Greetings everyone. I have this piece here I've been playing with. I have 3 basic questions (at this point). 1) Look at the lampshade. I made the material slightly transparent so it would let some of the light through. The effect looks okay on the wall and such. But the lampshade itself doesn't look right. I would like to be able to have a truly diffuse material that will let LIGHT through but not any IMAGE, or at best a very very blurry image. Notice that you can see sharpness and clarity of the shade holder wire and even the bulb with no diffusion. Not realistic at all. 2) I've seen a lot of other folks "room corner" type abstract scenes and the light looks cool and surreal. Maybe I need some help in that way here? A light dome? Something else? 3) I like this image, but it just looks too CG to me. Too amatuerish really. I know I need something else to punch it to a higher degree of realism or impact but not sure what else. Perhaps my textures are too simplistic? Sometimes that looks good (in a surreal way) but not here. Any suggestions?

The lamp shade is actually quite good. I posted a piece years ago about wanting to be able to show the lightbulb AND the light is gave off. In a way you've cracked the problem. I'd suggest make the shade look pleated to give the material a slightly thicker appearance.

You could try making the material of the shade a bit higher in ambience, so that it looks "lit up". Maybe decrease the transparency a little also? Plop render the area where the shade is so you can experiment without re-rendering the whole image. Good luck.

yes and maybe try blurry transparency in the render settings

To increase realism a bit maybe try adding a bump map to the window cill texture and decreasing the ambiance a bit. Showdows from the window are a bit sharp, soft shadows and a decreased value may help.

1. You kinda hinted at the problem yourself. What is the lampshades material's diffuse set to? Try it at 100% and see if that makes a difference. If it's already 100, then I'm not too sure. Maybe the refraction (but I suspect the diffuse isn't high enough.)

You'll want to increase the refraction of the lamp shade to the highest seeting possible, give the specular halo a value of rgb 250 250 250 (very light grey, almost white), and enable blurry transmissions at 32 rays per pixel on premium rendering. Beware that this will KILL your render times, and you might as well enable blurry reflections and soft shadows as it won't increase the render time much more. (If you do this, make sure the shadow softness for the light you used it up at around 80 in the light lab)
Now the way bryce calculates the bluriness of reflections and or transmissions is via the brightness of the specular halo color for any given material on an object. Materials with a very dark specular halo (closer to black) with have little blurring of relfections or transparency, while materials with a very light specular halo value (closer to white) will have a high degree of blurring. Extreme values such as pure white will increase the plastic or metallic quality of materials. i.e. transparent objects will look like plastic or ground glass and reflective materials will reflect colors of nearby materials without appearing reflective. This is the KEY to realism as in the real world materials behave very much this way. Say you have a red ball next to a white wall, with a light shining on it. Now based on the scattering of the light from the sphere (all light that we see is reflected from surfaces of objects), the wall areas near the sphere will aquire a red tint, because the light is "leaking" from the sphere onto the wall. This is a very subtle property of light, but without it you can only go so far toward realism. What I do is this:
Turn on blurry reflections.
Edit the material properties for all materials that are not metallic or transparent (so edit any flat, "normal" maerials.). Give them a reflective value of 12 percent, and a diffuse value of 88 percent. Leave ambience at zero. Set the specular halo value to rgb 254 254 254, or one value less than white. Set specularity to less than 25. Now the reflection values should add the "light leaking" effect described above because they will reflect other colors in the scene. The high value of blurring (almost white specular halo) will scatter this reflection over a large surface area of the object, making it cease to look like a reflection and actually look like real light leakage. Keep in mind that if you actually want something to be reflective, make sure to set the specular halo color at or near full black, or the reflections will be blurred there as well.

Here are some examples:

In the above image, the bricks have a lightly reflective value to reflect the blue of the sky and to give detail to the shadows.

Blurry transmissions give the effect of frosted glass with specular halo values in the middle-grey range.

A scene utilizing both blurry reflections and blurry transmissions. Note, for the reflective sphere, the specular halo value was very close to black in order to keep the reflections in that object sharp. Render time was 38 hours at 128 rays per pixel.

Blurred reflections at high values really help to place object convincingly within an environment, lighting alone is not enough.

Blurred transmissions at very high settings will create great "plastic" materials, such as tomatos, human skin, candles, etc.

