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Lighting To Fix Undesireable Ice/glass Texture
I’m using an XRef in several project files but the results aren’t exactly the same as i’d expected.
I’ve created a snow flake with a glass-ish texture and both projects contain a white background (color vs luminance) & No lights. Comp size is massive (6648×600)
Texture for flake: Color, Luminance, Transparency (including refraction), Bump, and Specular.
Project 1: 1 flake falls past camera and it looks great (see below).
Project 2: LOTS of large flakes fall close to camera. Results are much grey-er at many angles/rotations of the flake. I like the fact there is some change in the texture as it rotates, but its too dark.Any suggestions on getting more consistent results?
Lighting? Baking? Specular issues? Too many refractions (3)?Thanks a lot 🙂
Project 1: 3145_herotexture.zip
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7 Replies
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I would get rid of the luminance channel, clear the bitmap from the transparency channel, and take the absorption distance in transparency down from 100 to about 20.
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I’ll certainly give that a shot tomorrow. Thanks for the input!
I’ll post back here with any success. -
also the flake is not a solid object – it’s an extrusion and two caps, even though they are all in one object – you might want to do an optimize on the flake, if only to reduce the number of points once there are a lot of them.
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You’re right, i should do an optimize. Though its a beveled edge and not a straight extrusion, i’m sure it will still optimize well without “squaring” it too much.
that will just help with playback/render times right, and not too much regarding the lighting right?
I tried adding some sky lights in but it made everything worse. I think i’ll be using default lighting as its consistent with such large camera moves through z-space.
Thanks
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the bevel is small so you might have to reduce the Tolerance when optimizing. Yes, probably only it would help with speed of manipulation.
Re lighting your baking request got me thinking and you don’t have any lights in the scene but you do have the Default Light still on in Render Settings/Options. That’s why you have white faces when the flake faces the camera since the default light (by default) is basically where the camera is. Turn it off and it’s totally different.
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turning off the default light and using the flakes.jpg in the Luminance channel (instead of Fresnel) is interesting – perhaps not right, but interesting
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Thanks Adam and Brian
I had some good results with Brian’s suggestion of turning off the Default light, and using the flake jpg in the luminance channel.
I also had some interesting results using the jpg in the bump channel and then adjusting the levels/dodge+burn of the jpeg in photoshop. Most of the examples below are with the default of.
Thanks for the suggestions! Now its time to see if they work when animated.
Bump:
Fresnel with luminance:
Luminance w JPeg:
Bump + Luminance:
Original XREF (default light on):
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