Lecture 220 - Introduction to Lighting (Virtual)

okay so we're gonna get started today with uh exercise 220. it's a bit of a break from working on your um your artist retreat in that we're going to start working on lights today and i will be honest and say that i think the thing that people have the most fun with in v-ray is lighting and doing night renders we're not quite at the stage where we're really going to be able to do quality night renders just yet but we're getting there and so today's really about learning how lights work getting ready to be able to to put them into your scene and actually start to light the interiors from here we will go toward an interior day render so we'll put the lights into your scene next class and actually create a render that's inside with supplemental lighting and then we'll move into the night where it's actually we switch into nighttime renderings so today is going to be about how do we create lights how do we work with lights and i'm going to focus on two primary types of lights these are v-ray lights to be specific one is a spotlight and one is a point light there are a number of different types of lights that are available in v-ray it's hard to um teach them all in one setting so i try to break them up and then i'll pull in some other light types a little bit later on but we'll start with the two most basic which are a spotlight and a point light now when it comes to actually doing lighting in v-ray there's a couple things that are kind of essential that we need to create the first thing is we need to create the fixture or the geometry that actually holds the light itself so if you look in this room for example we've got these ugly fluorescent lights above our heads and when the lights are on there is some kind of a frame that holds a lens and we can visually see that light there is also the light that's being cast down on all of us and so when we do lighting in rhino and v-ray we're actually building two separate things one thing we're building is the fixture and the other thing we're assigning is the v-ray light that casts the light in the scene so there's two different parts we're going to start with building the fixture itself first and then we'll get into the v-ray light and the v-ray light settings so i have a brand new rhino file open it should be in the large objects feet and inches template let me double check here perfect and so in this i need to actually create the fixture the thing that holds the light in the first place or the thing that holds the light bulb i'm going to do something that's a very simple place to start today my hope is that you'll embellish it you'll work with it you'll think about it a little bit more but i'll show you uh several different styles of lights so the first one that i'm going to do is a recessed light in the ceiling and i'll do a round like a can light so nothing particularly fancy it would be recessed it would be up on the ceiling etc so i need to make the geometry that holds the light first so if i think about that uh i could start with one of my standard primitives here i'm going to use this one which is the tube i'll click on that i'm going to start with my tube at 0 0. there it is it's going to ask me the radius the outer radius so let's say let's say this is a 6 inch can light so my radius would be three inches there it is then it's going to ask for the thickness of the wall which would be essentially the trim so we'll do that maybe it's let's see here let's do 3.75 inches and then it's going to ask me for the the height of this little piece now because this is going to end up mounting on the ceiling i'm actually building it into the negative so i'm going down from 0 0 0 instead of going up i could flip it over afterward but i'm going to go down let's go down by i don't know negative 0.25 inches like that oh i can't see it so let's uh go into my options here in opengl i'm going to turn off that gpu tessellation and now i can see it if i look at it in shaded mode there we go we can kind of see it so that's the trim that's the ring of the trim so to speak now i could get a little bit more uh fancy about it i could say that you know what instead of having it be just a square like that i could draw out that i want the profile to let's say go to have some baffles in it let me turn on ortho for a second here and then we'll go over uh let's see here and let's go okay so let's say i did that and then let me fill up this let's do we'll do it like that i could use this as a profile that i could then move over oops snap here come on let me do a rotate 3d on this so it's really it's a matter of what you want to do in terms of complexity but i could take and instead of having something simple i could sweep that around the rail which would increase the complexity of the the little baffles or whatever you get the idea so i can keep adding levels of detail to this but again it doesn't doesn't really matter i could have stuck with just the simple light i'm just showing you that your level of complexity can improve as you go along which is part of what adds to the realism of these lights in the first place so i have that which includes its little trim piece the next thing i need is the bulb we'd see a little bit of a bulb in here and in this day and age you're seeing a lot more of of the bulb being led so there's some kind of a lens that goes across as opposed to an actual light bulb that you would screw in so i'm going to go ahead and do that i could do it just as a flat surface i can also do it as a slight ellipsoid so if i go into my primitives here i can choose this one this ellipsoid my ellipsoid center is still going to be at 0 0. there it is my end of first axis would be out to that point let me turn on my quadrant snap there we go my second axis axis would be right there and then this is just the thickness of the bulb how far does it stick down so let's do it i don't know at an eighth it's an ellipsoid it's underneath the the cube here it's that one and so we can see that it has a slight little bit of an arc to it on this side i don't need the whole arc though i don't need it on the back side i'd rather keep that flat so i'll select the curve that i had here and i'll trim the back half off at least i hope i'll trim the back half off oops it doesn't like me and try that one more time let me use this as a trim there we go so i'm just going down with it so as i look at this light i need to organize i'm going to use it as a block so this fixture is going to be a block so let me go ahead and rename my layers and get organized here my first layer we'll call it can light dash 6. and then i'll have a sub layer for trim c6 trim and i'll have a sub layer for c6 lens or light or or whatever and so i'll take the trim and we'll put that on the trim layer i'll take the bulb itself and i'll put that on the lens layer there it is and then the rest of these layers don't matter so we'll go ahead and select them all i'll hold down shift while i select them all and then i'll delete them so i'm really trying to be organized about how i'm looking at this so the next piece would be to go ahead and assign materials so we'll open my v-ray asset editor here i'm going to be in the materials section and let's find a material i'm going to go ahead and go with plastic and we'll do maybe a a white plastic or something there we go there's a white plastic we'll drop that over here i'm going to right click on plastic here and say apply to layer it's going to go on the trim layer and so now if i were to render this we'd get the white plastic trim that's good but this the the lens of the bulb if i look at that and the light was on i'd want to see that it's glowing somehow so if you look up at the light there it's glowing there's a difference between the physical object that is the light and the v-ray light that's actually casting light in your scene and this is one of those things that is difficult for for you guys to understand initially uh in that there's the fixture is separate from the v-ray light so in the fixture i still need to make it look like this lens is actually shining or or is is on the light is on and i'm going to do that using a special kind of material called an emissive material and i have a little tutorial written up if you're in exercise 220 here there's a link to it uh it's right here v-ray 8.15 emissive material it's right here and so we're going to go ahead and create that emissive material i'm going to come back and reference these numbers because i can't memorize them so i'll be back to look at this in just a second but we're going to come over here we're going to open the v-ray asset editor and we're actually going to create a brand new material so i'm going to click on the new material button let's see i think it's this one there we go and we're going to create a new emissive so previously we've always done generic this time we're creating a new emissive material so i'll click on that it's called emissive i could rename this if i wanted to to be a light bulb or something like that and you can already see that in the little preview here it kind of looks like it's glowing a little bit and that's that's really what we're after so let's go in and adjust some of the settings so i've i've created the material i've called it light bulb then i'm going to hit the little toggle on the right here to open the material properties and actually close the material library here and just work with the properties and i need to adjust some of the settings so these settings here correspond to some of the settings that i have online so i have an emissive color at 200 161 and 82. so i'm going to jump back over into here and my color i'm going to click on the color and right now if i will try to type in 200 in the r value it's not going to let me and that's because my color scheme here is in a range of zero to one i can change it however to zero to 255 so it's just the scale with which it's working so now i can actually type in 200 161 and 82. it ends up being kind of a goldish color like that so it's not the most exciting color yet but it provides the right color light long-term it'll glow the right shade of yellow so now that i have that i can go ahead and close it and the next thing down is the emissive transparency so right here i'm going to click on that square in the emissive transparency i'm going to switch to 100 100 100. and so i've gone to 100s and i'll go ahead and close that so instead of being black it's kind of a gray so that gets me through the emissive drawer let me see this may be something that's a little bit different because yep so this is this new version of v-ray so um things change a little bit so you can ignore the diffuse color and the diffuse transparency for right now okay so i have those the last piece of this is a value for intensity so it's still here under the emissive and intensity this value the higher you make this value the stronger the light's going to be so right now it's at one but if i switch to 10 for example we're going to see the light start to and cast light into the scene and you can actually see it kind of glowing out there we're going to increase it all the way to 100 which is going to seem excessive in its preview state but will actually turn out pretty well long term so i'm going to go ahead and leave that at 100. it's called light bulb i need to apply that to the material so i'm going to go to apply it to layer and it's going to be the lens going to be that so now if i were to look at it here and do a little render you can see a little bit of the light starting to glow you can see it along around the edges it's a little bit yellow in color which is our purpose so it's glowing so we now have the light fixture ready to install into a scene so i'm going to go ahead and save this i'll go to file and then save and let's put it into today's folder bear with me for a second so that's can light six i'll go ahead and click on save there it is and i need to bring it into a night scene we will get to setting up a night scene but i'm not going to make you guys do it um i have a sample for you so if you pull up exercise 220 about halfway down under part two there's download a sample night environment to try out your light blocks so this is already set up for you so you don't have to create anything if you click on it and download it when you go to open it maybe there we go obviously the files from last semester which is why there's unsupported v-ray materials in it okay so what it is is it's a little wall a little roof that's kind of floating there and it gives us a place to put our lights and try them out if i do a render of this scene it should show up kind of like a dark background there's a little bit of shadow as if there was maybe a moon with it but it's mostly black on the screen it looks really really black but for our purposes it's enough to kind of test out our lights and make sure that we like them so the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to bring in that can light and i want to stick it on the ceiling here but i need some guides for where it's going to go so i'm going to draw a little line that goes across diagonally on that ceiling so i can snap right to the middle it'll make it easy to bring it in i'll turn on my midpoint stop i'll go to edit blocks insert block instance so it's really important to note here that i made the geometry in a file and i saved it and then i'm bringing that geometry of the light into the scene as a block reference so i'm bringing it in right now and i'm going to go find the one that i just created there it is i'll go ahead and say open perfect i want to use it as a linked block definition and my layer style as reference i'll say okay i'll say okay let me replace all existing materials and when i put it in i'm going to stick it right to that light right there so now that i have the light fixture in the scene i could perform a render and if i did it correctly there will be you always have to wait for things to render out there'll be a little bit of speckling and i'll be able to see right here yep there's the light it's in the scene but it's not nearly enough light to actually be lighting the scene to know that there's enough light in the scene um and to to mimic real light so this is where a v-ray light comes in so this is the geometry that holds the light now we need to build the v-ray light itself so i'm going to go ahead and leave this where it is and i'm going to come up to the v-ray toolbar right here and i'm going to choose a spotlight it's the third one over right there and when i create the spotlight the first thing it asks for is the base of the cone so i'll snap right to that center hopefully i still have midpoint snap on come on doing such a nice job of letting me snap there there it is midpoint and then it's going to ask me for the radius of the light so i want the radius to be one foot or the diameter to be two feet so i'll go ahead and type in one foot and then i'll press enter and then i want my height i want my light itself to be going so that it's shining down and sometimes it's hard to get it to to actually snap to be going down so it may be easier to just do it in one of your side views so i'm doing it here and i want the height here to be one foot so i set those as the same the radius and the height are identical here one foot radius one foot of height and we'll go ahead and place it in like that so this now this object is my v-ray light that's going to be lighting the scene itself there's a few rules for this light number one the origin of the light so this point up here can't be intersecting or contained within any objects so i need to move it down so that it's below all my geometry so you see it doesn't actually interfere with any of my geometry i can move it to be really really close to my geometry but it can't be there where it's inside because then this light would be shining on the inside of my light fixture so i need it to be outside so we're going to make sure that it's down and outside of all my geometry like that and then we need to work through the properties for this particular light so when i click on the light itself there it is there are if i go over to my properties there are light properties so these