Lights question, for David Wright...

[MichaelB]

Hi,

I've been looking over some of your work at Artmaze, and I'm impressed by your ability to get beautiful, lifelike renders from LightWave. I've been wondering if you feel a lack of intergrated IES lighting in LightWave is any kind of a problem. I've noticed other 3D packages make a real point of mentioning this feature. However, I've gotten to know LightWave pretty well, and one look at your work tells me they may not be strictly necessary. I think I would like to stick with one 3D package and master it, rather than constantly try to learn another and another in hopes they would have a magic "Make Super Art" button. Do you have some specific way of converting IES light info to LightWave lighting conventions, or do you work on it until it "just looks right?" I was also wondering if the majority of your clients were happy with an excellent, but not-physically-accurate lighting visualization, or if lots of them requested the output you would get from a program like Lightscape or Radiance. Any insight you are willing to share would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thank you,

Michael A. Barnes

[dwright]

Hi there, thanks for your comments. Most of our work is done in LW, but we use Lightscape for some interiors. Our modeling s done in Lightwave and sometimes Max. Unfortunately Lightscape has been discontinued. 3ds max / viz/ viz-render radiosity is not the same and has far less quality and precision than original lightscape. We tend to use LS for an interior due to is quality and speed. LW GI radiosity is great but slow, not recommended for use to simulate indirect interior lighting?well I used it for the interior shot of a 911 project very recently. This particular shot was impossible to render under LS since it required real translucent and subsurface scattering rendering, (a giant translucent artwork was illuminating the interior space) therefore we used LW+G3 rendering engine.

 

Our attitude towards work is to get it to look right and we almost never think in IES terms. Sometimes we don?t even use IES lighting on lightscape since we do not need such precision. Our artistic interpretation is what makes our images not the software. This does not mean that if there was IES integration in LW I will not use it.

 

Generally speaking by this time, I feel confident that I can use any package out there and create nice looking images. I didn?t choose Lightwave, it was the only professional tool available in the late 80?s early nineties to do work (based on the Amiga days) and I simply grew up with it. I truly believe that you can pick any software out there (well not any but most of the common ones) and produce great work. I also believe that becoming a software fanatic does not help the software industry, so I don?t tend to recommend software in particular, not even LW.

 

Cheers,

 

David

[MichaelB]

Thanks for your reply, David. Seeing things from your point of view really helps me sort through some of the hype that surrounds some of the new renderers and their advertised features. I have seen some very beautiful images on the Internet, and a good deal of the time it turns out the artist is just making full use of their TALENT to get those excellent results. Once I saw an artist post a software compiled radiosity rendering of a scene, then post another image of the same scene that didn't use any built in radiosity. I liked the hand built image much better! Somehow it seemed to catch the intensity and feeling of the scene much better than the super-physically-accurate rendering. I think it might have to do with the fact that any physically-based renderer still has to reinterpret the results based on our human visual response. At this point in time I think the software is just giving us it's "best guess" as to how we would perceive the scene. But, since WE already know how we would perceive the scene, the results that true artists achieve can rival or even surpass the software's best efforts. Your point of not being a "LightWave Only" or "Max Only" or "Whatever Only" is well taken. Although I would like to concentrate completely on just one app, I also have to be realistic and learn to use any tool that the job requires. I just have to put my thinking cap on (although it's a tight fit sometimes ).

 

Thanks again,

Michael A. Barnes

[quatermain]

We tend to use LS for an interior due to is quality and speed. LW GI radiosity is great but slow, not recommended for use to simulate indirect interior lighting?well I used it for the interior shot of a 911 project very recently. This particular shot was impossible to render under LS since it required real translucent and subsurface scattering rendering, (a giant translucent artwork was illuminating the interior space) therefore we used LW+G3 rendering engine.

I too have noticed that LW's GI is incredibly slow for 2+bounce situations. I've been trying to find good & reasonable settings for interior indirect lighting with LW. What type of settings have you had success with?

 

Do you mean G2, not G3, the Worley plug-in? Or is G3 something else?

[MichaelB]

I might be able to help you a bit with the "faster radiosity" part. This tutorial: http://www.hades-studios.com/hdritutorial might give you some good ideas. I followed it through and it does give some speedy results. Not sure how it would work for animations though. All of my trials had a lot of flickering, and I'm just not sure how to get around that yet.

 

Regards,

Michael A. Barnes

[dwright]

ups.. yeap G2

[Mr.P]

Hmm, I've never used Lightwave's radiosity on a single piece of interior work. Partly because I spent years working without it and was used to creating 60+ light interiors, but also because its mind-numblingly hindered by any sort of room. Also, I can't afford G2, so this brings me to my thread-related-question....

 

how does G2 help?

[dwright]

it helps to create better surfaces, many effects that needs post and treatment by separate layers now you can do that in a single pass with G2. The only negative is the $ mark, but the quality is superb.

 

You are able to control fernel alike maps into any material property (disuse, color, reflections, translucency.. and more). It also lets you boost properties without burning color too quickly, and other tools, including a superb subsurface scattering engine.

[ingo]

I`m not sure what" fernel" is nor how i can controll it with G2 but it seams that G2 is a must have for LW. Otherwise in my eyes LW`s raydiosity is pretty fast (whatever that means). But it depends heavily on how detailled you like the shadows. Since you can tweak the raydiosity engine a lot better than the raytracer its sometimes faster than the raytracer, but that depends on the scene.

 

And the IES lights are only useful for lighting designers, otherwise its to complicated for me to calculate the colors of the textures.

 

Just my two cents (european cents, equals eight american cents

[Steff]

Hey Ingo, I think he's talking of the Fresnel effect.... :ebiggrin: