Spurred by an asian based entry into this months Renderosity Magazine contest...and a certain pic in Real World Bryce 4 book (Carla Moore) I have a few other meshes to include, and need to finish building the lantern itself, etc, etc. AgentSmith

very pretty. simple but very pretty.

I like the effect! Kind of draws one in like a moth to a light. The image is antiquing.

Nice piece so far.

Basically finished the Shobi lantern model. Simple, because it just made out of cubes, but man...after a while you just have to go by a mental image of where everything is, lol. The top needs to be tweaked a little further. The gap between it and the lantern itself needs to be lessened. Other than that, it's accurate to a real one. (One that uses a candle, not light bulb.) Rice paper art is "Dancer as Sagimusume (Spirit of Heron)" by Kyoko. Used with free permission from Connecticut College. The top paper is some photoshop cloned background and the signature from the main paper. Thanks for the comments. AgentSmith

very nice piece. well done.

Very pretty, love those varnished floors too.

maybe render with blurry tranmissions? Great render but the screens are too clear IMO.

Agent Smith, Pretty good. I remember you saying that you wanted to do some animating. You know something like this might be neat to animate the lighting to simulate flame burning in the lantern. The play of lights against that floor at the right angle would look exellent. - TJ

No way with blurry transmissions, they need a control for that, It's always too...blurry, takes way too much detail out for me. I'd love to have an input field for that, like 1-10, 1-100, etc. Actually, I just increased the transparency in this pic for to kinda show the inside a little more. You're right, most rice paper for this would be rather thick and you wouldn't easily see through it. Those are actually 2D faces used, which I think come off looking too thin in their transparency, better to use a flat cube at a thickness of 0.05 and transparency of around 30. It so far, is looking better (to me) Only way you could have something that looked like above in the real world would be to use shear fabric of some sort. AgentSmith

Funny you mention that bikermouse. Carla Moore did a similar scene to this that happened to be in Real World Bryce 4, (the scene file is included with the book) Anyway, there was an animated gif of the lamp, with the flame flickering. I might do a fly around/through loop, or something simple. I still have to include the other meshes, and complete the set-up first. AS

Agent Smith, I don't have Susan's book yet, but I'm gonna get it after I get P5. I look forward to seeing your animation when you get it done - now that Bobasaur has helped pave the way, we can at least post animations in freestuff through a host website. - TJ

AgentS, they do have a control for it. It is the whiteness of your spec halo for a material. A black specular halo with apply no blur, a white spec halo will apply maximum blur. Then everyhting in-bewtween.

Beautiful lantern AS. As for wither the material should be paper or fabric, didn't silk painting come from Japan? Just an idea. Catlin

That is definitely a gorgeous lantern. I don't know what else you intend to add, but might I suggest a teapot and a cup of tea and perhaps a flower in a vase. I think an animation of a flickering lamp and curling steam would be very soothing. If you can track down some non-copywritten asian music you could have a very attractive and calm scene. If you don't want a calm scene, then might I suggest an animation where the lamp catches fire? :) Lin

Madamx, i will have to play with that, believe it or not, never knew that, thanks. You could have silk instead of ricepaper in a lantern such as this, but in 3D, lol, you would get a lot of "your screens look to clear". Better off (in my mind) to make it with what people traditionally are used to seeing. Besides, I want to make it authentic looking. AS

Oh, lsstrout, you hit it on the head. Big yes on including teapot, cups, and flower vase/flower in the scene. Probaly try to incorporate water and/or water reflections somewhere in the scene, really go for the Fung Shui. I plopped in the teapot and cups last night to test their textures in the scene (reflection, etc) This teapot and cup are amazingly done models, I suggest getting them in freestuff. It includes highly detailed pot and cup, all textures, bumps, templates, etc. It's kinda a slow download and big (12.5Mb), but way worth it if you are looking for something like this! It's made by kuroyume0161. Easiest way to find it in freestuff, is just do a search for "teapot". AgentSmith

Wow AS! Really knocking some socks off now! Nice touch the tea pot and cups, good thinking Isstrout! When you wrote about water and reflections, I was thinking showing the tea in the cups with it's fluid reflections off of the lit lantern.

Exactly. (liquid in cup) But, I may incorporate creating a partial room that has some sort of water way or pond directly outside of it, that has the water caustics bouncing into the room. Btw, with that teapot & cups download; the textures that come with it work quite well, but can take a while to figure out what maps to apply to where. It also comes with reflection maps, but I couldn't get them to work very well, so I ditched using them for now. It includes 11 .bmp maps at 1024x1024 and 4 .jpg templates at 4096x4096. The download is for Cinema 4D, but the zip also includes .obj files. Unfortunately, no .mtl file, so you will have to apply ALL the maps by hand. But it's the most professional free model/package I ever seen for free. Especially for a teapot, lol. AgentSmith

Forgot to mention, if you do get this, wrap all the maps "parametrically", and they work perfectly. AS

Agent Smith, Most of the garden picts I saw were pretty lame but I liked this site. George's Japanese Garden. - TJ

Lol, that's a neat little site, I like his page transitions and his "moon gate". I had just sat down last night with my Photoshop, determined to finally be able to draw a precise moon gate type of structure(stone), so I could make it into a Bryce terrain. AS