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Now here's the idea:

There have been a lot of lighting questions come up over the last couple of days. This model was created with the intent of having a kind of group "tutorial".

I stole this from CGtalk but the idea is that everyone would download this model ("That's quite a donation!" you may be thinking) with the specific purpose of lighting (and texturing) however they would like. We (pros to first day lighters) would all post our results in one topic and get feedback from each other. I think this would be a great way to teach and learn about lighting.

The model was created in such a way that all a user would have to do is assign group colors (bump maps applied) and start lighting. This could also be a lesson in composition as this model looks good from multiple angles. I would love to see everyone's take on it; daylight, dusk, night, white walls, red walls, a green roof, anything!

First of all, would I have permission from the guys on top for something like this? Also, is there any interest here from YOU, the users?

Tell me what you think!

Oh yeah, C&C are welcome too!

Thanks for reading!

EDIT: Model and Official Rules are in my next post on this page

Lee

fabulous model - will be very interesting to see what people come up with.

You could get a lot on interpretations with this model that could be very interesting

GREAT model! I'm looking forward to see how this thread will develop...

Ok.. first off Great Model!

Second... Greater Idea!

I'm in ;-)

That looks like a first-class model, Lee, and I'm sure that everyone would learn something in the process, so it gets the thumbs up from me.

That sounds like a great idea and hope it gets the go-ahead!

Al

Thanks Nancy, John, Trajce, Colin, Paul and Al! I'm glad to here interest here!

Alrighty, I haven't heard anything from up top, so LET THE GAMES BEGIN!

Rules:

1.Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate. This is a chance for everyone to improve their lighting skills, in the same way.
2. Make this model your own. Become familiar with it. Light and texture it however you would like. Change the model itself, if you'd like.
3. If you download this model you MUST post a WIP of some kind, even if you only end up changing the color of the roof.
4. Don't compare your work with others in a way that is degrading. We all have unique styles.
5. Ask lots of questions
6. Have fun!

Everyone at any level, and any step in texturing/lighting is welcome to come and post.

Please post your results in this forum. Also be aware that you will get some tips and suggestions to make your piece better. Lighting is an artform in itself, and there's a lot of room for all of us to grow here.

With that said, here is the project, and good luck!

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Awesome model, and a great idea.

one question, can radiosity be used or is it a non-raidiosity lighting setup? i can do both...

also if i could make a suggestion in drawing and shading, basic shapes are used for beginners; the next is more complicated shapes(of the sort) like bottles, cups, or other table items; then later the next level would be full rooms or room shapes;after that would be out door scenes and landscapes, some times water shading as well; the last true step of skill is still life such as animals, people or other living things, in actuality some prefer bare figures to show true skill(not that I'm recommending that). what I'm saying is this scene is kinda step 3 or 4, doesn't the one a cgsociety have different levels? maybe some people should contribute different level places to show what i men more i could post a beginner stage(spheres and rectangles, etc).

Yes, you can use Radiosity in an exterior scene. Make sure to use Kliegs instead of sun lights.

I'm thinking of making it a gingerbread house, but it's kind of hard to work on it when I have Labs looming over my head.

i was asking if that would be ok to do...
not if it was possible....

Thanks Stian, I hope to see you participate!

Good luck on the gingerbread house Matt, I can totally see it happening! Labs over your head, huh?



Yes, you may use AO, Radiosity or whatever you would like to light your scene, under any conditions. As far as your other suggestion goes. Well, my idea was this: I've done all of the hard modeling and texturing work for everyone, this way we can just focus, on color, composition and lighting. Cgsociety is set up the same way. They just have different lighting situations (candle light, outdoor light etc) every month or so. I agree that it would be nice to see other challenges, let's just see how this one goes. Good luck Mage!

Thanks for your support everyone! Good luck, I'm starting tomorrow!

Lee

Hello Jimmy, that model is absolutely baffling. I too am a Tim Schafer fan, and you couldn't have done better at capturing the essence of Grim Fandango (now all we need are some paper mache skeletons .) Also, magnficent idea. It makes learning something so much more fun when your doing it with other people; their mistakes can be your how-to's, and their good techniques can be adapted into your own repertoire, making a more tallented and well rounded artist. I can't wait to see the products of this experiment.
J Man

lighting links if they help.....

http://www.ypoart.com/tutorials/skylights-intro.htm

http://newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutor...-002/index.html

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=10132

http://www.andrew-whitehurst.net/3point.html

http://www.ypoart.com/tutorials/Photon-Mapping.htm

some aren't directed to a:m but they could be useful in some way

I just found a demo of the game that is a free download

http://www.3dgamers.com/dlselect/games/gri...lldemo.exe.html

Here's my rendition of it. I've never seen this cafe before, so this is all just made up stuff.

Three different versions. The first one is the original render, the second is a bit of level adjustments, and the second is kind of like a crappy old photograph taken of the same thing.

