Visible sun light?

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

Is it possible to tweak cinerender so that sun light rays are actually visible in the render? Thinking of how trying to recreate the kind of look you might get where light hits dust (would I use the fog setting for this?)

Many thanks from a novice trying to become an expert 😉

[Erwin Edel]

Most default surfaces from ArchiCAD18 and later have caustic channel on by default, so unless you made stuff from scratch or are using an ArchiCAD17 or earlier project, it should work out of the box so to speak.

The image I show, has mostly 'white paint' as surface. Which is the one I checked before the render.

I don't generally go into these fancy render settings, go for a more sketchy look, so you've reached the pinnacle of my knowledge here, I'm afraid

[Anonymous]

Erwin,

This is what I ended up with (see below). It definitely worked for my spotlight, unfortunately I closed the image after saving without making a note of the render time but I am going to try to replicate the sun using the general light as you have suggested and will post the results.

[Erwin Edel]

From the artistic side of things, wouldn't you rather be trying to achieve this for your dark dungeons, mystical forest and old church renderings? I mean, even a simple google image search for volumetric light yields this as the typical result.

You don't really tend to get those beams of light in a brightly lit sunny afternoon living room render, right?

Or is all this just an excercise in seeing how the stuff works?

[Anonymous]

Absolutely. So the below image is just my test scene anyway in case that wasn't clear. Actually having a spot light that has visible lights will be genuinely useful as we work on showrooms where night shots can be dramatized by having colour spots showing off products. We tend to have to add this in post-production (photoshop). The sun-light look I was partly hoping to learn from and have a up my sleep if I ever need it.

[Erwin Edel]

Right, so try a lazy autumn afternoon mood for the room, you'll end up with better visible light, if the walls aren't as white, but rather a more subdued yellowy look?

You can probably play around with just two infinite general lights, rather than all the spotlights, to keep rendering times low. Chuck one inside, just to light up the whole place enough to see the interior reasonably and have the one outside a bit brighter to get a nice contrast and see the beams of light.