light properties uh we have a variety of settings here that are available you can also see it in your v-ray editor which is right there which gives you additional options for the light itself so we're going to work on editing the light inside of the v-ray asset editor rather than just here because it gives us more options than what are just available here so if i select the light i can click on the edit in v-ray light editor there it is so we're in the asset editor there's my v-ray spotlight just as before i can rename these so that i have individual light names which may you know if you imagine having 20 different spotlights it may help you to say living room light kitchen light that sort of thing for right now it can stay spotlight i only have one so it doesn't matter and so now we're going to look at a few of the settings and so the first thing is the color of the light it's currently set for white if we want the color to be a little bit more yellow to mimic kind of incandescent traditional light we're going to change that color and again i'm going to change my range to be 0 to 255 here and it's going to be 255 214 and 170 like that which is a little bit more of a light light pale yellowy brown and that'll help in the overall light so we'll go ahead and set that so that's my color and then the next one that's really important is this units so there are several different unit types to control the intensity of the v-ray light most of you will be most familiar with radiant watts or power right here this is like the wattage of a bulb and most people kind of have a general idea of oh it's a 40 watt light bulb or it's a 60 watt light bulb in terms of understanding how bright a light would be and so i think you'll have the easiest time setting it up based on that so i would encourage you to change to radiant power right there and then you change the intensity to be what type of bulb so a 60 watt bulb you would put 60 there in its intensity as we come down here a little bit further under decay instead of linear decay we're going to do inverse square so we have decay set for inverse square good all of those options should be set now for us we can go back to our original scene there it is let me switch to i have a saved view to help the render here render one so we can kind of see the whole scene and i'll go ahead and press the render button and i love it when i do that and nothing shows up right come on there it is and so you can immediately tell that i have light casting down on the screen unfortunately you can't see it quite as well as i can there's a little bit of an arc here based on the distance of the light from the wall that's casting the light right there now i can change this by adjusting the light settings itself so for you guys to see this a little bit better i might change the intensity here so i go back into my v-ray and i'd say okay let's change this to 120. and hopefully you guys will be able to see it a little better i'll go ahead and go back and render and so my light just got a little bit stronger so hopefully you can see this a little bit better and there we go so now you can see that arc on the wall here a little bit better so i can change what this does let me create a few more spotlights to help illustrate this so this first one is kind of your generic light it works pretty nicely for an interior light i'm happy with it i'm going to create some layers so that i can hide these for a second and let me change object layer we'll turn off that one i'm going to create another spotlight so go back to my spotlight tool and this time i'm going to change the diameter so the the radius last time was at one foot i'll do the radius this time at uh i don't know let's do it at four inches and i'm going to set my height at the same height so we'll do uh one foot of height there it is same rules i have to move this so that it doesn't intersect any object and then we'll go back and adjust my light properties so i'll go in my vray asset editor here it's now the v-ray spotlight one same settings it's 255 214 and 170. this is a set of numbers i actually have memorized there it is my units are going to be in radiant power i'm going to keep them at 120 so that you guys can see it there and my decay is going to be inverse square so i've gone through and adjusted the options let's see what happens in the render so at this point i can go ahead and open up that render again and instead of having the nice arc i focus the beam of light so that it's now very intense as a more of a spotlight down onto the floor because the geometry of the v-ray light has changed so i've shrunk that diameter down kept the height the same so the relationship of the diameter or the radius whatever you want to refer to and the height controls what's happening with the spotlight so you can see there that it's shining directly down on the floor i'm getting no fall on the wall itself there's still ambient reflected light from that spot but it's acting much more like a true spotlight would be the inverse of that would be to create a light that is more so let's do a radius of two feet and a height of one foot we'll move it same settings there it is it's spotlight 2 255 214 and 170 as my color watts same watt settings and my inverse square decay perfect and now when i jump back and i render this the light is going to be far more diffuse it's the opposite effect so i'm going to end up with very little light or or arc on the wall that arc is going to be much much higher than it was in the original one and so now it's a very kind of diffuse broad light so i've changed what the lighting conditions are based on the geometry of the v-ray light does that kind of make sense so most of the time the one-to-one rule is a pretty safe bet you stick with that and you're gonna generally be okay okay so i've done that and i've gone through those types of lights now if i wanted to change and i wanted to do some a light that maybe was a lamp you know let's say a floor lamp or something i could make that kind of a light so i'm going to go ahead and go into v-ray and i'll create a new light a new document large object inches there it is now i need to build the geometry for this light so i'd start with maybe a cylinder here we'll start at zero zero oops let's do a diameter of one foot a height of an inch and a quarter there let's switch this over into shaded so we can kind of see it all right let's do a another one turn on my center snap all right we'll do a diameter of one inch uh and a height of i don't know four feet i'm sure you guys can come up with better looking geometry than what i'm doing okay this is just purely the example so let me come in here to the cylinder again let me make sure i'm snapping to the center there it is let's say my diameter is going to be you know what let's make it slope instead of being a perfect cylinder we'll do this all right so my diameter will do it at 10 inches and we'll do this at one foot and then we'll do it at eight inches so it has a little bit of a slope to it i'm gonna move this down also so that the the post and the lamp shade intersect a little bit so let me move this vertically by maybe four inches there we go i'm going to take the shade itself and i'll explode it so that i can delete the top and the bottom like that so i just built out the little floor lamp okay again the geometry of this doesn't matter you guys can make something beautiful you don't need to you don't need to make something as simple as i'm making so once again i have to set up my layers to bring it in as a block so we'll call this one i don't know floor lamp we'll make a sub layer for shade we'll make a sub layer for stand and that's probably sufficient now in this case because i put a lampshade on this we're not actually seeing the bulb inside it's being covered up by the lampshade so i'm not going to worry about building the light bulb itself and doing an emissive material it's not really necessary because it's hidden by the lampshade so we're going to leave it with just those so first thing i need is the stand needs to go on the stand layer sorry wrong layer change object layer there it is the shade needs to go on the shade layer perfect so i have the shade on the shade layer the stand on the stand layer we need to assign some materials we'll open that material drawer up let's do let's see if we can find a metal for the lamp sure that one looks kind of interesting uh we'll right click and say apply to layer and it's going to be on the stand layer so that's now been applied to the stand layer now the shade is a bit trickier so since we're in the new v-ray i'm going to give a shot at some of the their fabric materials and see if that will work nicely as a shade i can't promise that it's going to work in the old version of v-ray it was better just to create a semi-transparent kind of tannish material and have it work so i'm going to give this a shot and see if it works and if it doesn't i'll go back to the old way because i think it has improved so i'm going to look here under fabric and i'm going to pick a fabric for the lampshade let's see here well that one's kind of ugly what's that one look like well that's a mesh that's not going to be good how about that one yeah that looks nice okay so i'm going to use that one i'll right click on it and say apply to layer and we're going to put it on the shade layer there it is by the way um there is one like i've loaded some materials that i didn't end up using here if you want to clean up your file you can click this little broom looking icon which will get rid of any materials that aren't actually assigned so i can get rid of those materials that i didn't assign sometimes that's useful when you have you know 20 materials and you don't need them all okay so i've gone ahead and i've done that it's possible that i might have to adjust the opacity of this material a little bit so that the light shines through we're going to give it a shot and see what happens okay so i have that set up i'm going to go ahead and save this i'll go to file and then save and we'll call this floor lamp and we'll save and then we're going to bring it over into that same rhino file this one and for for our purposes i'm going to go ahead and take these two and put them on a new layer just so we're not being confused by some of these other layers there we go and so i'm going to bring in the floor lamp so i'll go to edit and then blocks insert block instance and i'm going to go find that floor lamp there it is it's a linked file as a reference layer type and we'll drop it here onto the ground i use that corner just so that i could place it somewhere i'll switch into the top view and we'll adjust it a little bit let's move it so that it's close to the wall but not intersecting the wall so there it is at this point i don't have a light installed just yet