Lamp Guy - Page 2 - Simply Maya User Community

# 16 19-05-2006 , 09:39 PM

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wow very impressive ....lookings like your coming along way on this character ...love it ...

now can you make him moon walk lol hahha kidding ...

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# 17 19-05-2006 , 11:32 PM

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thanks

and yep the character is coming out great! keep it up

May the force be with you

MSN: markjborg@hotmail.com

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Mark Julian Borg

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# 18 20-05-2006 , 06:06 AM

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Cheers for the tip dilberts, lighting's not a strong point of mine, I'll have a play round with the set up today I think. I remember you put a couple of links up when you were making your plastic bottles, I'll take a more serious look at them too.

No worries master yoda, I'm glad I didn't confuse you too much. If you need any more explanation about it feel free to ask.

mmoore, I'll get round to animating him at some point, I'm really concentrating on getting him right first though.

All the best,

Mat.

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# 19 20-05-2006 , 06:08 AM

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i know mate ..just top knotch work once again ..

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# 20 20-05-2006 , 08:27 PM

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I've been messing around with lights and render quality today. My PC isn't brilliant so I've always been careful with render and light settings so as not to upset it, today I threw caution to the wind and this is the result. It took an hour to render at 1024x768, I've used 4 lights in total (3 area lights for the scene and in the bulb 1 point light). The back area light has depth map shadow enabled at 2048 resolution and filter size 6, the point light has ray trace shadows wiht light radius 1 and rays 35.I've also used FG set at 45.

I'd appreciate any feedback on this one, cheers,

Mat.

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# 21 20-05-2006 , 08:50 PM

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nice render user added image

May the force be with you

MSN: markjborg@hotmail.com

My Official Portfolio

Mark Julian Borg

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# 22 20-05-2006 , 09:07 PM

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very nice render ..i like the whole simplicity look and in deep thought ...

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# 23 20-05-2006 , 11:19 PM

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That's more of what I was getting at. Now when you look at the little guy your attention is on his character and pose rather than on the reflections. I would keep adjusting the image though. I think your light intensities are a little too high as your glass reflections are blowing out. What I would do is start with all you lights down low, and slowly increase the intensities a little at a time. You may find the best image is with one of the lights really low compared to another etc. Also, try a quadratic fall-off for more realistic lighting, and maybe use raytraced shadows with a wide light radius and large shadow samples for nice soft shadows. Pick a small square of the image that has all the elements you want to adjust, and just keep doing a render region until it looks good (so you don't have to wait an hour in between adjustments).

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# 24 21-05-2006 , 11:28 AM

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Hello again,

and thanks for your thoughts. As suggested by dilberts I've been tweaking the lights to get rid of the specular blowout on the bulb. to get this result I changed the depth map shadow on the rear area light to a raytrace shadow with 35 rays, lowered the FG to 15 and lowered the intensity of the point light in the bulb (note to self: sort out the values for the intensity and glow on the brightness controller). As the point light has been lowered substantially I had to up the values of the area lights, which were set very low previously, the rear one now casts a shadow, YAY!

Raytrace stuff doesn't show up on IPR renders, so it's no use using it to tune the shadows. To speed things up dilberts suggested that I choose a portion of the picture to render and tune, is there any way to do this without using IPR?

Cheers,

Mat.

edit: I forgot to change the fall off to quadratic, I'll do that for the next one.

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# 25 21-05-2006 , 12:00 PM

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Limited Region Render

happymat you can draw out a rectangle to any size you like in any region you want rendered to limit your render area just as you are doing an IPR.

Open the render view window - left click anywhere inside the window and drag around the desired size/area you want rendered - then at the top of the render view is a clapboard with a red square line around it, select that to render the region area you just drew.

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# 26 21-05-2006 , 12:50 PM

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Sweet, you learn something new every day!

Cheers Anm8or,

Mat user added image

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# 27 21-05-2006 , 04:54 PM

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Much better!. Keep on tweaking. Instead of having a separate floor and sphere background, maybe try to smoothly transition the two so that you don't get that hard grey line running across the image. If you merge the two you'll get a nice soft color change that'll bring out the character more. If you look at my segway thread in the challenge forum, you'll find 2 screen captures showing the lighting set-up which will show what I mean. Anm8or is spot on with the render region technique, I use it all the time for tweaking.

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# 28 21-05-2006 , 05:20 PM

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Cheers dilberts,

I'll take a look at the segway thread for the set up. I've not actually used a sphere for the background this time, I thought I'd see what sort of effect changing the environment colour on the rendering camera would have, I'll try out your suggestion of merging a sphere to the ground plane next.

That render region button is bloody useful, I've never needed to use it before because I've never really been that adventurous with light and shadow quality.

Cheers again,

Mat.

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# 29 23-05-2006 , 08:45 AM

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I took a look at dilberts segway thread, nice work! Here's the what I rendered after seting my lights up in a similar fashion. I set the area lights to have quadratic drop off, it makes a huge amount of difference to the style of light emitted but the amount of light is much lower so I had to up the incandescence of the background and the diffuse on the brass shader. I tried using a linear drop off on the point light in the bulb too but wasn't happy with the result so it's been left as is.

I think I'll try making some sort of environment for him next and see if I can get a nice render out of that too.

Cheers,

Mat.

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# 30 23-05-2006 , 08:51 AM

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I got a bit tired of looking at him sitting on the step so I tried a couple of other poses while I was messing with the lights. I rather liked this one so I thought I'd share it, the quality is only Preview FG rather than production so excuse the graininess!!

Take it easy,

Mat.

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