I am not sure what setting I have wrong, but when I render out a seuquence in flipbook and go to save sequence then open the pic sequence in COP or image viewer, all I see is a black blank screen. The flipbook renders show ok when first rendered in mplay.

Nevermind, just needed to add an ambient OP to the scene. The odd thing is the objects are visible in JPG renders without an ambient OP but not in PIC files! :?

That's because jpg is lossy - it's interpreting a very dark area of the screen and comes up with more visible pixels than the “real” thing. If you inspect your non-jpg with “i” - you should see areas of non-black…

Btw - “ambient” is evil. Ugly, nasty hack with little basis in reality. If you really need to add an ambient light level(and you shouldn't ), I would do it in post where it's more controllable. Just thought I'd throw that in there fer free.

First thing I do if I ever start up Houdini with a default setup - delete ambient1. 8)

Cheers,

J.C.

Thanks for info. I still need to learn more about setting up lights, but one thing I have noticed is unless some sort of ambient light is set up in a scene (in whatever software I have been using) it is tough to get the scene filled with enough light using point lights alone.

The problem with ambient is that it's an evil, ugly hack to make lighting somewhat easier. In reality(meaning, in the real world) there is no “ambient light”, although we use the expression frequently. There's bounced light, from all over the place. Now of course you can always do some sort of massive GI solution…and watch your animation render at 5 hours a frame and still not be happy. I'm not suggesting that at all. I hack “ambient” light all the time - but I do it with several very dim light sources - at least they have direction - and I try to have each light have a “purpose” - i.e. when you get that horrible black on the underside of your objects, I'll make a “bounce” light to try to emulate the light from the sky bouncing off the ground. That's completely different from an ambient-type light because it's this awful slam-dunk additive that simply ups the floor of every single thing in the scene. Ugh. This way lets you control the floor bounce separately from the wall bounce, etc.

I mean, I was being *slightly* sarcastic. People use ambient lights all the time in CG. It's just so *very* digital looking, and as mentioned, you may as well just add some colour in the comp - it would look the same and you'd be able to control it after the render.

Lighting is tough. I'm certainly no expert at it, and I see it as one of the most challenging jobs there is. I have tremendous respect for the lighters at Pixar - especially in some of their more visually beautiful films like Bug's Life and Finding Nemo. Building data is a nit-picky thing, animation is too, with dashes of inspiration, shading is a careful, slow building of layers - but lighting is like camera framing and story - it seems to aspire to something higher IMHO. “Painting with Light”. Beautiful documentary:

Visions Of Light: The Art Of Cinematography (1993)

You should check it out if you want to be inspired.

Oh, now I've gone way off track again, and managed to insult everyone that loves modelling, shading and animating….

Cheers,

J.C.