Painting with Light in Cycles!

I have been doing some experimenting with Cycles and I have come across an intresting solution to a problem I was having that you guys might find intresting.

I was using HDRLight Studio, and thought it would be cool to do this inside Blender.

You can download a simple scene with a fully setup light dome HERE Just open it and set the other viewport to render and start painting.

More detailed video Here:

Would a emission texture on an low poly mesh, not be better?

But else an very Unique powerful impressive Technique.
Bye Bye 3 point Light setups ^^

thats cool.
havent tried it yet, but it looks really awesome.

umm… i have never used shapekeys…
could you do a mini-tutorial on those please?

In an ideal world yes it would, but Blender/Cycles cant update a texture in realtime. You need to save and reload the texture every time you make a change to see the effect in the render. Using VertxColour you can see the effects in realtime and paint while Cycles is rendering.

ok…
i found a shape key tut on youtube… pretty neat…
would it be possible to make your sphere object as an addon object(complete ready for painting)
so that we dont have to make a new one each time?

i think that Holyenigma74’s idea is a good one, is there anyone who will build a button into the add menu (as an addon of course) that creates a simple plane with the shapekey already added, and already has a curve and modifier built onto it? this would make this tut really useful, and very relevant. Also newer users would have an easier time, because i didnt learn about shapekeys til almost a year of blendering ;D

i think the post about adding a windmill would be relevant to that as well. But how to implement the curve modifier and the shape key.

Is it possible to just use a UV sphere with the normals turned inside with the same emission setup?

Evil Moon MOose, i think the reason for using a plane/sphere,
is so that you have a square map to paint on…

if you used a UV sphere, your map would be ??
not sure how a uv sphere default unwraps, depends…

a cube/polysphere may give better results in this regard than a uv sphere.

I have added a link to a simple scene to the top post, Just open it and set the other viewport to render and start painting.

true true thank you MCHammond! That is basically what I was looking for ;D sometimes i forget how easy soem things can be ;D

your post is giving a link error. *(404)

edit link working now

It should work now untill my webserver dies, it does that some times.

cool ! thanks MCHammond :slight_smile:
i noticed that there was a little “stretching” of the lightmap texture behind the monkey,
i rotated the sphere from the top view a few degrees, then from the side view a few degress…

that makes the light color behind the monkey one color no hardlines…

ohh… and is there a way to exclude the sphere background from the rendered image?,
i know with regular blender internal you just set it to RGBA if you have nothing in the background and you can have transparent background…

umm with setup can we use the light from the sphere but also exclude it from the rendered image?

something that would also be nice is if someone could come up with a sphere with no pinching like we are getting,
but also have a nice square painting surface…
Maybe if we painted on a env style map(angmap) that would help?

@holyenigma74

Glad you like it, Its not perfect but it does work. Hopefully some developer will see this and make 100 times better, I can only hope for something like this:
http://www.hdrlightstudio.com/lesson/keyshot_car_lighting_demo

Post what you got, I would love to see what you have created :stuck_out_tongue:

is this going to be integrated in 2.6 ?

or always be part of an SVN if any available yet ?

happy 2.6

Neat demo, it looks a lot like the light painting shown off in the initial video for the bleeding-edge rendering app. Clarisse by Isotropix. So it almost looks as if you can roughly emulate the same style of light painting from a high end app. that’s not even released yet.

It would be neat to try, either in an artistic sense or as a lighting shortcut.

The next offical Blender release will have cycles. Blender 2.61! “unless there is a bug fix realese”

200 passes seed0 x 200passes seed 3
(Set to “screen” in Gimp(merged the layers), then use the wavelet denoise filter) http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/6351/chandlightsphere1signed.jpg

Cycles for me, is basically unusable though…
since i have such an old video card and a very slow CPU…

I need an upgrade badly… :frowning:

are you saying that light paint will be included with cycle ?

happy 2.6

Light painting is just what I called the technique, its not an additonal feature. I am using the vinila Cycles and just painting a vertexcolour and setting that up to emit light. Its just done in a way to emulate a feature that other programs have.

But yes when Cycles comes out you can do the light painting then. :stuck_out_tongue: