I’ve been working on this scene awhile, and I feel it nearing completion so I thought I’d ask around for some critiquing and suggestions.
The original plan was to centered around cool lighting effects pouring through a stained-glass window, and it grew into this hallway. One thing I don’t like about it are the bases of the pillars; they look a bit out of place to me. But I’m open to any other suggestions on improvement as well. Thoughts?
Thanks!
Floor material i think is ok…however the walls and the pillar looks toonish or something to me…but i like the scene looks creepy…
Yeah, the floors and walls lok a bit flat too. The candle stands are barly visible. Mabey the cool light coming in from the windows should widen out a bit more at the base?
On the other hand, I really like the color shades that you picked.
Good atmosphere, nice clean render. I think the pillar bases are modelled fine, I’d perhaps texture them darker and/or a bit dirtier. Maybe even make reversed duplicates of them at the top of the pillars to even up the architecture a bit. A massive pike/battle axe or something leaning on the wall would be a great finishing touch, the image is quite evenly spread out as is. In a similar thought, perhaps some of the candles might have been burning a little longer and would be a bit shorter? Not that copy and paste is a bad technique (I use it a little too often still), it would just add a bit of character to the scene.
Keep it up!
Ben.
The floor looks like it needs a bump map. Also, for light to cast beams and make visible light shapes like that it needs to be a crapload brighter. Still though, nice job so far, it looks like it’ll get better.
did you use spots with halos to get the colored light? From a realism standpoint, candles really do only give off that much light, so that is good. If I was building a stained glass window, some clear pieces would let in more light, or the hallway is going to be very dark like it is. This is the general problem with castles; the floor is not white, so any light through the windows does not reflect well into the room and give any ambient lighting. So they added torches which put out alot of smoke…SO, to make it brighter and ‘look’ like day, try making the windows more transparent and upping the intensity of the sun, and add some really soft hemi’s where the light hits the floor pointing up to provide fill light into the room. imho.
Well, for one thing, it’s much too dark.
When you are setting up the lighting for any photograph, or CG image, and you want to get a certain effect (as in this case, that the candles are providing the light and some more is shining through the window), the first thing that you have to accept is that the actual lighting-rig will not resemble reality. You are looking for what’s called “plausible practicals,” where a “practical light” is something on-screen that is supposed to emit light. You want the finished scene to plausibly look like what the viewer might imagine, in his idealized mind’s eye, what such a scene might look like if it were being illuminated by the practicals.
The trick is that your practicals really don’t … can’t provide the lighting that you need in the scene. So, first you establish a baseline lighting-setup that provides the basic distribution of tonal-range that the shot requires, then you add lights that will simulate the intended effect of the practicals.
A good example of a shot I once observed was a photo being done for a tourist magazine of a major hotel. Daylight streaming through the windows and skylights, attractive lamps over the floor, and so on … all of it fake. All of it: the shot was put on-film at about 3 o’clock in the morning on a new-moon night. Every single thing was faked.
In CG, you have the marvelous advantage that you can stick a light anywhere you please, even right in the middle of the shot, and the camera can’t “see” the light-source; only the light that it reflects off some chosen surface. And you can choose the surfaces that it will illuminate, in complete contradiction (if you wish) to actual reality.
Thanks, all good suggestions. I’ll try a few out and see how it looks.
For the stained glass you should make sure you use Ray Transparency with a very high filter value and Transhadow on the floor. And yes make the light coming in brighter.
Important question:
half of you guys liked the color, half said the image is too dark. On my monitor, I can see everything just fine, but on my girlfriend’s laptop, the image of the hallway is really dark and I can’t see any detail, or basically anything but the candles and windows.
a) How much detail can you see?
b) What is causing this problem? The lighting change is way more extreme than just monitor brightness settings…
I see stuff fine, but then, my monitor is calibrated.
To continue sundialsvc4’s discussion of faking the lighting, in real situations the human eye adjusts to ambient lighting, within a fairly wide range. It is possible, for example, to read by candlelight, especially if the candle is not directly in view, so the reflected light from the page is the brightest thing in sight. In your medieval hallway, since there is enough light shining through the windows to cast colored light on the floor, there would be enough light in the hall for people to see without the candles. If candles were required for lighting, it would either be very overcast outside, or night.
Point being, in either case, the hall would appear much brighter to someone actually standing in it, than to someone looking at a picture of it. So the picture must be made brighter artificially to compensate for the fact that the viewer’s eyes did not compensate for the low actual light level.
The render looks fine on my monitor. If you’re going for a creepy feeling, keep it dark. The suggestion of a bumpmap on the floor is great. Also, just for kicks, you could add a pool of blood, with some drips, to the upper left. The idea of an axe would then be augmented.
If you’re not going for creepy, then a brighter render would be fantastic.
Either way, candles never burn at the exact same rate. So they should be different heights, with different shapes on the edges, perhaps with some wax gobules dripping down the sides.
Nicely done.
