I've experimented with multiple different methods of creating light for the interior with influence from Mat, and multiple different online guides and tutorials. In terms of interior lighting me and Wing decided it's quite essential to have some form of lighting in order to light the scene during the night time setting. After doing some brief research I found it wasn't unusual for barns to have interior lamps or lighting. The first task of course was to model the light bulbs. Wing took the time to model some really nice and authentic looking light bulbs hanging from wires, meaning they could be hung from the central beam running through the barn. We thought that around four would be a good amount and duplicated them accordingly, making sure they were evenly spaced across the length of the barn. To make the light bulbs generate light I looked around for different methods but decided it would be best to create lights and position them inside the individual bulbs. The type of light that would be good to place inside was quite difficult to determine however, as I was unfamiliar with which did what. The first light I tried was the area light. I took the light and placed it inside the first bulb before duplicating it three more times so each bulb had its own light source. I then scaled the size of the light downwards because as far as I understand, this doesn't affect the actual light source, and only the indication of the light bulb when looking at the mesh. I added a shader titled mib_blackbody which was under the mental ray light tab and added it to each of the lamps. From my understanding, this absorbed some of the light and created a softer glow in the area that the 'area' light was illuminating. Before I had added this shader the area was quite heavily illuminated and blown out. Using mib_blackbody also allowed me to alter the temperature of the light, quite a difficult way to approach the light but it did allow me to be quite accurate at achieving the type of light I wanted, after looking at a light temperature chart and deciding I wanted quite a warm glow to the bulbs I set each of the bulbs to be between 2800K and 3500K which produced the warm glow I wanted.
By using the available customisation options under 'area light', I was also able to alter the intensity of the light it emitted. I had to explore this quite a lot due to the fact there was four bulbs but I wanted to find a good level of brightness where it gave off a nice glow but didn't illuminate the interior too much. I set each of the bulbs to around one on the intensity scale. Unfortunately however the light spread quite far and was interacting with objects as far away as the wire fence which was completely unrealistic and ultimately made the scene look ugly and messy. I looked again at the decay option and set the option from no decay to quadratic decay, which heavily reduced the spread of the light. This worked quite well and the light was now contained within the barn itself, however due to the decay I had added the intensity of the lights was much fainter and barely showed up in the barn. I tested a few different levels of intensity after this and adjusted it accordingly. I found that an intensity of six was far too high, and around four for each of the lights was a nice amount of glow for the size of the scene. Looking at the scene now I could tell that despite the way it looked from the outside, when you looked at the inside of the barn the lights looked like hanging light bulbs switched off and there was no obvious source to the glow in the barn. To correct this I added a lambert shader to each of the bulbs and set the colour of the lambert to a muted orange colour. Then, by clicking on the special effects tab, a drop down containing the level of glow you could apply to the lambert appeared, which could be set to be dim or quite bright. I tested it a few times to find a reasonable amount of brightness and decided that the interior lighting was complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment