Well, this took like a cubic b–load of time to get rendered, and still I’m not quite happy with the result: placing the brightest source of light literally inside the salt lamp model (i.e. staying true to physics at least in this regard) doesn’t seem to pay off. I followed all recommendations from here - www.blenderguru.com/articles/7-ways-get-rid-fireflies/ - to kill off the fireflies, except for killing caustics, rendered this at 6000 samples, and still got helluvalot of noise which even the excess of post-processing filters couldn’t help to get rid of. I believe that it can be done somehow else; I tried to make the body of the salt-lamp to emit light (which immediately spoiled its looks), but I’m yet to figure how to make “inner gradient” as it is, so that there was no emitting objects inside it.
Any recommendations are really welcome, with a lot of gratitude.
UPD: And yes, perhaps there’s just too many polygons (3.7m) and glossy mats.
Well, so far everything looks spot on - except of course, the lamp.
Starting with the simplest thing that may make a difference… You
have a lamp and a candle in a room with daylight coming through
the window. Dunno how much it will help you in the process, but
perhaps make it night outside, so there’s less ambient light in the
environment. Then take a look again at your lamp without any
compositing and such. Maybe seeing it in its proper context will help
you find a better way to the look your going for.
Frankly, right now it looks like orange kryptonite in an Amish house.
I’m trying to figure out how to beat noise, given that the primary source of orange light is encapsulated within another model (with volumetric material on it). All of those “realistic” refractions, I believe, produce a swarm of fireflies all around, while getting a relatively noiseless image requires setting up 6000 samples, lotsa fireflies-suppressing trade-offs such as clamping indirects and filtering glossies, and still takes 14,5 hours on my Core i7 laptop (using GPU doesn’t make it much faster).
I’m doing the same scene without the lamp right now, this gonna look better. And then I’ll try to figure the crap out of the lamp’s material again…
I can relate… Quad-core i7 laptop here.
Amazing on some things, chokes on certain lighting setups. That’s why for my audio visualizer project i just do screencaps. Definitely interested to see what you come up with. Oddly enough, my next AV test is with volumetrics, and I actually NEED the fireflies
yeah, between the caustics and the volumetrics, you’re pretty much hosed on render times. not a whole lot of ways to get around it if you go that way. You could potentially bake out the texture of the lamp and use that as an emission texture, but I’m not sure if it would work.
Other than the glare being a bit too blurry, and maybe the lamp being a bit too bright, I don’t think it looks to kryptonite-y.
edit:
after doing some tests, I think you totally could bake the light and get a good result. I duplicated the volume mesh (the salt crystal in your case) and inflated it a little bit in edit mode (alt+s). Then I gave this shell a translucent material with pure white color, unwrapped it and baked it to a texture. Then copy the shell mesh, give it an emission shader and plug in your baked texture.
By baking the light, you contain all the fireflies within and let them all clean up. It’s still going to take some time to bake it, but it will be way better than letting all those fireflies out!
