As I look for a voice artist for my animation, I decided to do some lighting tests. I remember a few people recommend looking at caustics, so I found a tutorial here for underwater lighting here. I quite like the results, however I need to slow down the speed of the light rays. Some disadvantages to lighting this way is I have no clue how it looks or where the light rays are until I render it out and it takes a very long time to render with this method (although this may be because I'm rendering it on my laptop while doing other things).
I think I'll try out a few other methods to see if I can get similar effects with less render time and once I have access to a better machine I might see how long it takes to render out. Despite how it looks, it might not be ideal due to the render time especially since I only did it at HD 560 with some settings like Final Gathering turned off. After testing other things out I might look around at my settings to see if I can speed up render time in any way.
Note: Although this method is a valid it will (as you said) take a very long time to render. A simpler method would be mapping a caustics image sequence (or fractal / noise) shader to a spot light. You then create a volume primitive (cube of fog) to shine it through. The draw back is that this is a 'software only render' and will need to be composited on top of a Mental Ray render (if you're using that too).
Note: Although this method is a valid it will (as you said) take a very long time to render. A simpler method would be mapping a caustics image sequence (or fractal / noise) shader to a spot light. You then create a volume primitive (cube of fog) to shine it through. The draw back is that this is a 'software only render' and will need to be composited on top of a Mental Ray render (if you're using that too).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion, I'll definitely look into it!
Delete