I'm rendering with Redshift. What I've been experimenting with is to take the star field map I'm using for the background, whether Hubble or now Joey Ponthieux's wonderful suggestion of the NASA star field image. It seems to wrap nicely to a sphere, not much shows up in the render, but it's a good base to work with.
I use the crystalize filter in photoshop, which seems to create larger facets out of the star intensities -- flat shapes of color values -- based on averaged pixel information (as far as I can tell), to create an HDR image. You can make the facets as large or small as you'd like, and it still approximates something from the background source image. So, it is like having as many subtly different low lights as you'd like. I downsize the faceted image, turn it into 32 bit, and use a saved selection to boost the lighter facets up past 1. This makes some nice, slightly varied lighting for the GI, not too demanding of the renderer. I love image based lighting for GI, it is fairly simple to create whatever kind of HDRI you want in PS these days, it's come a long way in that area. But I will also have some local lights in the scene as well. The lasers will not be forthcoming. ;-) I still need to get some nebula-type atmospheric stuff going though... To liven things up. Maybe work in some Hubble nebulas or better yet, something that will actually drift through the scene. I'm wishing I were more well-versed in ICE... Nancy On Jun 25, 2014, at 9:58 PM, Sylvain Lebeau <s...@shedmtl.com> wrote: > Interesting... > > On a renderer point of view, I wonder how importance sampling will cope with > all those bright little spots... > In the end, it's just a tiny little fill light. I would defenitly use a > manual created direct light source with very low intensity to recreate the > "Mystery artistic soft light that shows lasers" > > Of course in such situation nearby a nebula, it's totally different. > > Are you rendering with Arnold?! > > sly > > > Sylvain Lebeau // SHED > V-P/Visual effects supervisor > 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8 > T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM <http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM> > <am.png> > VFX Curriculum 03: Compositing Basics > mail to: s...@shedmtl.com > > > > >> On Jun 25, 2014, at 1:58 AM, Nancy Jacobs <illus...@mip.net> wrote: >> >> >> >> On Jun 25, 2014, at 12:14 AM, Jason S <jasonsta...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Plus mistery soft light from a galaxies that always happens to be somewhere >>> around so that there may be light, with dust in space so we can see lazers >>> :) >> >> That's what I'm counting on! That "Mystery soft light". Since what I'm doing >> can have a bit of 'artistic license' ;-)... Though I am making it generally >> correspond to the starfield light. >> >> After all, one can see in old paintings the 'heavenly light' thing... Where >> you don't really question where it comes from too much if it works in the >> painting... (ok so I'm a painter first after all... ;-)) >> >> Nancy >
