mansion (or mansionless) scene - experimenting lighting...

[ratracer]

Although I'm reasonably happy with the modelling and texturing of the mansion, as usual I'm having trouble with lighting... as I am pretty bad with it, I usually keep simple - one or two lights that as far as I go without getting too much confused...

How's these? (don't mind much the shadows since those will be corrected...)


this one is wrong since the mansion is too bright


I adapted and simplified the lighting I borrowed from one of the www.vocanson.com excellent FREE models but even so...


I just threw two omni lights - will have trouble with shadows and stuff I'm sure


just one skylight light and lighttrace , tried those for the first time - trouble is the rendering is 12 minutes (instead of the 1 minute of the others) - it makes the stones look a bit plastic though

[Archangel (aka SoupDragon)]

Wow those are great! But the secret with lighting is not to do what you did and have just one or two bright lights. For a sunlit scene you need two or three acting as the sun, with some lights pointing in the other direction to lighten the shadows from behind... it's kinda difficult to explain, I'd suggest you search out some good lighting tutorials.

[ratracer]

well, the yellowish one follows that principle - it has lights pointing "everywhere", but since I borrowed them from another model I understand that they feel wrong in mine - but I know you are right...

Too many lights always gets me confused, but I don't think I'll have any other solution than to look for that route

[agsking]

Hmm these look good. I like the last one a lot, but its alwase good to have fast rendering times. Only thing I can suggest is what archangel said, get some good lighting tutorials. There are LOADS of tutorials on 3d. Also, What program was this made in? 3dsmax?

[ratracer]

yeah, 3ds max.
the last one with the mansion gets a rendering time of 45 minutes (although I'm not that bothered with that since Max has a fast renderer compared with other 3d tools I used - I'm used to wait a lot to get a result) ! I also like the last one for that view (for other camera views it looks bad mainly because some modelling faults get visible )...

I started adding some more lights but, so far, no dramatic improvement... and yes, I'll start looking for tuts on outside lighting (most of the ones around are for inside lighting which supposedly is more difficult - but I clueless at both)

which one should I concentrate and try to improve?

Also, is a daylight scene too bland? (for my game it doesn't really matter which time of day it is - although it won't be a night scene... ) is it worth trying to get a more shadowy scene (at dawn or dusk) even if I will try to avoid getting into more complex lighting?

[Beldin]

The problem with the light tracer is that it uses QMC Raytracing for the global illumination. (It's very slow in max) Your settings are probably not optimized correctly. What you could do is to use radiosity for the lighting instead of the light tracer. But it's kinda tricky to setup and it's mostly used for indoor scenes, but it's much faster than the lightracer. I could take a look at the scene, if you want to. (send it to beldin@mad.scientist.com, if you're interested)

[Ali]

Just a quick note about outdoor lighting which might help, sunlight in addition to being very bright is ever so slightly blue, while artificial light is often quite yellow. I think the most realistic of those scenes (while they're all great) is the 2nd. Because it's so yellow though, it looks like a sunset, but the sky is still day blue.

The shadows are excellent on the last 2 though!

[ratracer]

Thanks
And Beldin I'm not sure you would want that since the scene is already 40 MB with the mansion!

Even without the mansion is some 10MB, after optimisations.
I know there is no justification for it being so large, apart from my inneptitude (I've seen more complex scenes being a lot nimbler)...
After taking out the mansion, the tree and the grass it may be of a decent size, though...

But if you're up to it I could put it for you to download. I'd be most thankful...

[Beldin]

Wow..ok thats maybe a bit too big... :o If you could tell me the size of the whole scene (in max units). I could make a scene file with a light setup that you can merge into your scene. And a little tip for your textures. Are you using bump maps? (It doesn't look that way). Just copy the diffuse map in the material editor to the bump map slot. The ground looks like it could need some.

[ratracer]

Beldin,
I will send you a scene with only the wall of the building and only some other details to make it (A LOT) smaller and pratical to send by email. I'll remove most of it (also the forest and the grass since they were made by plugins)

I do use bumpmaps (in fact, the materials are too exagerated and complicated since as I don't exactly what to do, I keep changing and adding stuff until it's more or less ok - the scene was done so that even in a close up view of the door or the windows of the mansion it doesn't look pixelated... it's probably a beginner's error)  

I'll promise to make the scene pretty small, ok?

In the meantime there's another view (made with skylight and light tracer - it looks a bit like a model)


Thanks

[Beldin]

Well, I thought I'd post a scene file with the lighting setup, since it's kinda simple...
It's built from a "dome" of 57 omni lights, with very low intensity multiplier and a light blue colors to simulate the sky.
All of the omni lights have shadow-mapped shadows, together they will produce a very soft shadows. Almost like the lighttracer but without bouncing light.
And then there's a direct light with a yellowish color for the sunlight with raytraced shadows. I've grouped all of these lights into one single object, that you can rotate and scale to fit your scene. The scaling is very important. The dome should be larger than the whole scene, but not too big, because if it is, the shadows will look washed out and inaccurate. Just delete any old lights in your scene and merge the file I've attached, into it.

here's the file:
domelight.zip
....and an example render using that lighting setup:

[TheDude]

There's a script for max that sets up the "dome" for you to get soft shadows. http://home.wanadoo.nl/r.j.o/skyraider/e-light.htm

[Vel]

Ratracer, your 3d art is simply outstanding. What are you working on at the moment? I had a great time with TUM and hope that you'll come up with a game at least of that quality.