I am about 3 weeks into my Blender learning curve, and have been working on modeling and animation. A Blender 3d design tutorial and web searches are helping me up the hill.
After completing a castle tutorial, I decided to add hemi lights to the towers, point lights to the archway, one sun lamp to simulate Moon light and a couple himi lights to light up the sides. By the trial and error process of adjusting the lighting colors and values, and moving the camera coordinates, I came up with render that looked great. So now, to animate a fly through, and after rendering the first few frames, a longer animation appeared to be in order. I animated 6300 frames and did the 39 hour render. But much to my dismay the entire castle rendered too dark. Can I fix the video or do I have to re-light and re-render?
Well you can make it a bit brighter in post-processing but I’d recommend re-rendering… before starting the rendering the animation make sure the frame look perfect.
it depends of the “kind of too dark” -
at least it could be you will have no other option than to render
it again with better settings, because changes in gamma, contrast, light
may override the scope of the display-settings and
will then cut off some details.
one way to pull up gamma with
the use of mencoder (part of mplayer) is to use
the vf plugin like this, setting the gamma to value 2.:
you may need to set a higher vbitrate if re-encoding uses a too low … or
use a lower bitrate to compress it more (=smaller filesize).
There are other samples using ffmpeg … etc…
Post a frame for people to lighten up and then they can give proper advice on what to do. Usually, I use contrast and brightness to boost an image (the output usually resembles an image with an even lightsource behind it), still maintaining a lot of detail if balanced right.
The inside of the castle where you can see the brick is fixable (and even fine as-is if it’s a night type scene which I believe it is), but the outside needs light. You could use area lamps shining directly on or from the ground or sun lamps with very low energy set to a blue or something.
You can also add environmental lighting (in the World tab).
It’s that outside that’s the issue…
Thanks again for Looking, and Marius it makes me feel good that you thought it to be a night type scene. The outside of the castle is, to quote Linuus “waaaaay too dark to fix.” and it may be that a re-render is my only option. My intention was to have a dark scene, and I want the inside lighter than the out side, but I realize the overall scene needs to be lighter but not by much as it is supposed to be moon lit. Now the sky is an issue that concerns me, I would like it to be dark and also star lit. Can this be accomplished with the World tab, and and also have the ability to lighten the whole scene keeping the inside lighter than the outside? To ask the question another way will the World tab lighten the scene? Will key frames stay the same? Below are three more snapshots. I hope I have given enough information to show the direction in which I am trying to head. As I implied I am new to Blender, and all help is appreciated.
