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Keep in mind that how much light is cast by an object also depends on the volume of surface covered by the emissive shader. If you have a 3 inch sphere and a 8 food by 8 foot wall with the same settings the wall will cast dramatically more light.
I'm okay with that, I just want the smaller objects to illuminate her face in closeups and give off more light than a weak halloween glow bracelet in short/medium distance shots, is all.
I managed to get some good results by turning the bracelet and nails up to 250k lumens, but my renders are taking forever. I'll try to get a decent one and post it later. :)
The thing about a scene that is lit that way is it always takes a bit longer. It isn't super bright and being emissive dependent always makes studio have to think things through more.
Here's a link to one of my images and the settings for a night lantern. The first post of my thread (am on Thread 7) has links to other tutorials as well, by various members.
This has lighting- what the sliders do in Tone Mapping (very simply) and shows you the information for each section, with images showing the results.
One way around that may be to use a geoshell. Make it emissive and set opacity way, way down, and have the underlying object be reflective.
One way around that may be to use a geoshell. Make it emissive and set opacity way, way down, and have the underlying object be reflective.
This was done with a mirror surface, and the emissive geoshell at an opacity of .02.
I'm listening.
I've never worked with Geoshells. Tell me more.
A geoshell is basically a copy of the object, with the ability to set an offset that determines how far away the copy is from the original. Think of it as a skin.
To use it, select the object you want to copy, in this case the sphere. Go to Edit->Create New Geometry Shell. That will create the shell as the child of the original object. When you select the shell, one of the parameter sections is called Mesh Offset, and the parameter itself is called Offset Distance (cm). It defaults to .1, or 1mm. For something like this, you can try an offset of .001
I set my original object to be a mirror, and then set the geoshell to be emissive and to have an opacity of .02.
If you play with the opacity, you can get different effects.
The downside is that the geoshell doubles the amount of polygons, so if you're having memory issues with the render, this will make it worse.
For the effect you talk about above, you could create the geoshell for the character, go into the surfaces tab for the geoshell, and set the opacity for all the surfaces to 0.
Go into the fingernail surface, set it emissive, and then set opacity back to 0.015 or something that works for you and then play with the emissive lighting color and strength
It'll take a lot of experimenting to get the values that work best for you, but that's part of the fun!
I dove in last night and tried it, before I saw your answer today - with the default offset, it actually looks like her nails are emitting hologram "shells" over themselves, which is actually kind of a cool effect and I'm going to play with it a bit more.
I didn't set the full shell to a 0 opacity, so I also ended up with a kind of "aura" effect around her hands, as the light from the nails picked up the 0.02 opacity I'd set the rest of the shell to. I'll go back in with a 0 opacity later, because the aura was distracting and didn't look quite right.
Unfortunately, even setting the model's nails to something like metal-flake-green-car-paint ends up with them showing up black under the emissive shell - I'll keep playing around with bright metals and reflections, though, because clearly you're on to something here and I want to see what I can come up with.
Thanks, TabascoJack! :)
Happy to help!
Soooooo, TabascoJack is a genius.
The difference is so notable. Check this out.
I'm using the "Useful Mirrors" shader under the emissive geoshell on her nails, and it's helping keep the nails looking textured and rounded. Which is exactly what I need.
This is just an 85% complete test render, but check this out. I'm so happy.
Thanks for the compliment, but I'm just passing on stuff I've stumbled across other people doing.
That render's looking really good. I think you're onto something there....
My only problem right now is that I wanted to get her lips a slight glow as well, and for whatever reason, the geoshell over her lips won't illuminate. Nothing I do is working, so I'm going to keep plugging on it. Can't let it stop me!
And TJ: Thanks. I hope I'm on to something. I really do.
Still no luck getting a soft glow off of her lips (or her eyes, for that matter), but I fiddled with things a bit.
The addition of a cold white light plane primitive about 1m in front of her, and a reflective plane primitive angled behind her gives that sort of reddish background hue.
The nails are up to 1mil lumens (yikes!), but check out the good peripheral/border glow they give off thanks to the geometry shell and mirror-surface trick.
All in all I'm quite happy with this.
The values for the fingernails (mirror + cutout opacity 0.02 and emissive shader on the geometry shell) works fine for the iris and lips, too.
You'd like to think so, but I wasn't able to get them to work, no matter what I tried. I suppose I could keep trying, considering that's the effect I want, overall.
What worked good was adding the bump map as inverted image in the emissive slot. That way, you also get some nice structure.
I can post my render settings, if it is of any help to you.
Finalized version:
Ahh, I think I see what you did, now. Awesome trick!
I'll try that on my next render. Are you using the bump map for that section of the figure, or a generic map, or...?
I see you're hitting the same issue with the shell "ghosting" on the hands that I did, giving the hands a kind of aura effect. I got rid of this (mostly) by making sure that the shell was turned off everywhere but the third section of each finger, which is just the fingertip and the nail. There's still a slight aura effect, but it doesn't limn the entire hand like it did before.
I use the map that comes with the figure, and use it in cutout opacity, and the emissive slot. In the image editor, I simply switch "inverse" on or off. It depends on the result in a test render if the inverse or the regular bump map work best. I'd normally use the diffuse map in the emissive slot, but not in this case.
About the "ghosting", actually I didn't mind that one as much, as it comes from the light that is emitted by the fingernails. I did think about adding a light coming from the front, so that you can actually see the outside of her hands, but in the end, decided to just use the back rim light. I also used a slight bloom effect for render, and the earlier mentioned method of switching off convergence for dark room renders. That worked surprisingly well, and the render was much smoother than I had thought.
All in all, this was a rather interesting experiment, and I'm looking forward to see your render!
At the risk of sounding ignorant, where are you setting the bloom effect? I've scoured my render settings and I'm not finding it. Perhaps I'm blind?
Bloom is an Iray feature, so first you must be using Iray. Then it is found in Render Settings > Filtering
As mjc said, it only works in Iray.
I am using IRay (hence the emissive shaders being possible), but I had actually completely overlooked the Filtering section of the render settings. Now I know! Thanks!
I am working on a render right now with Jacks settings just got to wait for it to get done rendering to find out if it worked for me
I am also going to take Bees advice on the maps and see what happens with my warrior woman!!!
Here is where I tryed the first time and failed badly because I didn't know much about emessives!!
Hi, I'm having the same issue the Brig was having with his emissive shaders and was wondering if a solution was ever found.
I was trying to light some surfaces in my scene but went back to this test file to see if I could get it to work with just standard primitives first.
No matter what I do I can't get the plane to light the sphere. The light intensity is super high, I used the emissive shader for the surface, and just the standard iray uber shader for the sphere.
If anyone has any ideas on how to get this to work I'm willing to try anything right about now!
Thanks!
Have you tried a full render? If the Iray Preview mode is set to Intreractive (in Draw Settings) it won't show emissive effects.
I have and unfortunately am having the same result. My draw settings are also set to photoreal. Really not sure why this is not working
You could try turning Two Sided on for the surface, though I think the normals are pointing the right way. You could also try raising the ISO in Tone Mapping for Render Settings.
Check the glossy color of your sphere. Is that, by chance, black? Also, for the plane, the green arrow is supposed to point towards the object you want to light. But in your image, the red arrow is pointing forward. Would you mind sharing your parameter settings for the plane?
What colour is the sphere?