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Hope you guys enjoy this as much as I did. Thanks for putting up your awsome model Lee.

Good gravy Matt, that looks amazing! When I saw this beautiful thing, I couldn't believe that it was my model! GREAT. Thanks for your participation, I hope this isn't the end of it! When other entries come in I hope that you'll give us some advice. Thank YOU for a wonderful first go at it.

Still VERY amazed,

Lee

This is sweet! I'm in and will begin asap. Quick question - do we have a time frame? And if we finish, would you like a description of how we arrived at our final look? Y'know, so that everyone can learn off of each other?

Thanks for the brilliant model and idea!
- Michael

Heck no! Take as long as you would like. Also, if you're stuck post WIPs and ask for help, that's what I'm going to do.



That would be great! Maybe we could even talk Matt into explaining himself a little bit

Lee

I used Bitmap plus for most of the texturing. Just find some textures that you'd like to use, create a bitmap plus material, and apply them to those specific groups.

I only made a few additions to the model: wood on the windows, grass, parkingmeters, newspapers, A fell down, ocean, and added a sky layer so there would be reflections on the ocean. I could have used a Sky dome, but this was easy enough.

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The shot was rendered with only one sun light and AO.

I had a go while I rendered on another machine. Still needs work and definately not at nice as Matts but its a start. I really wish AM had "tube lights" so I could simulate the light off of the neon without a million lights or having to map it with Ambient maps.

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Great start Colin! I was hoping we could have a good neon lights discussion. Amient maps, I hadn't thought about that one, we should try it out and see how it looks. I love the volumentrics from the windows, gives it a spooky Casablanca kind of feel. If windows are translucent, will they let volumentrics through?

Lee

It looks like he took out the windows (and would have had to remodel the window on the far right).

Here's some of my thoughts on how to make the neon lights:

Light gels shooting directly at where the neon needs to be
Many many lights along the neon
A few lights moving along the tubes and rendering with motion blur
Post effects

Nope.. I left the windows in.. They are 50 percent transparent which lets the volumetrics through even with Depth Mapped shadows (take that Maya ;-)

I think the best way to do the neon lighting is with Ambient maps and Color maps. It'll give more control with less tweaking. Gels would work but then I'd have to aim them, I'm lazy. I might give Gels a try, just for the sake of doing stuff thats easy to change later.

Hey Colin!

You and i are going for a similar night theme and I love it. It feels like a nightclub, uh...at night . I'll post my render up shortly, but I had a quick question. I selected the windows group and made them transparent so i could shine light through them. However, only the two windows on the very right took my surface setting changes. The three in the front, are using the stonewall group settings and will not take the window group settings. Did you have to do any tweaking to get those windows to work? If so, what did you do?

Thanks!
- Michael

whoah, Matt! those images look incredible. I don't know anything about ambient occlusion nor radiosity in A:M. Heck, with this thread, I'm lighting a scene for the first time in A:M (and avoiding AO and Radiosity for now ). Beautiful images. I love the run down feel you gave it with your own models and modifying the original.
I'll have to look up how to apply textures using bitmap plus. they look fantstic! i have done a lot of texturing in Maya, but A:M's decal approach currently kind of alludes me. I like unwrapping UVs, it's what I'm used to.

- Michael

Hey Mike,


Yeah.. I had to move the window group below the wall group for the left windows to work right. The rightmost window doesn't have a window and I had to model that in.. I just took the wall and stitched in a window and added it to the window group. Can't wait to see what you come up with.

Thanks, Colin! AHA! The lowest group is the dominant. I moved the window higher up on the list, thinking it was the opposite. Actually, lower makes more sense - top-down hierarchy. SUH-WHEAT! I know have transparent windows. And I see what you mean about the top window. I'll add a window there too. Cool - I'll have my WIP up this evening.

- Michael

Bitmap works a lot like texturing in an SDK Level Editor software for video games. It takes tons of work out of texturing because it accounts for any angle created by surfaces. The model only took me 2 hours to texture and that was because I didn't know what I wanted to put on it. Probably would have taken me 30 minutes if I knew what textures I wanted on which groups.

Bitmap Plus is very simple to us. You just load a Bitmap (diffuse color map) and a normal map and you've got yourself a texture that could cover every surface of your model instantly. You can even set randomizations in the maps so that you don't get noticeable patterns accross surfaces. It's a lot simpler than using UV mapping.

If you don't have V13, you can use Yves's skylight rigs to simulate AO. It does a fine job, but I prefer AO.

Thanks for fixing that Colin. Sorry about that guys, I posted the model before I had tried texturing anything myself. Their needs to be a hole modeled in the far right stone wall and the window group needs to be moved down. Hey, it's free right? I'm excited to see what you come up with too Mike!

