Here's the first stages of Yoops Golden Chamber room where the group first meet Mrs Yoop. Any comments on how to improve it are welcome........

That looks beautiful in a still, Ken. How's the fire animated?

That looks very good, very good indeed!
It's so exciting seeing all these places come together!!!

Thanks guys. The fire looks great animated and is a result of this thread.

I added some quick textures and added the characters. I'm not sure what that semi circular shadow is on the floor behind them.

Ohhhhh... That's nice...

very dramatic - love the scale

Nice start so far!

So you'll be changing the textures of the floor? It needs a little bit more structure (bump, displacement, normalmap) as it looks too flat now.

I think the scene would look more interesting if the lightsource gets a window-like shape. At the moment it looks more like a .... spotlight.

David

I just love the way the light breaks trough the window, it looks, as Nancy pointed out, quite dramatic.

The floor has a normal map on it so I think it can be made more "bumpy" looking if required. I think I worked out what the shadow is and why the light isn't window shaped. I have the wall normals flipped and haven't positioned the "outside wall" section properly.

No, I can't seem to get the light to shine through the window and leave a window light shape on the ground. I think it's something to do with the softness. Here I've reduced the softness and the problem is worse.....but the "God lines" in the light are more obvious (still not perfect though) which I like.

Nice stuff Ken,

But would it be better if it was a moonlight rays coming from a window in the ceiling?
Now it look like a morning shadow who give an hope, expectation effect more than a frightning,dangerous mood...

if course I'm not talking about something like "Mr Been spotlight" but more something like ....evil werewolf stuff...blueish white rays... keeping the warm color tone coming from the fireplace....

this is just my impression...
nice work so far anyway


Al

You mean like a skylight? A little weird for a castle maybe? But this is Oz...I'll change it to that. The color can of course be changed. I don't read it as a bright/hopeful thing.....more like a "spot light" for Mrs Yoop to question them under.

I changed that. I was also finding issues with a light in the flame model not casting shadows of the fireplace on the back wall. I've put the light in the chor now and it's better. Also, I've upped the quality of the volumetric light and made it blue.
Now it's just a matter of adding more props...

I much prefer the shaft of light in the previous versions - they look a lot more natural. I wonder if this vertical light might give problems seeing the characters talk when long shadows of noses/foreheads are covering their mouths.

It's easily changed. I do agree. Opinions?

Yeah, I definately like the light coming from the side more.

I agree.

the last one of the "side-light-images" is lookin' good!

Alain? What do you think?

Well , I don't know

Be careful about that view , I mean keep in mind the camera point of view used on that scene.
The point of view in your render would not necessarily be used by the animator team...

it's a general "bird view" from the room door, lightning effect can change a lot depending on camera view...and can be done in different ways ,like layer etc.

But it's still good to have some choice and your experiments in this sphere are cool and surely not lost.

(I'm working on the outside Yoop setup...hope to show some stuff soon too )

Nice work again
Al

Ken, if the windows-shape doesn't work, why don't you just use a light-gel? That would be my first choice.

How's a gel done again?

IIRC you should right-click on the camera's shortcut (in the chor) and select New->Rotoscope.

If you cant get your shadow to fit with the contour of the window then it is probably because your walls don't have double sides.

I prefer the light coming from the side too. But I prefer the blue light to the other one.

I agree with Alain that the light in this sequence will heavily depend on the shots and be adjusted according to the composition. Plus, there will be ample opportunities for very dramatic and impressionistic lighting in this scene given the emotions that it will convey and generate.

This said doing lighting and mood search can only be beneficial in the end or at least interesting.

I have a back side on the walls. There's a report on AM Reports about it. I'm pretty sure it's some light setting I'm missing, but I don't know which one.

How about a compromise? My problem with the last light is it's too uniform/symetrical. Maybe if the ceiling light was more to the right and the moon light was angled it would look better. It would mean the shadows are longer too. I'll see what it looks like....

Great-looking room, Ken. We shouldn't have light coming from the side because the room is described as "windowless" by Tin Owl. To get long shadows we could put a couple shadow-casting lights above Yoop's table and place a couple of torches to justify them. The lighting will go in after animation anyway.

Ken, I liked your image from this thread so much that I put it in the front page of the Wiki but I think you're as far as you can go now until we start animating this shot. Move on to Mrs. Yoop's bedroom. I know that a bed has been built, and the box that Green Monkey is imprisoned in... There's also many other drawings by Alain of the interior of Yoop's Castle. If you build them they will be in the movie.

I just took a look at the project. Indeed there were some light settings that were wrong. So let me use this opportunity to write some hints about lights related to this situation.

This is the render you get from your setup:
[attachmentid=19628]

First thing to note is that Cast Shadow is not set to ON. So let's do that and while we are there, set the shadow darkness to 100% otherwise the shadows will not be black and we still will see the klieg light circle on the ground so here is the result:
[attachmentid=19629]
Note the shadow on the inside wall is slightly darker. But that still does not cut it.

What is happening here is that when a ray-traced shadow uses only one ray cast, the shadow does produce what we call "Shadow Falloff". That is the shadow gradually fades out as the distance from the shadow casting object increases. This is actually related to 2 measures: 1) the proportion between the light distance to the object and the object distance to the shadow, and 2) the light width. For instance, reducing the light width from 150cm to 15cm produces this:
[attachmentid=19630]
The shadow is darker and we clearly see the window frame in the shadow. But we still see the light circle.

To completely get rid of the light circle, we need to set the light width to 0cm.
[attachmentid=19631]

Another way to control the shadow falloff is to move the light away from the shadow casting object so the distance from light to object is much greater than the distance from object to shadow. For instance, if I still use a 150cm width llight and move it away 10 times the distance from the object, I get this:
[attachmentid=19633]
Still the shadows are not completely black. And no matter the distance from the light to the object, if we want to completely eliminate the shadow falloff effect, we need to set the light width to 0.

Shadow falloff is only an effect of using only one ray cast for the light shadows. If we set ray cast to anything other than 1, we get stochastic soft shadows. For instance, just moving the 150cm width light 2x from the light but setting ray cast to 30 will produce this soft but very black shadow:
[attachmentid=19634]

Ah! Thanks Yves. Moving on to Yoop Bedroom.....