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Grujic
First message : 2006-10-06 14:15:01
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Grujic
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Hi all,
I have a couple of rather nasty problems with the Neon light shader ...
First, it multiplies the rendering time by 8 or 10 - if used sparingly! The attached view without the Neon light as a light source renders in about 40 minutes, with the Neon light shader in about 6 hours. Yes, yes, old PC and all that - but! It's too much!
On top of that, there is no visible or tangible enhancement to the scene lighting with or without the Neon light shader as a light source, especially not in the Radiosity.
Second, it leaks all over when the neon surface is curved. See attached.
Again, please tell me that I am doing something wrong. The settings are standard Interior, no tweaking.
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RichardFirst message : 2006-03-13 21:44:21 http://www.btrdv.nl
Richard
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All right,
For the leakage:
- try adjusting geometry model, so your lightsource (neon object) wont overlap, or even make the light source (geometry) smaller.
- try lowering lightstrength values of your neon shader.
Neon lighting by shader can be quite nice and realist (shadows etc.)
For reducing rendertime:
(- buy a budget multicore pc.)
- after experimenting a copple of years ago I decided to just fake it, therefore I used Neon shader but didn't used Neon light. I use as little lights as possible to get the lighting effect back I want.
- those days I also did some experimenting on keeping the geometry as simple as possible (reduce vertices and line segments and surfaces)
In your specific case, I would:
- try to use just one normal light for the oval ceiling (make a whole in the ceiling at a place, where it is not visible for the spectator), and experiment with light strength and attenuation. Trust on radiosity and don't forget to test-render now and then. I know this can be a though MF and maybe you need more lights or you might even have to use more geometry for the ceiling underneath the lights for an even distribution (?).
- the spots will all be directed lights (also strengt/attenuation)for the surface, which is behind your light, you use a neon shader without lighting the scene.
- the rectangular surface might be a recangular neon lighted surface (just one) above the lowered ceiling surface, or you might trie to tweak a bit like afforementioned.
- for the vertical surface of the table or lobby you could apply a neon-glass shader or try something like the above.
- also try the expert shader, but I suggest you first try a little more with both neon shaders.
- if you are experimenting turn of other lights and concentrate on just one light or lightgroup. If you are satisfied with the character of all groups seperately you can start adjust them to the whole.
You can add lights at other places (halfway) to make up for shadow details or light spreading around. The good thing of already have rendered those neons is, that you now know how some shadows could look like (underneath the chairs for instance)
I did these things while working on an old laptop. And rendertimes of laptop and desktop became olmost the same.
Excuse me for my bad English, and I hope you will render a movie with this scene soon.
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Grujic
First message : 2006-10-06 14:15:01
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Grujic
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Thanks for the ideas, Richard.
I did something simpler - traced a 24 sided polygon, now that all the surfaces emmiting neon are flat, there is no leakage. I only hope that I will live long enough to see the rendering finished. Or that Abvent is packing a Mac and sending it to me ;) I would be happy with a patch that makes Windows version render even in double the time the Mac one does ... :(
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Mateo
First message : 2008-06-02 18:48:27
Mateo
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Plan B;
use photoshop by:
-rendering the scene with the neon light, open it in PS
-create a new layer; paint white the desired "neon areas"
-apply a (high) gaussian blur effect to this layer, then turn opacity down until desired
-delete overflowing light areas
I know that's not a PS forum, but I'm trying to help Grujic. Some lighting effects can be best simulated post-processing rather than setting lights/materials, and most of the cases itreduces a lot of time. Taht's similar tothe effect most people asks for getting a "real" 3D-grass; you can get it easily in PS in just a couple of minutes.
Regards,
Teillu
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RichardFirst message : 2006-03-13 21:44:21 http://www.btrdv.nl
Richard
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So, if you want to render fast on a slow computer, you sometimes have to do some extra, less simple, work, to render fast.
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Meszes
First message : 2010-02-09 16:40:48
Operating system : OS 10.5
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Meszes
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Hello Artlantis Users,
Let me tell you that the neon shader has been fixed with the latest patch. Despite the fact that renderings take shorter time to calculate, we both need to learn how to optimize our scene.
Our purpose is to achieve more precise neon effect and to keep the rendering time below a certain and acceptable level.
Lets pick a surface that has only a few polygons i.e. a simple box, and apply neon shader on it.
Our object now became a light source. Virtual photons emitted from the polygons. Each photons inherit its direction from the polygon normal vector.
Our neon box is now equal at least 6 new light source.
Imagine what happens if we just apply a neon shader to a material of an armchair.
This action will increase render time and more RAM is needed for the process.
My suggestion is to create independent tube like objects in our scene and apply neon shader to them.
Lets pick a box from the basic geometry library and re-scale it to have 2cm by 2cm by 60 or 100 cm size.
Apply the neon shader. We may use a simple elongated plane also which has to be rotated in the proper way to create the effect.
Copy these object to any part of the scene to create the neon effect instead of applying neon shader on a previously modeled surface.
Why previously created surfaces might not work well?
The answer is the pivot point of the effect in my opinion.
That's why I suggest to create individual objects, planes or simple boxes.
We are planning to create our next tutorial, this time about neon shader and neon lights.
Regards,
Csanad Meszes
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Grujic
First message : 2006-10-06 14:15:01
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Grujic
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Well ...
I would not say that neon was fixed, by a loooong shot.
I left one of the neon objects on as a light source (a planar surface, mimicking the surface light in the ceiling) by mistake and after THREE DAYS Artlantis told me it needs another three months to finish one image.
Not acceptable.
The Radiosity was one notch above the worst.
Adding ArtLantis objects into the model is also not acceptable. The model comes from the design software - cars, people, plants are OK in ArtLantis. The building has to come from the design software. Improve the export plugins, optimize the polygons!
Sorry, guys, you have to work on the Neon still. And the rendering times are anything but acceptable, especially on Windows and not brand new machines with gigulons of RAM. Some people can buy a new machine each year, some can't. You can't choose which job will come up, or what is to be done when.
"The fastest" is not even close to being fast any more.
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