Checkered floors...

Ok folks, time for a ‘XYZ over a checkered floor’ image! :smiley:

This time XYZ is not a chrome ball, but a magnifying glass,
Don’t ask me if that is made in Blender… of course NOT it is LightFlow with
Blender for creating the scene.

http://www.selleri.org/Blender/images/lente.jpg

Comments?

Stefano

Neat. Would you care to post the render time for the scene? I’ve been curious to see if it would be worth it to switch to an external renderer for my final animation, and I have no idea what the rendering time shift would be like. Also, any chance of a mini-review of the lightflow export script? What does it do well? What does it not do so well?

Anyway, cool image. You could make it even cooler by including an attachment for a small amplifier lens that sits over one of the corners of the main lens.

Thanx for comments,

Time was 2h on a PIII 800MHz 0.5Gb RAM. (Win 2k)

It was niced down because I have to work :slight_smile: so CPU time could be less tha 1h.

Original scene was 800x600, reduced to get a better feeling.

The export script few major flawns (sorry eeshlo)
1 - It does not keep lattice deformations (objects reverts to original state)
2 - Parenting is lost… and transformations are NOT kept (so
you can find your objects everywhere…)

Minor flawns are that you have te edit all non-plastic-like material to
have reflection/refraction and that lights exported are always much dimmer than original (can’t tell why, so I usually multiply
by 5-10 the energy…)

Sad point is speed, really. maybe on Linux… I have another rendering wich is indeed simpler as a mesh (but with really complex refractions) which is rendering now… I’m at 31.3% and 31h 40m of rendering time…

I can try to post a MiniTut on my site one of these days

Stefano

Thanks for the information.

Ah, wouldn’t it be nice to, as one poster said a while ago, have an external renderer so well integrated that you could hit the “lightflow” or “bmrt” button instead of the render button and have it work with ALL features intact.

It is a problem with the Python API, you cannot access all the functions. I tried to write some scripts and every time the most usefull function was missing :frowning:

I bet there is no API to ‘clear paren and keep transform’ and so on

Stefano

What? You don’t like that? Ok, just for you I made some quick changes, go check my site (you know where) to find a new version, which might or might not work, try it out…

Minor flawns are that you have te edit all non-plastic-like material to
have reflection/refraction

This can be done with the material extensions, you know about those, don’t you? LF_README <---- its in there, really !

and that lights exported are always much dimmer than original (can’t tell why, so I usually multiply
by 5-10 the energy…)

I commented on this in the LF_README.tx (yes, again), the best way to get a feeling for the lighting is to enable ‘sphere’ mode in Blender for the lights, this has to do with the fact that Lightflow lights (like in real life) have a falloff factor with distance, which in Blender can be done by enabling ‘Sphere’ mode…
If you can get good results in Blender with that, you should get some good results in Lightflow. Which doesn’t mean it will always get it right of course…

Sad point is speed, really. maybe on Linux… I have another rendering wich is indeed simpler as a mesh (but with really complex refractions) which is rendering now… I’m at 31.3% and 31h 40m of rendering time…

On Linux things are twice as fast as on windows in my experience, but of course, if you have both radiosity and caustics enabled, rendering times can be quite high, so for quick(er) previews, disable both…
I could of course add a preview preset to the script for that…

Wow! You can do that? You’re a wizard :slight_smile:

[quote]
Minor flawns are that you have te edit all non-plastic-like material to
have reflection/refraction

This can be done with the material extensions, you know about those, don’t you? LF_README <---- its in there, really !
[/quote]

Surely NOT :slight_smile: I’ve checked the ‘I press the button let’s see what happens’ In that poll on ‘How do you learned Blender’ on Chat forum :slight_smile:
I’ll read the readme througthfully but, well, after all I think that manually editing the LightFlow script is not too bad.

[quote]
and that lights exported are always much dimmer than original (can’t tell why, so I usually multiply
by 5-10 the energy…)

I commented on this in the LF_README.tx (yes, again)
[/quote]

I start to think that in your posts there might be some subtle insinuation on the fact that maybe I haven’t read the README :stuck_out_tongue:

Stefano

hmmm,damn i wish i could get my lf stuff to look that good.
alas,tis the price i pay for being programming illiterate

nice work!

rixtr

The halo is hurthing the image bad. It should not be showing through the planet from behind it.

:o wow, somebody is getting proficient with Lightflow… congratulations :smiley: (why these faces are yellow ?)

Plus, you have hurted Esshlo’s ego so much that he decided to improve his script after all these years ! :stuck_out_tongue:

And… you didn’ t read the README !!! YOU ARE MY HERO !!! WOOO HOOOOO

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Cheers.

malefico (yeay I’m back!)

nice to see you again! And the lens is not that complex… have a look at the diamond post! I start loving LightFlow :slight_smile:

Stefano

My dear friend DAK, I think you got the wrong topic…

The halo is hurthing the image bad. It should not be showing through the planet from behind it.

My picture is in a seperate topic. And I think that the halo should show up in-front of the planet. As long as the origin of a halo isn’t completely blocked, the whole halo will show, it will get dimmer if less of it’s origin is showing (noticed this after a couple of night drives on the highway).
Adues,
WeWa

really nice LF work , I wish I could understand all those code based rendering, but it is not for me then I guess…I will try to tweak or just work with cartoony stuff instead…I guess 8)

(maybe A:M soon :-? ?)

/ztonzy

Actually, I only started this about two months ago, it wasn’t me who wrote the script, that is all Montz’s fault :wink: , I only modified it a bit, nothing more…
And the changes I made two days ago were easy enough to add.
As for not reading the README file, it seems there are a lot of “hero’s” out there…
I wasn’t aware I actually had an ego :-?
Anyway, there is another update coming soon, courtesy of S68, an actual GUI, thanks S68!
:smiley:

cool!