so i need to install a light into this light fixture so that we see what uh the light looks like and so i could do a spotlight like i did last time but remember a spotlight originates at a point and shines all in one direction well in this case my point is right here and i need it to kind of go up it needs to go down needs to go out so this is a perfect opportunity to use something called a point light and so if you come over here we did spotlight before if we come over two more we get to point light so i'm going to go ahead and click on the point light tool be careful that you're not picking the sun tool here we're using just the point light right here and it's going to ask for a location i'm going to snap it right to the top of this let me turn on my center snap and i'll snap it right to there it is currently intersecting that top though so i still need to move it up by maybe an inch so it's floating there so there it is one of the challenges with point lights is as you zoom in they stay the same size they don't ever get bigger so picking them sometimes can be a little challenging i'll just warn you about that ahead of time so i have that selected i'm going to once again go over to my properties click on the light properties and then go to edit in v-ray asset editor so there it is there's my v-ray they call it an omni light here i need to work through the same settings so first off is going to be the color 255 214 and 170. there we go i have my color set my intensity we'll leave it let's do it at 120. my units are going to be in radiant power or watts my decay is already set for inverse square so all of that's good the rest of that's fine perfect so i have that one set up we'll go ahead and step back let me go to my set view render one and we'll give this a render like i said on this one i'm not sure whether the shade is going to turn out the way we want it to or not okay so you can see here that our light is casting light up through the open end of the shade and down through the the lower end of the shade it's casting a shadow from the pole where it's being held so if i move that light further away that shadow would get narrower but it's not really shining through the fabric that i wanted it to so this is where like i said i may have to go through and make some edits so i'm going to come back to my floor lamp i'm going to go into my material and under fabric here let's see here i want to make sure that i hit the correct thing i'm going to go to this i'm going to try this opacity level uh and so i'm going to change the transparency from black to kind of being a medium gray so maybe something like that or so and i might also have to adjust it here under diffuse let's try ah that one's definitely changing let me go back to this transparency i'm going to go back to being just black and under this opacity let's say 0.8 i want a little bit of transparency but not too much it might be 0.9 like i said this is somewhat trial and error okay so i have a little bit of transparency in that i'll go ahead and i'll close it i'll save this so i'll go to file and then save i'll jump back to my sample scene here i'll go to edit blocks block manager maybe there it is uh my floor lamp there it is we need to update it sorry wrong one that one replace existing material applied all because i edited the material all right and now we can go ahead and give that one a render as well so again i said this was a little bit of trial and error on my part because it's uh the new version so i just i'm trying it out it already by that square it already looks promising the key is always how transparent you make the shade because if it's too transparent you don't get enough of the shade itself all right there you go so that looks pretty good so it takes a little bit of playing around with it now i could also change this shade to be a different color and that would cast the light different in a different color so if i went back to my um original here i went into my v-ray and i said you know what i want to use the i need some kind of a ridiculous color here let's go back to the plain fabrics those were working pretty well sure why not let's use the red all right so there's my red fabric i'm going to right click and say apply to the shade and then over here where i adjusted that diffuse there opacity right there i change that to 0.9 there we go so that's set at 0.9 if i save this now and i jump over into this scene and i go to edit and then blocks and then block manager i can update that floor lamp it's going to ask me to replace the materials i'll say apply to all perfect and then i can go ahead and do this render again now this time the color of the shade being different than the light itself is going to change the light that's being uh cast here so it won't be as red at least it shouldn't be or sure it shouldn't be as yellow i don't know whether you guys can see it but i can already see a little bit of a pink tint to it so the point is the material you choose can impact what the light looks like i didn't change the light bulb color i could do that too but in this case i kept the light bulb the same i just changed the shade material and that then as as the light passes through that shade it's going to change the color of the the background one of the challenges with with doing these kinds of demos is there's always waiting you know when i let this render it's going to take a little bit of time i don't