Lightsaber help
 

These are the latest versions of the lightsaber i'm working on. I'm rendering in final gather and for some reason am getting those weird shadow blotches on the floor. I have final gather set to 500 instead of 300 with a min radius of 0.3 and a max radius of 8, the floor itself is basically a normal blinn, with a little less reflectivity a high eccentricity with a high specular roll off and low specular color. The scene is HDRI lit so there are no lights in there other than one set at 0 intensity to stop the default lights So if someone could help me do away with those shadows it would be helpful. Also I'd like to smooth out the lightsaber because as you can see the round parts of the emitter and such are kind of jaggedy, however i like the middle peices (black peices) the way they are, so is there a way to smooth just peices of it and not the whole thing? C&C also welcome

http://thedigitalninja.net/Site/rand...aber15copy.jpg http://thedigitalninja.net/Site/rand...aber16copy.jpg http://thedigitalninja.net/Site/rand...er/saber14.jpg

hi there...first off u may have a chance of your pictures been removed....640/480 sizes only.
now to make it more smooth u could maybe sect all the faces that are the area u want smooth then got to editpolys extract.Or use the split polytool to add more edges then pull thoses edges to create a rounder shape.
The blotches u talk about is called artifacts usually cause or not enough final gather rays in ure scene try using the distance tool and get your distance of the entire saber(example)
saber=19 so divide by 10=1.9 <Max radius
then divide 1.9 by 10 for min radius =0.19
and give you scene maybe 1000 rays. u know they can go up to even more than the 1024 from the slider u can put 90.000 if u wanted.
Hope this helps.
Oh and it looks pretty cool!!!

I tried what you said and it's still happening

make sure your hdir image is modified correctly in HDR shop, it appears to be not.

I don't have hdr shop, nor do i know what that means :). i'm still very new to hdri, i just downloaded a free hdri sample.

i guess its time to do some searches and read throug some tutorials and look at some threads
i learned from a tutorial at digital tutors but i dont think they have it for free anymore

Any you can recommend?

Well I took a look at an HDRI tutorial with HDR Shop, not sure if I did an appropriate one seeing as the floor is still ****ed up, but I think the saber itself is a major improvement


http://www.thedigitalninja.net/Site/...obisaber17.jpg

ok one last update, I managed to get significantly lower those stupid blotches by raising my photons up from 500, to 4000. this takes 30 minutes to render, so is there to either A) fix this with less photons, or B) bake the photons or something so it doens't have to recalculate it each time?

http://www.thedigitalninja.net/Site/...bisaber019.jpg

if u have a sky dome remove it and dont use photons then render.

well i have a dome with the Hdri mapped to it, and the photons are part of hte final gather render.

You made your own dome or is it one that automatically comes when u select Image based lighting?
take the photons off and ull have no artifacts... i think.

Uhm, as far as i learned to do this, I made a dome and then put a texture on it with the hdr in the ambiance, that's how i was taught how to do hdri.

there is a option in mental ray to do it automatically.......

http://www.thedigitalninja.net/Site/...bisaber023.jpg
http://www.thedigitalninja.net/Site/...bisaber022.jpg


Just an update on it.