Gauzy, Soft Light Quality: How?

[Sassmouth]

Hi, All.

 

I am a huge fan of this guy's work, and I'm trying to figure out how he achieves his quality of light. It's very bright, with low contrast and medium shadows, but with crisp lines.

 

I'm using V-Ray, which it seems he may be also. Maybe he's dialing down the color mapping for less contrast? I've tried to re-create the effect with PS effects, using adjustment layers of brightness, but I think this effect may be a result of the rendering settings. Do you have any idea what some of the broad strokes might be here? Possibly adjusting with a shadow pass?

 

Example below.

 

This brings me to a related question: How do I capture vray shadows as an alpha channel? I can load them to appear in the frame buffer, but it seems useless unless you can isolate them as an alpha, yes?

 

Thanks for your input.

 

Steve

Edited July 13, 2010 by Sassmouth

[wasteland giant]

image just looks like nothing is casting shadow.

 

so just a couple of omnis no?

Edited July 13, 2010 by wasteland giant

[Sassmouth]

Thanks for your response.

 

The shadows are subtle, but they're there. You can see them in the vertical blue element--those helical arrows are casting shadows there. And you can see some shadows in the building interior at the plaza level (as well as from the people, but their shadows appear to be going a different direction, so another light, I'm guessing). Also, you can see some more shadows at the bottom on the green tank element.

 

I haven't used omni lights much. You can get nice soft, global light with them, I guess?

 

I have managed to render out a shadow channel, then clip just the shadows from it, finding them in the image's alpha. Maybe it's just a matter of combining an original image, no shadows, but with global light, or direct light with shadows off, and then overlaying a second rendering, this one with shadows on, and extracting only the shadow alpha. Seems like that might work to achieve a similar effect. What do you think?

 

Steve

[-MerlyN-]

To me it looks more like there are no direct lights at all. If I'd to do it, I'd prolly just use indirect illumination or an AO pass to darken the occluded areas.

[Frosty]

Is that the MB Hydro building?

[Frosty]

I just checked his site and it is. Its just down the street from me .

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I think I would start by experimenting with just a dome light and nothing else.

 

I threw the attached image together in a few minutes. It has a dome light and nothing else. You could probably play with the output gamma to lighten the shadows to match what is shown in your reference image.

[Sassmouth]

Thanks for your responses, everyone.

 

Thanks, Travis, for the mock-up. That looks promising.

 

And thanks, Merlyn, I'll look into playing with AO.

 

Steve