Headlights/Taillights

[Chad Warner]

Hi-

 

I am working on a night scene ( I have to do several shots)...does anyone have any quick suggestions on how to create a headlight effect and taillight effect? I figured I'd just use lights and self illuminated materials for the lenses, just wanted to find out how other people were doing it.

 

Thanks,

 

Chad

[Brian Cassil]

That's what I do, but in addition, set the self illumination fairly low and create a self illumination render element. You can then use that to add additional layers of SI in photoshop to interactivly control the brightness without having to render and re-render. You could also blur a layer or two to get some special effects.

[ShaunDon]

There was a dude on here not long ago (sorry, I'd search but I'm lazy... I really should credit him) who used a little bit of volume fog in his headlights too. Looked very, very cool.

 

I'm really bummed that I don't get to do more night renderings. I can count the number of night shots I've done on one hand. I dream of doing a night animation some day -- probably just for the fun of it. Too bad there's so much paid work to do!

 

Shaun

[Chad Warner]

I can count how many I've done on 3 fingers, so I don't have a lot of practice. I think I remember the volume fog, but Vray and fog don't go together real well.

[ShaunDon]

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=13548

 

This is the dude I was refering too. And Colin did it in VRay. I've had problems in the past getting VRay to render volume lights accurately if I was using the camera correction modifier. But that was back on Max 4.2 and VRay 1.09, it must have been addressed by now.

 

Post your results if you can, I'd love to see. Good luck!

 

Shaun

[Wayne Harney]

I find these effects to be much easier in post. Here is a raw rendering and a touched up version I did by painting/blurring glows, light beams etc. in PS. It was very easy and you see the results in real time. (Self illuminated materials for the light sources)

[ShaunDon]

Good call, Wayne. And rendering a volumetric light as a matte pass is a lot quicker than incorporating it into the scene. Plus the advantage of adjusting the intensity in realtime.

 

Slowly I'm moving more and more of my work over to the post side of things. It's a pain though since the client will sometimes want to adjust the view at the end, which should be easy in 3D. But it means re-rendering and re-loading every matte you've made into PS. Ick.

 

Shaun

[Chad Warner]

I generally like to do things like this in post as well, but I have multiple views, so I was trying to do everything in one shot, instead of having to photoshop 5 views.

[Ernest Burden III]

I recently did two night views of a building, but have been asked not to show 'em yet. I put cone lights in for headlights, and just have a self-illum for the tails, no motion blur. I would have liked to do some red/white smearing like a night photo, but didn't have the time. And I'm not big on aping the features of a photo. Although the car strings look so great I might do them anyway...next time.

[ShaunDon]

Ernest, you reminded me of the last night shot we did. This one is of the new Westin Residencies tower in Providence, RI -- we sent a photographer down to take long exposures from the viewpoint and Photoshopped most of the cars in. We masked out the flares and light trails and montaged them in, and I was pretty happy with the effect.

 

Shaun

[Chad Warner]

For those of you who care, here's the image as delivered. I'm not quite happy with it, but I ran out of time--along with this image were a daytime photomatch, a nighttime photomatch, and 4 additional daytime images.

I rendered out a self-illumination pass for the headlights, and just drew light the cones in photoshop.

Let me know what you think.

[ShaunDon]

Good job on the cars, dude! The glass in the building could benefit from some mapping, but that is time consuming and I definitely sympathize with being rushed by deadlines.

 

The wet street is nice -- if you made it glossier and punched up with reflected light from the buildings it might enhance things without too much work.

 

Archviz turnaround times really make me want to get into broadcast. Too often I feel like I'm just getting into a project when I have to abandon it and push it off to the client.

 

Shaun

[Wayne Harney]

Looks good Chad. Wouldn't mind seeing a darker sky and the headlights seem to be pointing downward too much. Also maybe a little too much forground? Can you move closer and use a wider angle lense?

[Brian Cassil]

As far as the headlights go, I think you did a great job. Some minor crits on composition but it would be nitpicking. Nice work!

[Chad Warner]

Like I said, I'm not all happy about it. But in the wee hours of the morning I decided to quit messing with it and let it render as is.