Hello. Thank you for watching.
Could anyone tell me how to make and shade a car light?
Or could you tell me a site which explains those?
A natural return-question would be: “in what setting?” What kind of light, and it “a catalog shot of the light, suitable for a flyer from an auto-parts store,” or is it part of a Lamborghini? How far away is the camera going to be? Is the light the center of attention, or an irrelevant accessory that won’t get a passing glance? There just isn’t “one single ‘right’ way” to model anything. And I sort-of look at it as, “how little can I actually get away with here?” Stuff that warrants having attention lavished upon it … gets lavished.
How you do the actual lights and materials will depend on whether you are using BI for Cycles.
Either way, a common place to start would be to have what will be the glass and what will be the lights as separate objects.
Since it’s in materials, I’m guessing a “painted on” light for a game?
Not only have textures for glossy and diffuse, but perhaps an extra map for emission. The rest would be done in a game engine, to animate the brightness used for emission as needed. If you need individual control of lights, you may also need to give them their own separate materials. There may be some lighting effects such as bloom, but those also depend on the game engine.
If you’re actually modeling it out for a render, then an emissions mixed material in Cycles makes it easy for the bulb or LED. Make the other parts out of glass (lens) or glossy (reflector) as needed. Lens piece should be modeled as a solid (at least using solidify) if you want glass refraction to work correctly. There’s also emission, etc. in BI, but I’m not as familiar with rendering there. Also may want to do a light path mix on emissions in Cycles using camera rays, light going to the camera exceeding 1.0 in RGB doesn’t anti-alias properly. (Bright lights can also blow-out their values in Cycles.) Exception to that is when using (post-render) compositing filters such as the glare node, sometimes they need that high value to work but it’s a bit complicated to explain - better to just experiment as there’s seemingly no set rule for this.
I’m sorry I was too lazy. I should’ve asked more clearly.
I’m making a car which would be rendered in Cycles. I want it to be realistic no matter whether the light is turned off or turned on. And now I’m confused about how I can reproduce the bumps and dents of the glass that would refract the light just like the real one.
I wonder there are good textures for the glass that refract the light, or I should model it with flat surface…
lights.blend (654 KB)
The glass itself is too smooth. I can see through the light source and I think that’s not realistic.
Use displacement, bump or normal maps. As long as you bend light passing through dielectrics it’ll show as plausible.
first of all you glass does not have any volume
so no refraction at all!
do you have a high res to show the real thing or is it just a generic car light ?
now the first pic seems to show some bubbles inside
so add some volume bubbles inside your glass to get refraction
now to see the details inside you should also add a low intensity point light inside
to lit up things around or most of it will appear blackish,
happy cl
Thank you very much for answering, guys!
I’ve learned from you guys now and seems I need to learn much more. I will make the light have thickness at least and observe a lot.