Guys,
I’m coming from photography. I made a champaign bottle in 2.78 with a fine shader, now I need those light’s reflections in the glass to become nice and soft.
I set up 2 “strip lights” (emitting planes) to bring out the shape, but the reflection is rather harsh and unpleasant.
In photography, I’d place a strong diffusor right in front of the lights to avoid those razor sharp reflections. But how can I achieve that in Cycles?
Of course, I would not alter the glass material. So either there is a way to modify the light source or the light itself.
Should I bounce the light off of a less reflective material onto the bottle? Like a reflector in photography. Or should I place some kind of material in between lights and subject?
I’ve found a blur node, but I haven’t used the compositor yet enough to know my way around. There is also supposed to be an “Integrator” according to the online documentation, but I have failed to find it in the software.
You could apply a greyscale image to your emission planes to soften the edges - perhaps using it to mix between an emissive and transparent material towards the edges of your emission planes.
This is great, I got a similar reply on Stack Exchange, where someone recommended using a B/W image to soften the edges, which is similar to your suggestion. Awesome, Thank you!
UV unwrap your emission plane and just toy with a color ramp node for the x and y outputs.
For area lights we don’t have proper texture space yet, so you’ll need a mapped transparency plane in front of it (map to control shadow).
I just tested the color ramp approach for emission plane. Anybody else have a problem in that the emissive plane will always case a shadow lighted by an environment map? Cycles settings have shadows turned off for that object, and even if I have a isShadowRay->Transparency mix doesn’t help. Sun lamp seem to follow the rules, but not the environment map. I’ve tried low and high map resolution, color and noncolor data, gamma correction, none or many diffuse bounces, various color management options, not helping. Is this a bug?
What I saw was the guy did something like a circular gradient, or better, he shaded the edges inwards. I’ll try all approaches tomorrow morning and post the results!
@CarlG I’m having the same problem with the planes casting shadows, it actually seems they cast a shadow into their own light with the edge closest to the lit surface. I spent countless hours to find out how to get these objects to NOT cast shadows, all I could find wad how to switch off object’s shadows when being hit by the emission object’s light. Kind of weird. It’s like finding a good glass shader. 10 tutorials for “realistic” glass, then you’ll maybe find the right search terms and find one that works…
