-)
Thank you . Trying this right now.
Just to give credit where credit is due and promote his wonderful stuff, the image you posted is using Age of Armour ambient light.
His documentation is also well-done.
Thank you AOA! Your lights have been the go-to solution for everything I do and I absolutely love the freedom and control they give me:
I tend to use 1 linear point light and 1 AoA ambient light.
One other thing I sometimes add to that if the light is not too far from the camera — put a sphere primitive inside the lamp, surrounding the flame, turn off Cast Shadows and apply the Glow shader to it. You will have to fiddle with some of the glow surface parameters, but it really gives a very nice in-render effect with no postwork needed. This looks pretty good with lit candles as well.
One other thing I sometimes add to that if the light is not too far from the camera — put a sphere primitive inside the lamp, surrounding the flame, turn off Cast Shadows and apply the Glow shader to it. You will have to fiddle with some of the glow surface parameters, but it really gives a very nice in-render effect with no postwork needed. This looks pretty good with lit candles as well.
Glow shader? It's trying to ring a bell but all I'm hearing is a klank. Can someone refresh my memory?
In any case, that's a wonderful idea/technique.
It's a Shader Builder preset. Open the Shader Builder tab, open Surface and RenderMan Companion, and Glow is one of the presets you can see. Just apply it like any other shader (with both the object and the surface selected). There's really only three parameters you can play with once it's applied; Diffuse Color, Opacity, and Attenuation, which adjusts how quickly the diffuse colour in the middle of the object fades to totally transparent at the edge.
Some tweaking is necessary, but if you set up the sphere primitive so that it just slightly pokes out through the glass panels of the lamp, then the glow effect when you render should just about fill the inside. For lamps and candles, I usually set up a pale yellowish glow, and make it just translucent enough to still clearly see the flame inside (if there is one).
Edit: found it, here's a render I did a little while back of the Leanan Sidhe Gazebo with a full lighting setup.
It's a Shader Builder preset. Open the Shader Builder tab, open Surface and RenderMan Companion, and Glow is one of the presets you can see. Just apply it like any other shader (with both the object and the surface selected). There's really only three parameters you can play with once it's applied; Diffuse Color, Opacity, and Attenuation, which adjusts how quickly the diffuse colour in the middle of the object fades to totally transparent at the edge.
Some tweaking is necessary, but if you set up the sphere primitive so that it just slightly pokes out through the glass panels of the lamp, then the glow effect when you render should just about fill the inside. For lamps and candles, I usually set up a pale yellowish glow, and make it just translucent enough to still clearly see the flame inside (if there is one).
Edit: found it, here's a render I did a little while back of the Leanan Sidhe Gazebo with a full lighting setup.
Wow! Thank you soooo much. Lovely render too---really shows them off.(Heading into Studio now and may not come out for days.)