It is still life

[luvsmuzik]

Indoor work today. Lighting, glass, reflections

Hanne's material share Gold tgc. candleholder  (perfecto!)
Hanne's material share  Fake wood tgc. floor (minus reflective)

Made this scene first in Blender, I know it needs....decorative accessories...bla, bla....will do.
Questions:
Is there a facsimile for a plane used as a light source with TG? I should try a light source maybe? In this scene i had to add a second sun, with shadows off, and only 0.5 strength, position 180 elevation 25. to see into the room. Or....do I just need more windows, ha?

I added some volume to my glass vase 20, and color 0.875. however is that too much and the probable cause of a light hazing around the object? The object is shelled, like, with inner faces, would that be the culprit?

Thanks in advance for any help, I do use it!

[Dune]

Bobby is the one to answer your lighting question I guess. I did notice the absense of reflection on the glass vase, and the seemingly light emitting candle. Is that on purpose?

[luvsmuzik]

Thanks Dune. Yes I put 0.3 lumina on the candle, original setup had a flame atop. I just tried too much crap on the table here. Scaled candle down and moved it to center the vase and add flowers. First renders had reflections on the vase before volume additions. I think maybe the haze is the outer shell of the vase and the greenish the inner lining opposite normals perhaps.

I wanted that sort of "Old World" lighting without just slapping a filter on it out of program.

[Hannes]

Yes, indoor lighting is something special in TG. I'd say the windows are very small, so even in real life the room would be quite dark. Nevertheless my advice is to play with the sunlight and the environment light. In my attempts for indoor scenes I increased the sunlight multiplier (a bit) and the environment light (strength on surfaces) a little more as well, until it looked more or less natural. I had to increase the GI settings as well, but imho it's worth it. Using additional lightsources to me only works if there are actually additional lightsources in the scene like lamps or candles.
Talking about the candle: I had a scene with a candle some time ago, and I used a separate object for the flame, set this one to not "cast shadows" and placed an additional light right in the middle of this object. Then I created a very small localised cloud at the exact point where the light and the flame object are, to get some subtle glow around it (see the attached image - the upper one).

And the glass: have you tried to check or uncheck the "double sided surface" feature of the glass shader? By the way there are some glass shaders as well in my materials files.

[luvsmuzik]

Oh WOW! Thanks Hannes!

Your renders are super to say the least. As you can tell, I had to import the whole scene as one object, but it is not that hard to change some of the variables, once imported. (Hoping to not go over free version limit with object shaders)

Here I added an image map (simple 256x256 black and white) as a texture for the table cloth, set as displacement function, I only wanted a woven look w/o changing color. I could have also just selected the outer edges and assigned a new material for a border effect, but that is another shader. I have all these neat scrolling shapes.....

I went back and changed tris to quads on that vase. (a very old old file made from a spline curve) I will play with the double sided option. Thanks!

[bobbystahr]

Indoor work today. Lighting, glass, reflections

Hanne's material share Gold tgc. candleholder  (perfecto!)
Hanne's material share  Fake wood tgc. floor (minus reflective)

Made this scene first in Blender, I know it needs....decorative accessories...bla, bla....will do.
Questions:
Is there a facsimile for a plane used as a light source with TG? I should try a light source maybe? In this scene i had to add a second sun, with shadows off, and only 0.5 strength, position 180 elevation 25. to see into the room. Or....do I just need more windows, ha?

I added some volume to my glass vase 20, and color 0.875. however is that too much and the probable cause of a light hazing around the object? The object is shelled, like, with inner faces, would that be the culprit?

Thanks in advance for any help, I do use it!

Yes but it won't cast shadows. Lately I've been testing using an invisible card object with luminance and coloured area lighting. I use the card because the plae is such a pain to transform easily and the card has handles.

If an object is essentially a solid as yours seems to be I don't think you  enable  Double sided surface, dunno if that solves your hazing problem though. Basically I haven't found a cross object solution to the glass shader as every object seems to require tweaking a fair bit.
You could send me the object and I could have a run at it.

[luvsmuzik]

Hannes: "Talking about the candle: I had a scene with a candle some time ago, and I used a separate object for the flame, set this one to not "cast shadows" and placed an additional light right in the middle of this object. Then I created a very small localised cloud at the exact point where the light and the flame object are, to get some subtle glow around it (see the attached image - the upper one)."

Very good advice.   Thank you! WIP

[N-drju]

Usually to make scenes like that, everyone is using "indoors" GC programs like DS or something close. Cheers to you luvsmuzik for working it out on Terragen! Interesting approach.

[luvsmuzik]

Usually to make scenes like that, everyone is using "indoors" GC programs like DS or something close. Cheers to you luvsmuzik for working it out on Terragen! Interesting approach.

Oh thank you! I explore Blender a bit, but have always loved Terragen. I was not smart enough to script Ray trace type, so, knowing a little geometry I tried to find something I could experiment with. How hard can it be to build something, heh.....

Got this far with this one in Blender, got hung up with lighting, as usual....

In image two, the beams are dragging the color , not a desired effect....

[Dune]

Nice progress.  The glass is looking good now. The grapes don't need glass I would say, but merely a non-RT reflectivity and some translucency, perhaps with tiny drops with RT-reflection. The candle could use a distribution shader (final position altitude, use Y) so only the top (near the flame) is translucent. And that flame!

[Hannes]

What Ulco said.
What do you mean by "dragging the color"? The second image is still a bit dark, but it's working. But it's quite flat. Is GISD checked? Occlusion weight?

[luvsmuzik]

What Ulco said.
What do you mean by "dragging the color"? The second image is still a bit dark, but it's working. But it's quite flat. Is GISD checked? Occlusion weight?

I am so sorry. I wasn't clear that those last two images are Blender renders. Dark closeup shot inside a cube with some skylight openings. It is here that I also realized that I had a few too many glossy transparent traslucent shader mixes, etc, but the test was to avoid white speckling ....

In the sunbeam image, rendered in Blender also, it was supposed to be rendered in layers in compositing and later mixed in compositor. If you look you will see the beams catching the gloss from the grapes and from the colors in the paintings, a real no no. If it was stained glass window, that would be great, but ....

Trying to pinpoint successful candle flame object location without putting it on the moon, with the click and copy coordinate method now.

Again, thank you both.

[bla bla 2]

With the power fractal branch to opacity of default shader a too.

[luvsmuzik]

Finally ....

My initial experimental flame was much larger scale, but I at least got something. I will probably change the haze color....little bugger was hiding behind the candle for about 15 incremental adjustments before I found it, ha.

Making clip files and notes to self on this one, by the way.
I have several room set ups to try with different lighting, leaving the anchor in default ground zero and not touching position of focus objects.

Power fractal floors and walls here and the vase is finally glass.

Gonna see if I can find an example of that translucency distance distribution....

[bobbystahr]

Looking really good. I find when placing a light I make it's size large enough to see the bounding box, move it near where I want it and rhen I Right click in the 3D preview Center on object>Light source* and the scene zooms to Light source * which when selected becomes the temporary  rotational center and the light is more easily positioned from there. Then just click the  Current render camera button and you're back to your scene and resize your light to what you had it.