I'm trying to get the effect of a darkening room with sprites and radiosity. The attached video shows a sprite emmitter just above a light, emmitting it's sprites straight down infront of the light. I was expecting the room to get really dark, or having a large shadow on the ground below. Does anyone know how to get this effect to work?

do you have cast shadows turned on the sprite system setting

I tried that. I turned the light off in the scene, and the sprites were still visible as if they had an ambience value on them. Is there any way to get them to be properly shaded so that when they arn't in light they are dark, and when the pass by a light they light up? I've put a room practically full to the brim with sprites, and I want to put a kelig in the shot to simulate a volumetric effect. That way I get changes in the volumetrics over time, instead of the same image ever time like when normal volumetrics are rendered.

if you want the volumetric light to change why not add turbulence to the light and animate that..wlll look later for a sample if that would help

Oh, It's a swining light. Here's a wireframe of what I'm doing. The light is in the middle of the room. I haven't made the swinging light yet, but this is just a test. I've also attached what the camera sees. The last render is what I want to achieve. I took a render of the room with the light on, and another render with a cone filling in the light's area, and set the top layer to differene in photoshop.

Matt,

I was playin with sprites a little last night , and the one render I did the sprites did not cast a shadow for me, I had cast shadow on, and gorund to accept shadows, and light to cast shadows....Ill recheck tonight..just in case I forgot something..

Michael

I know this has nothing to do with shadows, but it does have to deal with sprites. I made a quick render of an explosion coming out of another room rendered with orange lights and radiosity. I think it turned out pretty good for a first try.

Coooool

Reminds me of the scene in the matrix when the bomb explodes in the lobby

I had made that. It was lost when the hard drive crashed. I think I'll make it again. It wasn't that great because I was only using raytracing back then.

I made that to -- lol


I could post up if you want.


Ben

Here's a solid/wireframe of what I'm making. By the way, the best way to get smaller sized .mov files is to set the compresion type to jpeg. This 1 second file used to be 8 megabytes. I haven't put the doors in yet, but I think I'm going to use newton physics with a force object because doing it by hand looked really crappy. Hope you guys have all of the updates of Quicktime.

Sure go ahead and post your version of it.

Matt, that's totally awesome!! Wow, I can just see that flame come out of a dragon's mouth. I smell a fiery toot, errr...I mean tut coming on

HH

I seem to be making this thread just about sprites because I've made another thing. It's a NUKE! Dan made a city to blow up with it. It's like Sum of All Fears all over again.

Nice. Some newton physics in there and you'll be sucking deisel.

The nuke city clip is awesome. it is so awesome i am speechless.
would you mind sharing the project file? i understand if you don't, because it is really cool

yeah... the city isn't realy that detailed, i made it in like 4 mintues. Matt made the nuke sprite emitter and i just imported it into a choreography and made the city. I plan on making an animation for it. Maybe like a news spot with a news copter.

Hi all, i thought i would add some cool effects to that city explosion i made. It took about 2 hours and 50 minutes for the first second, but it was going to take about 32 hours to render the whole movie... which was only two seconds long. lol

Don't know how much tweaking you plan to do or if this is "for" anything...

... but it looks so fantastic I want to comment so it could be "perfect"...

The camera shake is a bit "soft"... a tad weak. A blast like that would be a more "sudden" impact... rather than the sort of ease in kind of thing... maybe a couple of "bounces" as the shock-wave passes.

The explosion is perfect... but it kind of gets a little lost with the slow pan and the slow impact shake... wish I could be more specific.

Fantastic effect... too bad there are no nuclear weapon strikes in the TWO project.



Vernon "!" Zehr

I think the camera movement if just the camera man getting a fright. The shock wave has yet to hit him.
Going by the last movie, I think the mushroom cloud should linger longer. It disipates too quickly to seem like a big explosion.

Nice improvements btw. Are you using the Newton plugin? I look forward to the next update.

PS I might be missing something, but is the light faked or is it dynamicly changing with the sprites?

Really good improvments.

question: do the explosion sprites give off light as one of their properties, or do you have to set up lights to fake it?

whatever you did, looks awesome in the updated one.

looks good!

Whatever its source, that light's causing some odd shadowing from the buildings. In the clip, the building shadows have hard edges, as though lit from a single-point light source. But the light from that explosion would be incredibly diffuse, probably too diffuse to cast any visible shadows at all.

really cool! Great job on the effect!

It's not every sprite, it's just 8 point lights. Dan attached them to the model of the smoke ring so that it would move with the same animation as the shock wave.

thanks vern. The camera shake is just the person moving the camera around to fallow the main spherical blast in the center of the explosion. and the TWO can always change lol


yeah, i did notice it went a little to fast, but overall everything is fast, the buildings falling and the shockwave... so just think of it as spead up film. and no, i'm not using the newton plugin, and yes the light is faked, i just had one very large central light fallowing the big cloud, and eight smaller lights fallowing the ring of the shockwave.


yeah... the shadows are very harsh... but the lights are enourmouse, and if i had had the render to 16 multipasses, those harsh shadows wouldnt have been so edgey.

The primary drag on the render was the burn material effector that was used by John in his "Shaggy gets burned" project, but it added so much to the render. The glow of the buildings before the were incinerated, the burning up and the leveling of the buildings, and the firery glow that was left behind was a great effect, but it was a killer in render time. I'll see if i can get anywhere with out the material effector... but i think it's not going to look too good.

True, but why not try Z-buffered shadows instead of raytraced? Then you can get the soft shadows in one pass.

Well, i guess that would work... does it add much to the render times?

Anyway, here is the project file for the explosion.

Z-buffered shadows are much faster than raytraced, because they're less accurate. With soft shadows, when accuracy doesn't matter so much, they're ideal.

Thats clever! and thanks for the project file!

look foward to seeing more.

Great work!

thanks for the project file, but it is hard to see anything without the images (smoke, moon, gallaxy, spots and dim)

Those images are on your A:M CD (e.g. D:\Data\Materials\Particles\Sprites\)

those are the sprite images. you get them from the cd =P

tanks for your replies .