Got a difficult brief here with which I am having little success. I need to put quite a few of these large, coloured, curvey chandalier lights in my scene. They are big things - about 3m long in a big ‘s’ shape. I have tried many techniques, but I just can’t get it right. We are now resorting to painting it in Photoshop, but even that isn’t great.
Here are some reference shots.
Would anyone have any tips on this?
I would try:
Simple geometry with enough quads in it.
(*) Color diffuse map
(*) Displace map for the sphere shape (B/W), maybe in the Opacity slot as well.
(*) VRay2Sided Material
Best regards,
nikki Candelero
nice renders 
they look like baubles - birth a sphere particle at each vertex of a bit of non renderable geometry and put on a glass material. Or as nikki mentioned, a map with a 2 sided mat on simple geometry.
@ joconnell
Glass material wou kill the raytracing a lot as there would be so many small balls. IMO, and tricky is probably not looking for this.
Best regards,
nikki Candelero
I have modelled a ‘simple’ version of one of these lights and it was many thousands of polys - I just don’t think modelling will cut it here.
Even making a good material to stick on some geometry is proving difficult.
I have just made a simple scene with my guess, and I think You might like it a lot as it renders extremely quick.
Of course you should refine the maps to your appeal.
I will post the results in a minute, with the ZIP file as well.
Best regards,
nikki Candelero
Wow - thats great! I can’t believe how helpful this forum can be. How long did that take you?
Seriously though, thank you so much. That has been really helpful. Now I need to rebuild this in the forms/scale/colours that suit my scene. 
…I’m giving it a go now. The problem with my scene is that it is very complex - there are about 120 vraylights just for these chandaliers, not to mention more general lighting for the rest of the scene.
I need more computing power! :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:
…Basically, as each ‘s’ shaped chandalier is about 3 or 4 meters long, they each need about 20 vraylights!
The scene took me like 2-3 minutes.
Actually the PS work (preparing the diffuse and displace maps) was longer :lol: :lol: :lol:
Suggestion about the lights:
You can use a VRayLight Material for the shapes themselves, and use 1-2 real VRayLights underneath to cast the real light, so you get less raytracing.
No need to worry about the shadows, as these lamps would actually produce the same area type of light, as you would cheat with 1 VRayPlane light.
Best regards,
nikki Candelero
