Emissive Materials and Night Lights

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Permalink Reply by Scott Davidson on May 31, 2012 at 7:51am

I am not sure how Vray's emissive material matches up with our Glow property.  The Glow property in the material gives an object a real brightness of light, but the light will not project onto other objects in the scene.  

Here are some discussions on night scenes: 

http://nxt.flamingo3d.com/forum/topics/night-scene

http://www.accurender.com/forum/topics/night-scene-with-hdri

There is a night HDRI here: http://www.food4rhino.com/content/full-moon

I would create as many lights on the ship as possible. Are there any other working lights, interior lights?  Are the nav lights larger? These would be objects that are tagged as lights. Put those lights on a channel.  Put the HDRI on a different channel.

You will need to draw down the brightness of the image a lot with image adjustment.  Also use the Burn number.  The Glow post-effect will be useful.

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Permalink Reply by Scott Davidson on May 31, 2012 at 7:59am

This is a photograph, but you can see that even at night, there is a reflection of the moon and other lights. The HDRI should take care of the moon reflections.

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Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on May 31, 2012 at 8:40am

Thanks Scott,

The Reflections are not a problem as this just adds to render time I was trying to remove these features when using VRay as it distracts from the technical issue of when you see lights and when you don't. The important thing is the Dark surroundings with the Nav Lights visible.

The Nav lights are larger than real life and are actually modelled to scale as the ships draw closer.I haven't yet found a way of achieving visible lights 3-6 miles away without scaling the model.

In an ideal world there should be no other lights on the ship when at sea but it looks like your example has the boarding ladder and deck lights on for receiving the pilot (or more likely forgotten to turn them off) and crew cabins without their blinds drawn, but hey...

Thanks for the links, I'll try and have a play with the different channels.

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