Fast "artistic" lighting Blender-style: possible in MR?

[Kerro Perro]

As you may or may not know i'm always interested in NPR rendering and specifically lighting has been a stumbling block in that, i'm trying to get good results without the very slow FG and GI etc. and Mental Ray is fighting me every step of the way! ;)

Now today i came across this interesting short done in Blender: http://reversionmovie.blogspot.com.au/ (pacing was a bit boring but i liked the visual style)
and found this pdf on how they handled their lighting: http://reversion.cosmunity.com/Principl ... ghting.pdf
I am very impressed at how this guy can get such nice results using using only shadow "buffered" (surely that's the same as mapped right?) lights.

Been trying to repro that in MR to get a similiar result as on page 3 of that pdf - one very soft spot light - but so far no joy:

ex2.png

I guess the Blender spot light is set up very different, i miss the "spotblend" feature and clearly setting "spotsize" does not do the same thing as setting the angle in MR... Wich btw seemed the only setting that really affected the light: it seems soften out the edges a bit but the cone angle always stays the same. You can't affect the "spread" of the light circle hitting the ground without moving it.

Now i'm sure that the way the spot behaves in SI/MR is closer to reality but that's not what i'm looking for! I'm looking for far more artistic freedom than that this light allows...

Questions are A: have i just overlooked something and is a similiar look a described in the pdf possible with the standard spot light or B: is there any "hack" i can use to remove some of it's restrictions? A quick rray search with the term "light" only led me closer to "Physically Accurate Land" and i'm tryin to get further away ;)

[Mathaeus]

"Buffer" shadow in Blender means good old shadow map. Theoretically, you just set up a wider shadow map softness, longer shadow bias.... but yes it simply doesn't looking the same in MR, I think MR does somewhat different blurring, not equal along depth - also I think this MR specific way of blurring is reason for flickering of shadow maps. After all, shadow maps in MR aren't so fast, nicely to say. There is additional issue to, if you're using directional light with shadow map, MR takes the scene extent for shadow map size (and nothing else) - let's say, a plane flying over a few houses in scene, is able to screw up all. Unbelievable....
If you want this effects to be fast, old fashion renderer is your choice. Blender internal, Max default scanline, Cinema 4d old render. If you want advanced effects like displacement, you can try something like this.
I'm also fan of this kind of lighting, while ago I've rendered a few small game kinematics using similar method, with Max default scanline. Not MR, of course.
About speed, Blender Internal could be even faster than Max scanline for this purpose - but it's a bit harder to tweak shadow maps.

[Maximus]

not sure what you wanna achieve here but this is what i got in few minutes playing with the shadow spread angle and softness.



same goes for 3delight

[Mathaeus]

... and that's my render in Blender 2.32 internal , around 2004 or 2005, using Athlon Thunderbird with 1 gb RAM or less - about 60 lights - now just imagine how many lights you can put it today, still with reasonable render time.

Anyway, for advanced effects, imho the best engine could be V-Ray for Max, because is able to pull out blazing fast shadow maps from Max default scanline *and* trace radiosity over. Hate to say that, but if I'm forced too ...

[Kerro Perro]

@Maximus: well i'm gonna truly seem like an idiot but i can't get the edges of the light beam to go nice and soft with the same settings:

Capture2.PNG

But at any rate that's using raytraced shadows and that still really adds up when the scene gets complex...
I did forget the cone angle though

@Mathaeus/Anto: Well that render is pretty much exactly what i mean... (awesome image btw!)
Am i to understand that this type if rendering is not doable in SI? Damn... Well i guess i should open my student edition of Max and give it a go.. I guess that would be best workflow wise to send scenes for rendering lighting passes. How difficult would it be to do the same with Blender?

Sucks to be looking outside SI for rendering though, i felt it coming for a while but was hoping to avoid it, especially since i do really love the toon ink lens and have built a bunch of shaders depending on it.

Btw i won't be able to post again till tomorrow night - just so you know i haven't stormed off in an angry huff ;)

[Maximus]

I'm really confused
You can switch off the raytraced shadows softness and samples, and use just the shadow map with softness, its the same thing. What matters here is the cone angle + spread angle of the spotlight. You can definately do the same render in Softimage and MR, i dont see the problem or i'm not fully understanding what you want to achieve.

This is done with just cone angle at 67, spread at 30 and shadow map with 0.08 softness.

