I think I have my materials the way I want them (give or take…they’re based of the exquisite Maid San), but I’m having a devil of a time with the lighting.
What I’m trying to accomplish is a fairly uniform lighting setup, with “medium” (not too dark, not too light) shadows. It also needs to render in a reasonable amount of time (yes, this is very relative), as they will all be upwards of 1600px square.
I’ve attached a render of the scene, as it is, and I’m using a handful of spots for the vertical lights, a hemi for each of the “reflections” off of the wall/ceiling, and a large shadow-only area lamp that overlaps the ceiling to produce the shadows. I have AO turned off, because I think it makes the setting look too realistic.
The other attachment is an example of my comic style, which will be integrated with the blender renders. This is ultimately how I’d like the scene to be rendered. The background in that panel was done in blender, but it’s far less complex than the apartment scene, and thus much easier to light.
Any suggestions on getting a less washed-out/overexposed look on the wall-mounted lights would be welcome, too.
In my opinion, the first problem is the intensity of the lights. The walls and ceiling are saturating to white, and so they lack gradient information. I’d cut the intensity by half, and make a new render; then we could take it from there; --because as long as the color is saturating there’s really no way to assess any further lighting subtleties.
Part of that, I think, is the material settings. I’m using ramps to control the break in the light/shadow regions, which is why the walls have no gradient color.
Those spots, too, provide zero light to the rest of the scene. But I’ll tone them down to see if I can get it to not wash out the walls.
also, less about the lighting and more about the materials, try making the colors more vivid, with less variation. and add more of it. on the walls, and tables and things.
I know what you’re getting at, and I’ve two responses:
The materials are far from done. I’m going to add some image/procedural textures to add wear and tear. Plus, the room is only about 50% done in terms of objects. There is going to be a LOT more to look at when it’s done.
The room is supposed to be bleak. The residents are over-the-top geeks who focus more on their computers than their living situation (as is becoming apparent). Everything that isn’t digital is done haphazardly. Plus, go check out an empty apartment - most of them are nothing more than an ubiquitous not-quite-white color, with tan carpeting. That’s precisely what this is.So, when all is said and done, it will be much more lively (and dirty). Plus, few of the renders will ever be at this wide of an angle. Most will be close-ups of the desks. And, if it is a large shot like this, it will probably be blurred in post-production because the focal point will be in the foreground.
True enough…I’m looking at the two, more objectively in light of your thoughts, and I think I agree.
It still doesn’t change the lighting issue, which is the problem I’m trying to fix, but your observation and critique is good. Thanks for pointing me down a better path!
Well, that’s looking a lot better, at 0.3; might even improve a bit with 0.25.
I’ve really no idea how you define “cartoon shading” or what you’re trying to achieve, but the next step I would suggest would be to get rid of whatever light tricks you got there, replace the lights with emissive geometry, and do a radiosity bake. Nothing gets even close to the realism in lighting gradients that radiosity baking produces.
Cartoon shading, toon shading, cel shading…all sort of the same thing. See my comic image in the first post, or at maid san. Uniform lighting, with shadows only to show shape, and tight, bright shiny highlights if needed.
While the emissive bake would definitely get the right gradients, I’m not sure it would accomplish the shading I want. Maybe it would – how much does that function pay attention to material settings? Though, I really do NOT want to unwrap all of these objects.
I do get a vague idea; what I meant is there’s many variants of toon/cell shading and I’m not familiar with their algorithms to begin with, much less with your requirements in detail. But what I do know is that in the case of flat, light colored walls and ceilings, the light gradients are all you’ve got, so they are 100% important, so you absolutely need radiosity baking with its multiple light bounces to get any realism.
While the emissive bake would definitely get the right gradients, I’m not sure it would accomplish the shading I want.
Yep; that’s what I meant: only you know exactly what you want.
Maybe it would – how much does that function pay attention to material settings?
It does. If you put a green wall next to a white one you’ll see some greenishness bounced onto the white wall.[/quote]
Though, I really do NOT want to unwrap all of these objects.
But for a radiosity bake you can use an automatic unwrap. It takes seconds. Just highlight everything with A, then press E to LSCM, and voila!
EDIT:
Ooops… You need seams to LCSM, I forgot. You can use the Archi unwrapper, tho.
Putting in seams isn’t an issue. It’s making the unwrap nice and neat, like the stuff we’ve been doing for PU. That’s more time and effort than I’m willing to spend, at this point.
But, if a super-perfect unwrap isn’t necessary, then I’ll give it a go. I think it’ll take all weekend, b/c I have >200k polies in that shot, though… The chair is a horrendous poly-hog with subsurf.
I’m also wondering about just using a single sun lamp or large spot, and setting the walls/ceiling to cast no shadow.
This is all giving me various ideas, which is good
Exactly. The models you do for PU have to have super-perfect unwraps because they are for a game engine; they have to work well with OpenGL, which means that
a) all the islands have to have an even scaling, as the GPU computes the ideal mipmap bias level for a whole model at once, rather than per-pixel.
b) standardized orientation of the islands, so that you can use global motion blurs for back-fading dirt streaks and scratches, during the texturing process
c) padding space between islands to be friendly to anisotropic filtering
d) grouping by materials to reduce color bleed by runtime filtering
e) alignment to power of two gridlines in the uv layout, to reduce color bleed in mipmap generation
None of that is true in this case; though; a 10-seconds UV layout by Archimap will do perfectly fine for you.
Looks pretty inconsistent to me. The light fixtures suggest a major effort in producing soft, ambient light. But shadows look razor-sharp.
But then again, if that’s what you want, that’s what you want.
