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Author Topic: Light Rays and neon  (Read 7534 times)

onespirit5777

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Light Rays and neon
« on: November 08, 2008, 02:06:01 pm »
Lets say it's dark out side and there is some fog, you turn on your flashlight and you can see the beam of light going through the fog.

There are some clouds in the sky and the sun shines through them and you can see the rays of light.

What if there was a selection for the lights as to weather you could turn on the rays or just set an attribute for all light to do it in the scene.

Trying to create neon with the right lighting  and shadowing cannot be done with current light selections. It might  be neat to make a light you could add the length and width, but if you had a design you wanted to use as neon that setting wouldn't work. What if you had an emissive attributes in the scene editor and you could select the object you wanted to give off the light. You could set the distance of the glow, brightness(brightness would set how far the light could be seen: Brightness:1[this would only cast lights to a very short distance say like a foot; Brightness:10[this would act as infinite]. Also have a selection of shadow properties for that object.
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floyd86

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Re: Light Rays and neon
« Reply #1 on: November 08, 2008, 03:18:32 pm »
In scanline i found a pretty good method to create light rays, not sure it will work as good in ART (probably not). What i did is making a object with the same shape as you want the ray to look like. Place it in your scene. Make the transparency of the object 0 and the specular 1. This way you can't see your object, but as light will fall on it, it will look like a ray. Place a spotlight so that the light will fall on the object. The result may look like this, with alot of tweaking:
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VBSmiles

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Re: Light Rays and neon
« Reply #2 on: November 08, 2008, 08:51:24 pm »
It should work loyd. As far as I can tell, most materials act no different in scanline or ART renderers.... with exception of actually using the attributes.
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hihosilver

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Re: Light Rays and neon
« Reply #3 on: November 08, 2008, 10:22:28 pm »
This is called volumetric lights, and I do think it would be a great addition.
Another way to simulate this is to use transparency maps
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floyd86

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Re: Light Rays and neon
« Reply #4 on: November 09, 2008, 07:14:10 am »
Quote from: VBSmiles on November 08, 2008, 08:51:24 pm
It should work loyd. As far as I can tell, most materials act no different in scanline or ART renderers.... with exception of actually using the attributes.

Well the problem with ART is that it doesn't render the back of faces that good. So when you use this method, it might render out wrong. I tried it with the same scene as i posted above and looked totally different.
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