Lighting Engines

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi all :slight_smile:

I got some problems with lighting the engines of the Daedalus. The first image is a single engine. The second image has that engine twice and two smaller versions of it. In the top left you see a third type engine.

I am pretty happy with the light coming ‘out’ of the engines, which I did with halo’s. However, these don’t give off any light, so everything stays dark. Very unrealistic:spin: In the second image I marked some area’s with red where I want the light to be. The complete end of the engine could be done with a single low-power lamp I think, but 1 do you have better idea’s?

The biggest problem is with the ‘circle’ of light half-way the engine. How do I get it to light the ‘inside’? I tried it with some lamps, but it seems ‘point’ lamps aren’t ‘point’ lamps, they seem to shine through the mesh, so that didn’t work.
2 Does anyone know how to light that area only?

And at last: I wanted some glow around the engines. I did this by adding a faint halo. In long-range shots it looks good (see third image) but on close-ups it doesn’t work at all. 3 Should I leave the halo’s and do it with the node editor?

Thanks for any help, it’s really appreciated!
Sven

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/4287/help2ko6.th.jpg
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/9089/helppt6.th.jpg
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/8263/help3yv8.th.jpg

2

When the light shines through the mesh it could be that you have a bias problem. Lower the bias value of the lamp until this effect dissapears.

3

You could use radiosity baked lighting for this, setting up emitters in the areas you have the halo’s working, that’ll help simulate realistic lighting around these areas.

As far as the glow, you could go with the node system or sequence editor to acheive the effect. It would most likely look better on close ups. Doesn’t hurt to try it that’s for sure.

It’s an awesome looking model from what I can tell so far, fix the lighting issues and it could be a very awesome render.

4

I will try this, I’ve never used the bias value before, maybe now is the right moment to discover what it does :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve never used radiosity before. Do you know of a good tutorial on using radiosity?

What would render faster: Using lamps (with the lower bias value) or using radiosity?

5

Lamps render faster then radiosity. Especially if you are using spots with buffered shadows or lamps without raytracing.