[Mathaeus]

@Mathaeus/Anto: Well that render is pretty much exactly what i mean... (awesome image btw!)
Am i to understand that this type if rendering is not doable in SI? Damn... Well i guess i should open my student edition of Max and give it a go.. I guess that would be best workflow wise to send scenes for rendering lighting passes. How difficult would it be to do the same with Blender?

You can do it in 3delight - hope you noticed a link to image by Milan Vasek. But it will take definitively longer than in Blender - for single image. Now it really depends what you're doing. If you want 3d motion blur, it could be near the same render time, because Blender Internal has to render a few images for 3d motion blur, in 3delight motion blur is almost free. However, Blender has a nice built-in 2d motion vector blur, if this is enough. Also, sampling of bump maps isn't best in these old renderers, nicely to say. It may be impossible to load huge bitmaps or many of them.....

For exporting... I think all what you have is Collada, and Blender doesn't seem to like the Collada method from SI ( that's an another old story, btw). At least I've been able to get usable Collada by first exporting to Modo, from Modo to Blender. Didn't tried that much anyway.
Next possible option could be MDD, but I think Blender still takes MDD as one huge morphing, not so fast.

P.S. about controlling many lights in Blender, you can't do it in SI way, by selecting many of them and editing whatever you want ( if there isn't some addon...) - but you just instance them ( editing any of them affects all). That's how this picture is created.

[Kerro Perro]

Ok couldn't resist posting before bed...

@Max: no you're understanding correctly, i'm just screwing up somewhere Will try again later...

@Anto: Well i actually tried my simple scene in 3delight - i've had the free version installed for a long time. But i only had a few minutes and i still don't understand any of it's settings, should probably read up on it! Also the Milan Vasek image looked very cool but not very NPR so that's why i didn't take 3delight into account. Think i could get very far with just the two free cores? Because currently i have zero budget...

Well the exporting sounds like a bit of a nightmare but then isn't it always ;)

Must go to bed now!

[gustavoeb]

Hey Kerro seems like Max nailed it... what you are after has nothing to do with shadows... heck you can switch shadows off if you like.
You can visually control this pressing the B key with the light selected. This wil show gizmos to control your light, press tab to switch inbetween gizmos. One of them is composed of two cones, one for the start and the other for the end of the fallof.
A spotlight is not much different then a point light, except for the fact it is masked by such a fallof.
There is another intersting control recently added (2011?) akwardly called Shape attenuation. This is actually an aditional mask that act much like barndors in real spotlights. The values are exposed in a strange fashion (to match the bad naming probably) but the effect is quite nice. Give it a try!
But sleep first...

[Mathaeus]

Hey Kerro seems like Max nailed it...

Well I'm afraid, he didn't. Once there are a lot of lights, all these falloffs or whatever else, became melted, so yes it is about ability of renderer to do fast and stable shadow maps.

Anyway, I really can't understand, why is soooo hard to admit that really small defeat, about rendering technique from last decade, already available in free software.... Reminds me to discussions on Max forums from 2002 or so, why they need this V-Ray when they already have default scanline...
I'd stop here.

[Kerro Perro]

OK couldn't resist sneaking in some quick 3d even though i should be working on something else ;)

@ Max: yeah i did manage to get the light softer - i did have to scale up my scene to do it:

Capture2.PNG

Now i also did a very fast test of blending colored lights:

Capture3.PNG

The result is ok, i have no idea if Anto's assertion that this will become troublesome with a lot of lights is correct - but he does seem to know a hell of a lot about this stuff so i'm inclined to take his word for it ;) But i will still try out for myslef, i have a nice and complex scene somewhere that i will use to test this later!

@ Anto: Well as said am still gonna try MR, as for exporting/another renderer goes: Max seems out. Can't export cameras via crosswalk and the "send to.." seems to be only for particle sims (the less said about that the better). Blender i'm gonna leave for now, i always admire it from afar but every time i try it out i go "derp! me no understand". Sorta the same goes for 3delight, i have trouble understandin the render settings - though that should be learnable, still any use with just the two cores?

Thing is the only other dcc i have any real experience with is Maya, so i'm gonna try to see if the Maya Software render might be good. I made some odd stuff wth it in the past so it might prove usefull.. I tried it a while ago but the "send to.." did nothing even though on paper it should work, must try more later...

@ Gustavo: yeah i knew about the b key from your rather excellent tutorial - even though in that you said not to use it