An early experiemnt, notice how the white walls acquire the colors of the red and blue walls. This is due to the blurred reflections.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can save a lot of time by lighting the scene with reflections. The most time consuming thing to render is shadows, so if you disable shadows and place a few lights well, the reflections will appear to be soft shadows at the lower ends of objects because no light reaches there, so these dark areas are blurred and become "fake" soft shadows. If you get good at this, you can render at 36 rays per pixel of premium settings in about a half hour per scene. Turn on shadows and watch the render time skyrocket to 6 hours or more. I hope this helps, let me know if you need me to go into more detail about anything.
-madmax

Also, get rid of those primitives and put something interesting in that scene :) The grasshopper is a great start, and you've got a great environment. What else might you find in a room like this?

Wow Max, did you have to write an essay on this for school and just paste it in here? :) It's a good post - I'm just teasing.

The things that I noticed most are:

1. the sphere primitive looks squashed to me which detracts from the reality (is the camera's fov odd? - did you press the scale view buttons when looking through the camera rather then dollying the camera?), I'd also scale the texture on the sphere to give more detail.
2. The floor texture doesn't appear to have any bump, a little bump and then maybe some fake shellac would look good
3. this is the one that causes for me the biggest issue, outside the light is dark/night which is why I can see the open door and lady reflected in the window, so why can I see the cross bars of another window, which is brightly lit in the shadows on the wall, bring all the lights inside the 'room' or keep the exterior ones very low to keep the lighting schema consistent.

Message edited on: 09/23/2005 04:24

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1563471

See AS's excellent notes on faking shellac in this thread.....

I would use blurry transmissions on the lampshade, to just "blur the light that comes through it" that should make it look translucent rather then transparent. The amount of blur is determined by the specular halo. White is maximum blur, black is no blur. You might need to adjust this specular halo on other transparent objects too so you don't get unwanted blurry transmissions on other transparent objects. As it's a dark environment, to improve lighting and realism, you should probably make the incomming light from the back cast soft shadows too. also you might want to put something more of a view out the window then just an infinite plane ;) doesn't need to be anything dominant, just something more realistic, like a night time photo of a garden maybe?

Wow - nice thread!

@zescanner
Only thing I would say 'bout the lampshade is the position of the light. It doesn't look as though the light-source is positioned within the bulb (even though it probably is).

I would position the light source, then play around with the material on the actual bulb, rather than the shade. The shade seems to be serving it's purpose in the scene, better than the bulb!

Pay particular attention to both the "additive" and "Blend Transparency" settings in Materials Lab.

Len.

WOW guys! This is some great food to chew on. I will need to work on these things and see what I can (and my computer) can handle; to see how far I can push it. This is turning out to be a superb exercise for me. For now, I want to add a descriptive of my scene. It is basically a square room with a window in three walls and a door in the fourth. The girl is standing in the doorway behind the camera. It is bright daylight outside but I found a window object online that had water-dripped glass panes in it and that is what I used and what makes the outdoors look so dark. And that is why the window sill looks so smooth as I didn't mess with those textures (yet). Most of the light for this scene is coming in through a window that is out of view at the right side. The yellowed light, softer, is from the lamp. That is why it looks like there are two light sources. I chose the primitive shapes not because they mean anything or because they look like they "belong" in a room like this but because they don't. I know their shapes aren't interesting but when I started (with just sphere) and found its texture which I used here I liked that and went from it... focusing more on a couple of interesting textures rather than the nature of the object shapes themselves. Gog, when you said scale the sphere texture to give more detail, do you mean make it smaller and finer? I rather like it being overly rough and extreme. Maybe a "subtexture" on top of the big texture here? hmmm. And yes I'm sure it looks squashed because of the extreme FOV. Any tips on how to have a wide FOV and not distort things at the edges? As for all the excellent specific tips (especially madmax) those are EXACTLY the things I was fishing for. Thanx and I will put them to practice this weekend! Look for followup WIP soon. --Jeff

Great thread, I've already learned alot reading through it too, thanks! I saw this in the gallery and noticed the grasshopper and lampshade first. I really liked both as is but understand your desire to learn to create a different look. I liked the image very much, cool mat choices, but one thought I had while looking was that your primitives are too flat on the floor. If the tile has bump to it and normal dust is on the floor, then there would be just a hint of shadow under them...maybe hold the ALT key and hit "page up" a couple of times?

Burpee... I saw that too about the lack of shadows. Was planning to adjust that before final render but forgot. Particularly the lack of a floor shadow from the cone makes it look like it isn't really on the ground. I think it is partly the "angle" of the light coming in from the window. Precisely the wrong angle for the cone and the cube. I will make changes.

Madmax... I have been experimenting (on a smaller scale) with your suggestions about blurry transmissions and the specular hilight settings. Awesome difference in the quality! (Also horrendous difference in render times!) I am really curious now to try what you are saying about "lighting the scene with reflections", but I don't grasp what you mean about that. Perhaps you could shoot me a small file with that setup so I can dissect it?