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Author Topic: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?  (Read 19478 times)

ENSONIQ5

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #15 on: September 25, 2017, 10:18:18 am »

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 :)
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Steve

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #16 on: September 25, 2017, 01:29:11 pm »

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.
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Nellucnaiv

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #17 on: September 25, 2017, 03:10:44 pm »

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
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Claude

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #18 on: September 25, 2017, 03:20:17 pm »

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

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #19 on: September 25, 2017, 04:02:17 pm »

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

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #20 on: September 26, 2017, 11:00:52 pm »

I put together a 500 x 281, (16/9) 100 frames of my project. To try and get the flickering effect, I changed the light colours in the flames randomly but think maybe changing the colours in the locals above each flame might give a better effect as they're animated to give the moving shadows that candles create. This was a test, so I put my little bat and my main character in but he's not fully animate in the rendering. I just wanted to check that the shadows look okay and spread in the right directions.

I'd really appreciate your feedback on improvements! :)...Too light, too dark, wrong colours....?

 
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ENSONIQ5

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #21 on: September 27, 2017, 03:18:58 am »

Excellent work, this looks great!  To be honest I think the light variance looks pretty correct, based on the action of flames themselves, and the candle flames and wicks are really excellent with a very realistic appearance.  The main things I'd be looking at relate to scale, the candles and flames are very large relative to the bat and the (seriously creepy!) approaching figure.  Great job on animating the figure's robe by the way, very nice indeed!

Also, while it would negatively affect rendering speed, softening the shadows cast by the lights would help to get rid of those hard-edged, dark circular shadows on the floor under each candle.  They can also be reduced by ensuring the max range of each light overlaps each other, so the shadows are partially cancelled by illumination from each adjacent light.

Finally, higher resolution textures for the walls and floor/ceiling would improve overall 'realism', and adding a bump map would also make the walls look less flat.  Just dropping the same texture into the bump channel and setting the value to, say, 60 would work quite well without needing to develop a separate map.  If there's already a bump map in place perhaps increase the bump value, turn up the specular value and reduce roughness which should improve how the lights interact with the map.

Well done on this, very impressive!
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johnar

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #22 on: September 27, 2017, 08:38:58 am »

That's awesome.
 The candle flames look great, a nice scene, and hats off for the cloak movement, and 'love the bat'.!
  Good stuff Nellucnaiv
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Gyperboloid

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #23 on: September 27, 2017, 12:18:27 pm »

Nice work! It's always interesting to "take a look behind the scenes" , so the set up and such would be interesting to look at. For that reason I think that should be posted in WIP forum at first place  ???
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Nellucnaiv

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #24 on: September 27, 2017, 02:16:01 pm »

Gee, thanks guys,
I started by knowing very little and then got hooked!
Thanks John, hope you like the animation you did for my voices. I think it's awesome and the compliments are rolling in about your job on my FB Page! You must let me know when you want voices! :)
ENSONIQ, thanks for the lights IN the flames idea. I wouldn't have flames without them.
Your latest advice is spot on, I'm going to set higher resolution images for materials. I have used the same for bumpmap at 100 and more contrast but higher res may just 'bump' it out more. Will also check out softening the shadows etcetera.

Thanks a lot to all of you for the support and encouragement! What is the WIP Forum?
Ian
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kreator

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #25 on: September 27, 2017, 02:49:55 pm »



Thanks a lot to all of you for the support and encouragement! What is the WIP Forum?

Ian


Works In Progress WIP


Its in Finished works and Works In Progress on Here Ian
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Nellucnaiv

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #26 on: September 27, 2017, 03:13:01 pm »

Thanks Kreator,
WIP....silly me! :)
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Blick Fang

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #27 on: September 27, 2017, 04:26:38 pm »

Nellucnaiv

Those are awesome flames!   I would make them a smidgen more orange, but, thats me :-)
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fefe01

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Re: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas?
« Reply #28 on: October 16, 2017, 06:55:24 am »

Thank you for that post! It is really inspiring.
Hey guys, can you help me about how to use asl in this lighting stuff. I mean the paths to go? ???
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