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Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?

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ENSONIQ5:
Light cones & glow spheres are difficult to get right in Anim8or, I have tried many different techniques and never really been happy with any.  A method I tried ages ago was to encase the camera in a reversed-normals sphere with the front-facing hemisphere transparent/reflective and the rear half glossy reflective (scattered reflection), kinda like an eyeball with a reflective retina.  In theory this should work, the scene is reflected in a diffuse way in the retina projecting a secondary reflection on the inside of the clear front half.  In practice, as you increase the reflectivity of the clear front part its transparency drops proportionally, so the glossy reflection diminishes and there's no 'sweet spot' where bright parts of the scene are reflected in the back of the lens in a diffuse way (also the scene darkens since you're looking through a lens that's less than 100% transparent).

Another option is to position spot lights at each local light source set to be always facing the camera, with a similar 'retina/lens' object setup as above.  The problem is that spot lights project a cone of light, so the more distant lights end up with a larger light sphere than closer lights, which is reverse to reality.

Unfortunately Anim8or doesn't support translucency where an object can be 'rear lit', which might have been a solution.  I'd be very keen to see how you go with this and if you can develop something that works and looks fairly realistic.  This was my test scene for trying different lighting setups, drawn from an old project that never went anywhere.  Seems to be a popular theme :)

Steve:
If you want to make the lights flicker try animating their color with an ASL script. Here's a very simple one that shows one way that you can do it.

float $brightness;

randseed(frame);
$brightness = frand()*0.7 + 0.3;
$color = $brightness*(0.8, 0.7, 0.1);

To add a script to a light's color, click on the lower of the two "..." buttons in the color area of the light dialog. Then set the "On" button in the Expression area at the button, click the "Edit" button and paste in the above script.

Nellucnaiv:
Wow! Thanks ENSONIQ and Steve.
You people are very supportive and encouraging! ENSONIQ that hallway with the arches, so much detail and lighting looks awesome! Very professional! I like your idea of the reflective sphere surrounding the camera and am going to experiment a bit with your idea shortly.
Besides having locals set in the candle flames, I also have locals with a pale yellow light above each candle. I've animated them to move with the flame morphs to give a moving shadow effect but as you say, it does take a lot of experimenting and creativity to get the atmosphere right!

Steve, I appreciate the flickering light script. My weak area is scripts and I need some tutoring but I'll definitely give it a try.

Guys, I'll post a 100 frame look at what I've got so far for your opinions and criticisms.
Thanks a lot to both of you!
Ian

Claude:
$brightness = abs(frand()) *0.7 + 0.3;  ?

Steve:
Yes abs(frand()) is better :)

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