Anim8or Community
General Category => General Anim8or Forum => Topic started by: Nellucnaiv on September 19, 2017, 01:23:13 pm
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Hi all, :D
I'm putting together a scene that takes place in an old medieval type hallway. I've made the hallway, candles and morphs for the flames to move and flicker,(hopefully). ::)
I have four candles and have set a spotlight over each one with inner 25 and outer 35 degrees radius which seems sort of okay but I'd like the candles to shed their light on the walls.(like real candles). Any ideas or suggestions?
I thought of using some kind of glow filters for this but mine are spheres and to blatantly visible! :o
I'd also like to try and get the shadows from them to move which I thought may work if I move the lights randomly ever so slightly above them. I have a character that I'm working on and would like the light from the (candles) to cast his shadows.
Gee, I'd really appreciate any input on making this scene look a bit spooky!? ;)
Look forward to any of your replies.
Ian.
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I did this some years ago But I used Terranim8or for it, The flames used animated texures (which you can do with Terranim8or)
What Lights are you Using? Locals or Spots?
Use Locals Scaled into each Flame, for Each one set Inner 50, Outer 75
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Hi there. Thanks so much for your advice and input. I don't quite understand the scaling function on lights. I know you can make them larger or smaller but I see the beam lines stay identical. I thought it was merely to make editing easier without bulky lights in the way? Does it also decrease or increase their intensity? I'll give the 50/60 angle a go. At the moment I also have 3 glow filters around each flame with ambience set at 8.0 for each, transparency at 0.01 which I move as the flame moves with a local shining right into it. It gives a reasonably realistic glow but no light is actually seen on the walls. Is there a better way? I thought of placing a flat, smooth, transparent reflective patch behind each on the wall? Sorry about the letter but I'd really like to try and get it looking good.
Thanks again!
Ian
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The scaling that kreator mentioned in in the Advanced Light propertied. Set the Inner Radius to 50 and the Outer Radius to 75. Make sure it's a Local light in the main Light dialog. The Angle parameter isn't used for local Lights.
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Local lights emit light in all directions, as opposed to spot lights that can only emit into a hemisphere at maximum. Lights of this type should illuminate the walls, if no illumination is apparent it may be due to the normals being incorrectly aligned on the walls (if so, flip them) or something to do with the walls' material.
Regarding the radius settings, effectively the light will illuminate anything within the Inner Radius 100%, and anything outside the Outer Radius 0%. So something that falls half way between the inner and outer radii will be illuminated 50%. Depending on the scale of your model you may need to adjust these settings to get the result you're looking for.
Glow spheres are a bit trickier, especially if you are rendering with ART which always casts 100% shadows*. A sphere around the flame will effectively block any light inside it from illuminating anything using ART, if you are using Scanline you can set the spheres to not cast shadows. An alternate method would be to place circular objects between the flames and camera that simulate the glow from each candle, so long as the camera is static it should look ok. If the camera moves you will need to move the circles too.
* May have been resolved in an update, I'm a bit out of touch with recent developments.
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Thanks so much Kreator, I understand. I notice that local angles can't be changed. I've tried as recommended but still no visible light.
Thanks for your time
Ian
Thank you for the detailed help ENSONIQ5.
I tried fixing and flipping normals. I still have no light visible. However, 4 small illuminated circles appear in the lights locations in the ceiling now when rendering.
I am using Art Ray Trace as Scanline is extremely slow, about 5 minutes to render 1 image of 400 x 300 when I tested compared to about 4 seconds for the same using Art, unless I'm doing something wrong?
As far as the textures go, I built the hallway in units using seamless rock and floor tile jpegs and rotated them to face the correct way using UV function. I used the same images in higher contrast for Bumpmaps on both, set at 100%. Other than that, I used the standard materials settings except for the roughness which I have at 3.0 as I don't want the material to appear too smooth and shine.
I so appreciate your advice, any idea what the problem could be?
Best regards,
Ian
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Anim8or does not Project Light in the physical sense, You have to fake it with an Emssive texture. Ie if you had two Spot Lights in the headlights of a car It would not project the light, You would need to add a couple of Cones To fake the light.
I did an article about lightcones in an issue of Dotan8 The last one in 2010 you should be able to get it via my dropbox
see http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php/topic,5534.0.html
Along with all the other issues may be of use to you!
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Best guess is something weird with the material, ie. not enough difference between Ambient and Diffuse, too low Specular or global Ambient level too high. Maybe upload the an8 file so we can take a look.
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The only problem with all the effect hacks is that they are nearly all incompatible with ART.
As stated above, ART casts 100% shadows of any mesh regardless of transparency.
My advice would be before doing any hack, get the scene rendering properly.
ART takes the longest of all the renderers, the fastest is OpenGL which is the same as the workspace. Scanline is second fastest.
ART works best with AA on and the more samples the longer it takes.
Trev
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Thank you so much to all of you for so freely sharing your advice and knowledge. The support is valued!
ENSONIQ was right about the 'normals'. I detached the floor and roof, flipped normals and reattached/ joined solid. Turns out my specular value of 0.6 for both needed to be tweaked to 1.2. I now have light!! Just need to fiddle with local inner and outer amount s. 250 and 400 comes close but will tweak it later when I have some time. Still want to try filters in front of the camera for the candle flames.
Thanks everyone, great to have support like this!
Ian
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Wow...That Hall way looks nice. Very detailed.
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Thanks Blue Dalek,
I'm trying...not so easy! :)
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Only 71 Frames I did have cobwebs all over the place but cannot find the png files now.... and I am sure I redid this with real fire at some point cause I didnt like the candles still I hope it conveys the spooky feel !!
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Those flames and shadows look really good. Wonderful atmosphere there! I've set my lights into the flames as you suggested and it works like a charm! Thanks so much, what a difference!
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Glad you liked it Ian!
You can turn the lights on and off as well as changing the lights colour, that also adds to the feeling that you want! You get those options in the timeline if you enable those settings.
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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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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 = $brightness*(0.8, 0.7, 0.1);
To add a script to a light's color, click on the lower of the two "..." buttons in the color area of the light dialog. Then set the "On" button in the Expression area at the button, click the "Edit" button and paste in the above script.
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Wow! Thanks ENSONIQ and Steve.
You people are very supportive and encouraging! ENSONIQ that hallway with the arches, so much detail and lighting looks awesome! Very professional! I like your idea of the reflective sphere surrounding the camera and am going to experiment a bit with your idea shortly.
Besides having locals set in the candle flames, I also have locals with a pale yellow light above each candle. I've animated them to move with the flame morphs to give a moving shadow effect but as you say, it does take a lot of experimenting and creativity to get the atmosphere right!
Steve, I appreciate the flickering light script. My weak area is scripts and I need some tutoring but I'll definitely give it a try.
Guys, I'll post a 100 frame look at what I've got so far for your opinions and criticisms.
Thanks a lot to both of you!
Ian
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$brightness = abs(frand()) *0.7 + 0.3; ?
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Yes abs(frand()) is better :)
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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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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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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 (https://s6.postimg.org/vid36dwgx/Smile_Blnkgry.gif)
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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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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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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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Thanks Kreator,
WIP....silly me! :)
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Nellucnaiv
Those are awesome flames! I would make them a smidgen more orange, but, thats me :-)
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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? ???