know how much you guys can see the red um yeah you can see a little bit right in here right in there and right in there as if that were a red lampshade rather than the the yellowy tan lampshade so anyway that's the point for how you would go about doing it so i have other options too so those are those are the first two now if i'm going to see the light bulb itself let's say i was doing a wall sconce or something if i'm if i'm trying to see the the light bulb itself then i might actually have to model the light bulb but in something like this if there's a shade that's semi-transparent i'm not actually seeing the bulb i don't have to worry about doing it sometimes people model a fixture like a wall fixture or something that has a glass case and then you see the bulb inside that takes a little bit more work because you have to be able to model the bulb as well as the glass case sometimes there's issues with glass and how you how it renders through the glass that's kind of an individual basis depending on what you make i may have some suggestions for for ways that your light might look a little bit better the last thing that i'll show you today before i let you guys start to work is how you might mimic something like neon or a tube light or something like that so i'm going to go ahead and go back into my floor lamp here i'm going to save this and then create a new file so let me go ahead and create a new large object inches all right so i'm going to work in the top view for just a second here i'm going to use the text tool to create some text so let's do how about 135 the height is in inches here so if i wanted it to be maybe 12 inches tall there it is like that and it just creates a text object for me to make this nice and smooth i might do a fill it with a radius of oh i don't know uh let's do let's try a half inch and see what that looks like yeah that's good so i'm just gonna round over the corners all right that's rounded over i guess it should be 136 huh how about we just do the three sounds like a good plan okay so i have my three you can tell where i'm going with this i'm going to sweep it so i need the cross-sectional curve i'll create my circle here not quite sure where i want to start it let me turn on my mid-point snap so i can snap to the middle now i need the diameter of the the tube here let's do maybe 3 8. there it is let's look at this in the three dimensional view i need to stand that one up on end so rotate 3d and we'll stand it up on end it may need a little bit more rotation for the sweep let me turn off ortho here for a second i'm just going to try to get that nice and perpendicular to the line like that now i can do my sweep so this is going to be a sweep one there's my rail there's my cross sectional curve there's my seam and now i have the neon tube going to shaded mode like that okay so i created the neon tube i need to stand it up so let's first move it there to 0 0 0 rotate 3d so that it's standing upright i might also move it away from the wall just a little bit so let's go maybe one inch like that just so it's standing off the wall a little bit okay so now i have the neon letter itself but i need to think about the the the materials of this obviously this is going to glow so it's a perfect opportunity for an emissive material so i'm going to change the default layer here to be neon and then the rest of these don't matter because there's not anything else that i'm creating other than the neon itself so i have the neon i need to go into my v-ray asset editor here and i'm going to create my emissive material i don't think they have any emissive materials already in here i didn't think to look various nope doesn't seem like it okay so we'll go ahead and create a new emissive material so i'll click on the new material icon and then choose emissive same thing here we have to go through and change this time on my color remember i had my color here from last time right there the 200 161 and 82 if i change to that i'd end up with a kind of yellowy color well chances are in neon i don't want the yellowy color i want some kind of a bright color so instead maybe i'll pick some kind of a bright color so we'll pick a nice bright color maybe something like that there we go my transparency here was 100 perfect so those are all set and my intensity value is going to vary because i'm going to use this to to make it glow so i'm not quite sure what it's going to be yet i'll start at maybe 50 and we'll see what how that looks uh long term it's turning out to be nice and pink there okay so i have that emissive i could even rename this to be neon all right so there's neon i'm going to go ahead and apply that to my neon layer good i'll jump over into oops wrong class there we go up there let me save this i'll go to file and then save i'll call this neon save perfect over into my night night scene there it is i'm going to create a new layer so that these objects can go on that layer and i can turn them off then i'll bring in the neon so i'll go to edit blocks insert block instance there's my neon linked as a reference and we'll go ahead and drop it there this time i need to move it vertically so that it comes up on the wall a little bit we need to move it over so it's on the middle of the wall so now that i have that there we can do our first test render of what it looks like i'm going to go ahead and render it wrong button so we're getting a pretty nice neon