Hi All,
Well Thursday night was a bust. Started to build a piece of it, and just blew it. I think I exhausted myself a bit. And Friday Night, well I just needed it off.
Tonight I have something to show, though. As I mentioned before I got stuck on the model. (No biggie, just, got a little worried about how things will hook up together. I think I have it solved now.) So tonight, instead, I worked on the Layout Construction and the lighting of the beast. One thing I intended was for this facility to be visible even when it's pitch black outside. This is a likely scenario for this palce, so I imagine they'd build it with a lot of lights.
A few of things occured to me while rigging these lights.
1.) I'd need to be able to clone them, so heirarchy needed to be organized. (Note: Clone All Items LW plugin is VERY well done.)
2.) Shadow mapping = faster rendering, plus the shadows can be cached.
3.) The end result of this project could reach 2 million polygons. In that situation, radiosity is probably not an option. So the lights have to 'bounce' manually.
4.) Real lights are rarely a perfect solid color, so texturing them should be considered.
So, I added a bunch of lights to this scene. Made them easy to clone, textured them, and set them to 'cache shadows'. The result worked, I cut the render time of the second frame by half. Woo! I then added ''bounce lights' in order to simulate the effect of light reflecting off the edges of its target. To my surprised, it worked pretty darn well. Take a look:
This image is the same as the first, only I got rid of the 'bounce lights' so you can see the difference.
Render time? 1:09 at 1280 by 1024 enhanced low after the shadows were cached. Pretty cool, eh?
Got questions? Fire them off to me.
