Note too much talk on the forum lately so I figured it would be a good
time to ask more impossible questions. :-)
I'm still working on my lightcycle (from the movie TRON) reproduction
(modeling is complete (I hope)), but now I'm trying to reproduce the
extreme lighting in specific parts for the movie. Original reference
images here:
http://digitalstratum.com/images/tron/screenshots/hover_1.png
http://digitalstratum.com/images/tron/screenshots/jet_wall_1.png
The shadows and dark areas are sharp and absolute. I can't really tell
where the light(s) would be placed. I've tried everything from very far
away, to right up close. With and without ambient light, with no
flashlight color, etc.. Also keep in mind that the game grid is very
large compared to the lightcycles, and seemly somewhat flat in features.
Second thing is the look of the rendered graphics themselves. They look
grainy, but not quite. Sometimes you think you see color banding, other
times the images are smooth but there is just something about them that
identifies them exactly as images from TRON. I've seen some people
reproduce this, as seen here:
http://www.tron-sector.com/gallery/show.aspx?id=2555
Everyone is raving about this image as being very close to the look of
the movie. Even though the geometric accuracy is not right, the look,
color, lighting, etc. is very nice. The author has not commented on
what software he used or his procedure (maybe it was done with 2D
post-production.) It looks like he used a very fine bump map, but that
would be inaccurate and I'd rather use a different approach. The color
and lighting is excellent though, that's for sure.
The last thing is the apparent "rounded" edges on some of the geometry
(see the first image) like in the canopy. We know that the lightcycles
were made from analytics (CSG, primitives, etc.), so how would you get a
round looking edge? Something MAGI's software could just "do" maybe?
Is this something that could be attained with a VSL material?
Oh, here is a 7 second animation I made last night (took 12 hours to
render.) I was just messing around with the idea of a transport for the
lightcycles instead of a "res-up". It's a bit slow in places and needs
some work, but I'll get there. About 1MB AVI:
http://digitalstratum.com/images/tron/transport_1.avi
Matthew
