Lighting an interior scene by firelight - constructive criticism and advice needed!

[DigitalDirt]

This one is darker though I like the balance between the blue and red better here...hmmm

Oh, and I'm working on not making her hair look so much like plastic Lego hair!

[ipo]

Maybe Vray can't do all the job ... let's try photoshop !
I take your last image and spend 15 minutes playing with it, I just boost exposition (you can do that with Vray), some grandients, an automatic color correction, comp a camp fire, do some color corrections and quickly paint smoke... Of course this is not perfect but now we can see some nice details you have modeled.
If you make a video After effect will do the same.

[DigitalDirt]

Oh wow, thanks ipo - it looks SO cool with real fire composited in!! I'll definitely be doing some post work on the stills and the animation in Photoshop/ After Effects, just wanted to get as close to what I had in mind in max and vray first, but I think I've done it...







In terms of render passes, I'm still learning but I figured I would benefit from rendering out a z-depth and ambient occlusion pass? If I use animated fire in Phoenix FD I should probably render that out as a separate pass too? Any hints on useful passes and things for post please let me know!

I've brightened it up and got the blue/red colour balance just right, seems it was all in the vray physical camera settings - I set it to f stop: 3.5, Shutter speed: 10, ISO: 500 and had the white balance at neutral after reading a bit about camera settings for fire here - http://photo.tutsplus.com/articles/s...shutter-speed/.

Then I added in a bit of vray environment fog and a pcloud system over the fire to act as dust and sparks, I was wanting to try and get this effect - http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tut...g_density.html (the cloud/granite image which looks like dust half way down the page) though I think this tutorial is for Maya so the settings were a bit different and I couldn't quite get it right in Max. So I just used a noise texture for the smoke density and did the rest with pcloud.

I'm still waiting on my Phoenix FD dongle arriving in the post, but when it does I'll be able to add a nice fire and some animated smoke to the hearth which will give it the finishing touches!

Thanks again everyone for your help and advice I'll post another render if I get the fire working!

[wxyz]

I've found Phoenix's alpha channel to be difficult...you may need to forego compositing and balance light levels within one shot.

[DigitalDirt]

Ah ok, I'll see how I get on if it's not going to be beneficial to render it separately I'll just do it in a one-er!

[HS_3D]

Looks great Alice, I always think it's difficult to decide what exposure you should be aiming for in reconstructions - I know the entire rendering setup (max/vray) is set up to pour you into a camera/physical system where exposure is controlled by iso/f-stop/shutter - without even getting into gamma and tone mapping. Did you opt to use this kind of camera 'model' to decide exposure or does the exposure setup and colour palate mimic a 'physiological' system? - i.e. eyes in low light/scotopic conditions. Sorry to be a pain in the arse but I've always fought with this one

(Cheers! Adam)

[DigitalDirt]

Hey Adam! How're you? Yeah it's difficult to get exposure right for reconstructions. On the one hand you need the visualisation to reflect the structural evidence for the site in terms of artificial and natural light sources, but then you also need people to be able to see what's in the scene!

I went about lighting this scene by deciding to get one light as I wanted it to begin with (the skylight, lit with hdri). I kept its multiplier value at 1.0 - and made myself promise not to change it! Then I set up the vray physical camera, which I thought was worth while taking the time to learn to use properly as for this particular project I'm blending live footage from the site with cg footage, so using a similar set up to the HD camera we used during fieldwork was ideal. I got the lighting balance right then re-added my lights in the hearth for the crackling embers and my glowing spark particle system and tweaked their intensity a bit until things looked good. From suggestions in the thread below I also added some blue tinted back-lights behind the character to bring her out to the foreground a little and to try and capture the nice blue shadows, red highlights that firelight seems to create - that was my only cheat away from the archaeological evidence I suppose

The camera choice was more down to achieving the atmosphere/tension I wanted with the lighting in the scene to fit in with the footage for the rest of the interpretive film rather than trying to mimic reality, the vray camera has so much more flexibility than the regular max ones though so it made things run far more smoothly!

Here's a few stills from the animation now that I've got the smoke just right! I was hoping to use the Phoenix plugin to make a real fire but the render farm at uni doesn't have it installed so we'll have to settle for glowing embers for now...

[snivlem]

One thing that Jeremy Birn mentioned to me years ago on one of the lighting challenges, and the crit was so valuable that I still try and stick to it.

That is when you are doing a dark scene and that is that its better to make it light and contrasty rather than flat and dark.

I think the histogram would should that your scene might be a little flat.

I've done a quick 30 second paintover to show you what I mean.



Of course it is by no means perfect but I think it might be an area of improvement to look at the exposure of your scene.

[DigitalDirt]

Hi Snivlem,

Yes I see what you mean, I'm rendering out 32 bit tiffs so I have more flexibility to tweak the lighting in After Effects later on and I'll definitely take your advice and play around with the contrast. I'm rendering out separate z-depth and atmospheric (for the fog/smoke) passes too so hopefully we'll see an improvement after the post work I think in the future I'd do the lighting for a scene like this slightly differently, but time is tight on this project now so I'll need to make the best of what I have!

Thanks again,

Alice

[HS_3D]

The smoke looks great! Really adds depth to the scene, and a smidgen of claustrophobia. A totally different experience to the cold dark cave you get in its current state (would appreciate seeing some plastic seafood and lamb shanks). For compositing animations, I've seen people render out to .TGA's as apparently they can contain several passes (zdepth, etc) in a single file. Are TIFFs better filesize-wise, or is it a better workflow to have separate files for the passes? (Would like to know as I'm also working on an animation)

EDIT: I'm good thanks btw! Having to focus on 3DS stuff at the moment though so missing the field...

[DigitalDirt]

Hi Adam,

Ahhh plastic lobsters! I knew I'd forgotten something! I've not used TGA's before, I've just always rendered to TIFFs and passes more out of habit than anything else!

Alice

[joconnell]

It's EXR that lets you save all of the elements in the one file and after effects is pretty damn slow to access any of the extra channels - stick with what you're doing!

[DigitalDirt]

Final Version!



Just a quick post to say thanks to everyone for their help and advice! Here's a still from the animation with a little fire composited in, got the hang of after effects and sorted out the contrast and depth of field, it's not perfect but I'm really happy with the way it turned out I'll post a link to the animation when it goes online!

Thanks again,

Alice