So far there has been 26 downloads! I hope I see at least 26 variations, even if you're going for a same look as any entry above.

Thanks so far guys, this has been a great success, keep 'em coming!

Lee

I covered up the windows with wood, so I didn't even notice. If you want to make the windows transparent, you'll also need to build the other side of the cafe.

If I had read this before doing the model, I probably would have textured it this way. Just for the record what exactly is a normal map?



Or use an image of the inside of a cafe, that could look cool.

This is a normal map:



Imagine that object as a sphere. Each slope comparative to the camera has a specific color. So when light hits that color on the normal map, it knows the percentage of light that should be drawn for that pixel. It acts just like a bump map, but with this you get a lot more resolution and smoothness for the samer area. You can also achieve a lot more depth.

Beauty! Thanks, Matt. I do have v.13. I will definitely try that out in the near future.

- Michael

I will warn you thought. Normal maps have not ben standardize as far as the X and Y posotioning. You may find normal maps with the green on the bottom of a surface, or the red and blue sides have been flipped. I remember testing them in A:M, but they usually changed every build, so just make sure that your maps look right. If they are messed up, you can use Ryan Clarks new Displacement map creator. That was one of my suggestions to him, and he added a script that will flip the X's and the Y's on any normal map.

You can get them from here

hi guys, uhh.. my computer won't read the file. It immediately says wrong file type. Would me having v12.0 have anything to do with this?
Thanks,
J Man

Hey J Man

Sorry, I just tried it out in version 11 and yes, this will only work with version 13. What a great excuse to upgrade though, huh?

Lee

I'd love to, but my closest excuse to a job is working at a local sign creation store this summer. (scrap change.)
Oh well, I really appreciate the model. It brought joy just seeing it, and I will totally keep looking for other people's examples. I believe I'll learn a lot.
Peace,
J Man

EDIT:*Wait a minute... Jimmy Caushca... I think that was Arnold's Grandpa's childhood friend/rival (depending on the story) in Hey Arnold!, no?*

It's only $99 to upgrade, and there are several new features that can really sproose up your renders.

If you work as an airline pilot, that's only 15 minutes of working to buy A:M 2007.

If you have the Yeti CD (A:M 2006) of v12, you can download v13 - Yeti version from here:
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=26246

Hope this helps...
Al

Calaver Cafe--Lighting effects and advertising...what a great thread

Here's my first pass at night lighting. I was a bit of a purist and tried to stick to the look of the game...I think I need actual bulbs on the lights, though, and I don't think the neon is quite right. Any comments would be mucho appreciated.

30 downloads, I can't wait to see these start coming in!

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Lee

I'm just coming to terms with the model itself - for some reason the end window won't go transparent for me and I can't for the life of me see why not. Any ideas?

Cheers

As the model stands, the window is part of the wall.

Lee, I looks almost exactly like the image I found on the Cafe. You can even see Grim up in the top~ Keep your updates coming.

Here's another one of my versions.

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This was extreamly easy to do because I had a huge rust texture with a normal map that I just threw on the entire model.

Nice stuff guys.

Jimmy, you should tone down your glows a bit and try using custom lens flares for the lights ;-) You really did go the pure route. If I get a chance sometime soon I might branch out like Matt. he's having to much fun.

There's plenty of wacky ideas to apply to this model. Even now, I'm thinking of making this some kind of vessel flying in space.

Nice work, Lee. I haven't seen the original in a very long time, so I'll have to take everyone's word that it looks like the original. I love the use of the lights. the glow may be a bit much, however. It overpowers the scene a bit. Unfortunately, I don't know how to create the look of the bulbs themselves without modeling them. Colin's lens flare idea sounds intriguing.

Matt - fantastic use of the model. Awesome atmosphere - it's immediately recognizable as being underwater. Of course, the sea weed is kind of a dead giveaway .

I'm rendering my offering and will upload when rendered.

- Michael

Hi All -

Here's my first attempt at lighting the scene.

NOTE: This is my first time placing lights in A:M. I have been using the default 3-light setup for all the exercises I have been doing. So this was a very exciting and challenging undertaking.

I used over 30 lights in the scene to create the effect. I'm using glow for the windows and neon lights. There is no Radiosity used as it was taking WAY too long to render just for testing. I decided that I would start with something simpler to test Radiosity (perhaps Yves turkey dinner scene).

Comments and suggestions for improvements are always welcome.

Thanks!
- Michael

Holy cow Matt, that's amazing! I love the specs floating around, nice touch



Sorry about that David. There's a wall right behind that window. If you hide everything but the "stonewall" group you can model the window in as shown and they reapply the rockground decal:

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Darn it, you caught me! I tried playing around with it, is there a way to get a completely white glow at the center?


Wow Mike, you wouldn't have known that this is your first time lighting a scene. That looks great. The spotlights under the windows adds a glitzy kind of look. Good job!