glow for that which is good the challenge with neon is we're doing the emissive to create the light so that we see the tubes the problem is if you guys can't see it particularly well but on the on the screen and when you guys try this out you'll discover that it ends up oftentimes being very blotchy the rest of it because the emissive material by itself isn't really enough light so this is where we can choose to install another type of light i told you today we're going to concentrate on point lights and spotlights the truth is that a rectangular light is a better light for this choice because we can put the rectangular light right behind where our our neon is and then have it shine that's what i'm going to do the problem with the rectangular light is it's not as scripted in terms of values so i can tell you to create a spotlight or a point light set up the watts and then it's going to show up like a 60 watt bulb or a 100 watt bulb or whatever when we create a rectangular light it's based on the wattage over the size of the rectangle so depending on how big the rectangle is we're going to need different wattages so it's usually a little bit more trial and error i'm going to go ahead and create the rectangular light corner i'm going to go ahead and see if i can create this here let's do it at uh one foot and i'm gonna have to orient this so we'll do this one also at one foot like that so this little light here is my rectangular light i need to do some rotating so let me rotate 3d so that i can stand it upright i need to do another rotate on it so that rotates around like that so on a rectangular light we have the rectangle and we also have a an arrow that points in the direction that the light is shining so i have the the rectangle i have the direction it's pointing i'm going to move this i need to turn on my point snap so i can make sure i get to it and i'm going to move it up so that it's near where my neon is but i'm also going to make sure that just like before it doesn't actually intersect the object so it's behind the object there so now with that rectangular light selected i can go back into my light properties i can edit in the v-ray asset editor there it is and we can go through the same options so first thing is under intensity we'll leave it set for 30 but under units i'm going to change to my radiant power watts there's one other thing though under options i need to make sure that it is checked for invisible because i don't want to see the rectangle itself double-sided would be if you want it shining in both directions in this scenario i'm not sure i want it shining in both directions i'm going to try it out and see now under color i have to figure out what that kind of magenta-ish color was because that's what's going to be shining the light color itself so i'll pick that color approximately and we'll give this a shot and see what it is like i said rectangular is not as scripted it's a it's a trial and error as you look for it so let me switch over into that render one view and we'll give this another render and see how it turns out yeah i can already tell that the glow is significantly better it's hard for you guys to see let me let me increase the uh the power of that to see if you guys can see it a little bit better on the projector it's going to be too strong on on my computer but on the projector it might be a little bit better you can start to see it in here yeah you guys can still barely see it on mine it's like everything is pink uh but anyway i'm using that to create the light for this particular um piece of neon so i'm using that rectangular light i wasn't planning on going into rectangular light which is why it's not written out in your handout but it's kind of appropriate for this style of light fixture so what i'm going to ask you today to do in your exercise 220 is to think about where you might end up placing lights in your scene think about what those lights would look like from a geometry standpoint build the light the fixture the geometry to hold the the v-ray light once you have that save it download this sample night scene bring that file in and set up a v-ray light it's really important for you guys to know that when you save your rhino file and you bring it in as a block into another file if you put a v-ray light into the block the v-ray light will not transfer through with you so your light your v-ray light is always put in the final scene that you're doing your rendering so on your on your retreat for example that scene with the with the uh the background and everything that we've been doing our renderings from that's where the v-ray lights will end up they won't end up in the blocks so they always end up at the in the end stage at the final stage uh of the renderings and that's just something that's really important to get practice on okay so today maybe create two to four lights geometries explore how this works today's our day to try to play around with stuff so try out lights figure out how the lights are working sort out what's working what's not working

Channel: Grant Adams

Views: 585

Keywords: DTFA, Digital Tools for Architects, Rhinoceros, Rhino, Rhino 3D, Light, Point Light, Spot Light, Emissive Material, Emissive, V-Ray, Vray, Can Light, Recessed Light, Lamp, Floor Lamp, Neon, Neon Sign, Neon Tube, Rectangular Light

Id: 4MbfGPFTTME

Length: 57min 33sec (3453 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020