I am looking to do someting like this http://www.disneyanimation.com/library/InteractiveLightingEffects_S2009.mov [disneyanimation.com]

I have a simple scene set up, that a simulation artist gave me to play with, in order to see if we can get the lighting from the particles emitting correctly to it's surroundings.

if you make a render out of the attached scene, you will see that the lighting is not really being casted correctly, for instance the explosion is not casting light behind it self, which I find very strange, as if the lighting has been set only to cast in the direction of the camera?

Perhaps there are some experienced guys out there that can point me to some good documention that can give me some insigt om how to do lighting with the Pyro shader that comes with Houdini 12, because right now, I have no idea how to control this lighting, except for increasing the “Emit Brightness” box under the “Fire” tab in the Pyro Shader.

Another question I have. If you tried make a render of my scene, you will notice that it's very slow at rendering, and yet it looks like that sample rate is still not high enough to output a satisfying look. What possibilities do I have to optimize the quality and render times?

Regards


Kenneth

One technique I've had success with is to render the just fire first, then create an isosurface of the fire, project the rendered fire on to the isosurface and use that as a geometry light to render the background. Having the fire and the background as separate elements in comp is also helpful.

Hi Danbode,

Ah I plan to render the simulation and objects in seperate passes. Thank you for the suggestion, I will take a look at it.

Hi,
The approach to this would be to scatter some instanced point lights or use some geometry acting as the lights. You then would use a field from the simulation to drive the movement of the lights and you could maybe even use the Cd value from the pyro to drive the colour of the lights and also the intensity.

Rob