Visible lights - Caustics

[Anonymous]

I can't get the visible light with a spotlight shining through the portal windows in this sanctuary to show. I think I have all the settings right but can't get it to change the rendering at all. I want to put in stained glass in the windows and show the visible light coming through. Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

Was your jpeg anything special? I just clipped one off of the web and I can't get the light to shine through like yours. Also do you need to use final for rendering quality to get this to work or can you do a quicker preview?

[Anonymous]

I'm still struggling to get this to work. My sample file looks like this.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Interesting. Darker/underexposed... but the quality of the visible light that there is is pretty cool.

Looks like you have both the sun and a spotlight maybe - otherwise I can't explain the projected glass color on the floor near the wall vs the shape of the visible light... and the visible light setting for the spotlight does not have a long enough distance... and so terminates where seen in the image?

To get my exposure (which is way overexposed compared to yours), I slid the blending slider for the normal-blended translucency jpeg to about the middle of the range to allow more light through for global illumination to illuminate the 'room'. Also used physical camera and unchecked the render setting box to use the sun. Only the spotlight was generating light in my test.

Will be away from my computer for a day or two...

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the help Carl. Still working on things but will try to get ready for a preliminary meeting tomorrow. I'm used to working in Artlantis but I'm hoping to get good enough to get some good images from C4D.

[Karl Ottenstein]

That's getting there, Mark. Nice.

For Artlantis, a correction to what I said earlier - about there only being visible light for the sun via "god beams". I hadn't used the feature in Artlantis 5 since beta and had forgotten... certain light sources in 5 have a check mark and slider for "light cone" which does indeed generate visible light beams that pick up the jpeg color - and super quickly compared to CineRender - seconds vs hours. These terminate properly on the floor at the image of the window... not extending like the 'god beams' in the image I posted.

But - and OT now since this thread is about CR, but since you said you use Artlantis ... the Artlantis 5 'light cone' illuminates the inside surface of the jpeg. So, if I move the slider high enough to see a reasonable level of visible colored beams, then the window itself become solid white. I think this is a bug and will report to Abvent. Do you have 5?

[Anonymous]

Great thread guys!
I hope you don't mind me posting some post tricks to enhance/cheat some detailing.
If you can render passes in Cinerender you should render a lighting pass and then in photoshop add a little Radial Blur (Zoom Method) after that you can mess around with the blending modes. I think it will add alot to the scene.
And add a bit of chromatic aberation and noise (1%) to the whole scene.
Hope you get the desired result.
Cheers

edited : grammar