At 20:47 25-7-2006, you wrote:
Note too much talk on the forum lately so I figured it would be a good time to ask more impossible questions. :-)
Hi Matthew, My replies didn't make it, apparently... I'll try again.I attached an alternative method for the stepped lighting - a single line of VSL ;) I was too lazy to make the full 32 steps but you get the simple idea: just a Boolean curve with Illumination in and out.
I'm still working on my lightcycle (from the movie TRON) reproduction (modeling is complete (I hope)), but now I'm trying to reproduce the extreme lighting in specific parts for the movie. Original reference images here:http://digitalstratum.com/images/tron/screenshots/hover_1.png http://digitalstratum.com/images/tron/screenshots/jet_wall_1.pngThe shadows and dark areas are sharp and absolute. I can't really tell where the light(s) would be placed. I've tried everything from very far away, to right up close. With and without ambient light, with no flashlight color, etc.. Also keep in mind that the game grid is very large compared to the lightcycles, and seemly somewhat flat in features.
Judging from the sharp shadows, they used a directional (Distant) light. The pitch-black shadows suggest there's not much of fill lights. Maybe you can use Andy Jones' custom surface illumination shader to tune the effect of light/surface angle manually.
Second thing is the look of the rendered graphics themselves. They look grainy, but not quite.
Maybe a large Special Light can help here, they produce grainy images if quality settings aren't too high. But if settings are too high, the image will look too realistic, which is not what you want here ;) Maybe the noise just a 2d filter, or the result of crappy technology somewhere in the pipeline...
Sometimes you think you see color banding, other times the images are smooth but there is just something about them that identifies them exactly as images from TRON. I've seen some people reproduce this, as seen here:http://www.tron-sector.com/gallery/show.aspx?id=2555Everyone is raving about this image as being very close to the look of the movie. Even though the geometric accuracy is not right, the look, color, lighting, etc. is very nice. The author has not commented on what software he used or his procedure (maybe it was done with 2D post-production.) It looks like he used a very fine bump map, but that would be inaccurate and I'd rather use a different approach. The color and lighting is excellent though, that's for sure.The last thing is the apparent "rounded" edges on some of the geometry (see the first image) like in the canopy. We know that the lightcycles were made from analytics (CSG, primitives, etc.), so how would you get a round looking edge? Something MAGI's software could just "do" maybe?Is this something that could be attained with a VSL material?
Good point. Perhaps this software supported torus primitives, which could be used to make a round edge on a cylinder. You could try to cut off a small edge with a flattened sphere or a cone. But aligning and scaling this is tough because you don't see what you're doing very well with Booleans. They render great, but suck in realtime view.
I think V6 will support cubes with rounded edges.
Oh, here is a 7 second animation I made last night (took 12 hours to render.) I was just messing around with the idea of a transport for the lightcycles instead of a "res-up". It's a bit slow in places and needs some work, but I'll get there. About 1MB AVI:http://digitalstratum.com/images/tron/transport_1.avi Matthew
Great animation! This project will work out fine, no doubt about it :) good luck, Mark H
steplightmat.r3d
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