Well, after really stuggling with textures and lighting along the way I decided to do a project thats very texture and lighting intensive. Its fairly simple and I need some help with the lighting mostly. Heres the first render:
The lighting is a classic problem for beginners with yafray, the solution is a breeze, and really cleans up everything. In the image loading box where you selected the HDRI, you should see a little number box called something like ‘filter’ set to 1, just crank it up to 1.5 to 2 and blender will filter and blend the image so that you won’t get all the tiny individual pixel light artifacts
Yup, still assuming you’re using yafray, make a new lamp and set its type to ‘photon’. You’ll notice it looks like a spotlight, so set its cone to JUST include the diamonds, and nothing else. See, it doesn’t actually cast light, it just tells yafray where to do in-depth caustics. This takes a while, which is why you use tiny spotlight shapes to pick out where you want them, so make sure to get the smallest angle possible.
I increased the energy in my spot lights and added a photon light. I also increased the reflectivity of the marble texture. I’m still not happy with the resaults though.
I want to have the marble show a mirror image of the ring and dimonds if possible. Not mirror image but just a good looking relfection. Also the photon emiter doesn’t look like it did a good job. I’d like for the reflected light inside the dimonds to be farther from the ring and more spread out. Right now I have one photon light thtas fairly farabove the dimonds and is shinning stright down on them.
Should I move the photon emiter at all to give me better resualts? And what should I do about the reflectivity of the ring on the marble?
I don’t think it matters where the photon emitter is. Why, by the way, where do your spotlights point, they might be casting light in a funny direction?
Though I’ll let you know if you have hdri image you should in no way use external spotlights as anything but an auxiliary source of light. Also, that doesn’t look like an HDR map I’m familiar with. Which map are you using? I’m sorry if I sound like I’m talking down to you if you know this, but the hdr map has to have an hdr extension AND be a spherical light-probe. Try here for some classic, high-quality ones. http://www.debevec.org/Probes/ Here’s another one with a couple beauties. 65 meg exr panoramic format, baby. http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Data/HighResProbes/
The reason I recommend these is because I dunno if you are using HDRI images, you shouldn’t actually need spotlights if you’re using those with yafray.
Also, ‘reflection’(ref) won’t do anything, it’s ‘ray mirror’ you want to turn on for a reflection. You can adjust the slider up just a bit if you only want a hint.
I’m using the St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome Probe from the first link that you posted. I am also using this tutorial(link at the bottom of the post) to set up the HDRI.
I have three spot lights in the picture. One to the right and left of the camera and one towards the back of the 3d enviroment. Is that all I need to do? Also you havent anwsered my question about refletivity of the marble and I got a quick question. If I place the photon emiter towards the back of the picture shinning through the ring to hit the dimond will it still cast photons through the ring to the dimond? Or does it have the be shinning directly at the dimond with nothing blocking it? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Import_and_Render_a_SolidWorks_Model
Blender internal can use HDRI images, although it only looks good on reflective materials at the moment. There’s a glitch in the sky texture AO setting that makes the lighting incredibly noisy on diffuse surfaces, even at 16 samples. (Example is 5 samples.)
the photon emitter has to have a direct line of sight with the diamond. If anything is in the way, the photons won’t reach the diamond to make those pretty caustics.
