I am working on a model of a space frieghter, that is very heavy on the geometry even though I am still rather light on detail. I am using point instancing to reduce some of the load but will probably need to break it down even more as detail is added. Engines and cargo pods have not been added yet.


What you see here is a lowRez representation so I can see where to place new geometry as I work on it. I would put a test render here but when I tried it took nearly 2 hours to start the render and after 7 hours was only 50% done. I lost that render when Windows update restarted my computer at 3 in the morning.

Some where along the line I got the great idea to place lights in with the instanced geometry and now have an extreme number of lights, 960 to be exact, and the number looks to be going up as I work on it.

What I want to know is how can I pre render the effects of the lights on my geometry to speed up later renders. Some of the lights will be replaced with textures, decals and sprites but spotlights will be trouble.

Now back to work On this monstrosity(nearly 300,000 points for the hiRez).
Also Posted at 3DBuzz as Dragon Ranger

Well, of course I can't tell exactly what you're trying to achieve with all those lights, but one new option in H11 is Active Radius, under attenuation on the light. You can set this to as little as possible and nothing outside of that range receives illumination. This helps a lot with tons of ornamentation lights.

Cheers,

J.C.

Woah, deja-vu

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&p=89083#89083 [sidefx.com]

960 lights is far to many. If you want the detail of that baked light setup , you should do it to a section of ship and then instance that. If you need interactive detail ie geometry moving through the shadow of the lights you could try instancing lights for the sections that matter.

Geometry instanced lights rendered with PBR. Will jam a file up at my website.

Rob

Just wondering can you bake to each geometry instance being as each will have different influences?

JColdrick: most of the lights will be basicly ornamental in nature so the radius limit will help a great deal.

The cradles, of which there are 96, currently have 10 lights each and I do not think that number is going down but most can be changed to geometry lights.

circusmonkey: Running lights and docking lights and any low radius lights, now possibly geometry lights, I think I can bake to an instance. But the spot lights that effect the main hull and other instanced geometry I am not sure about.

I have downloaded illum_pc.hip and will look at it later when I have time to give it my full attention. Btw thanks brianBurke.

I have a lot to think about and I think one of the first things I will do is switch to H11.

Thanks for the advice, I am sure I will need more later.

Cradle that holds the Storage units, not yet modeled.

I decided to work on the geometry for a while.
The only materiel I have on this piece of geometry is a washed out constant on one of the decorative lights.

I have been checking out Peter Quint on Vimeo [vimeo.com]. There is some interesting stuff there.

Thought I would post a test render.
Only one light and no cables since I blew them up with some changes I made to the Cradle.

Still only 1 light. I may not need to add any more lights.

I still need to add greebling to the pods, cross supports between the cradles and then start working on the primary hull.

circusmonkey
960 lights is far to many. If you want the detail of that baked light setup , you should do it to a section of ship and then instance that. If you need interactive detail ie geometry moving through the shadow of the lights you could try instancing lights for the sections that matter.

Geometry instanced lights rendered with PBR. Will jam a file up at my website.

Rob

I try to work with instance light and an atmosphere lit fog (to make volumetric lights) but how can i define only these lights in the Light mask of my fog ? Is there a way to name the instanced lights ?
Thanks for replies

Interesting question :-

How about group off the points used to define the location of the lights > ?

Rob

fsimerey
Is there a way to name the instanced lights ?

Instances have their names also. Save Ifd on disk, open it in a text editor, and check out your self. You should see something like:

/obj/pointlight1obj/instancer:1
/obj/pointlight1obj/instancer:2
/obj/pointlight1obj/instancer:3

These names can be used for masking as usual as far as I remember correctly.

hth,
skk.

SYmek

fsimerey
Is there a way to name the instanced lights ?

Instances have their names also. Save Ifd on disk, open it in a text editor, and check out your self. You should see something like:

/obj/pointlight1obj/instancer:1
/obj/pointlight1obj/instancer:2
/obj/pointlight1obj/instancer:3

These names can be used for masking as usual as far as I remember correctly.

hth,
skk.

Thanks for the tip of ifd file, very useful !
I tried this in light mask :

/obj/hlight1obj/lights_INSTANCES:*

where lights_INSTANCES is an instance node of hlight1.

In the ifd file, i found like you said this:
ray_property object name “/obj/hlight1obj/lights_INSTANCES:0”
But it doesn't work… I tried with this:

/obj/hlight1:*
and this
/obj/hlight1obj/lights_INSTANCES:0

not working…
Any idea ?

To reply to circusmonkey, instance points come from a simple primitive. I use an object merge in the instance node like you can see in the image attached.

So, with this lights mask in my fog: /obj/hlight1obj/lights_INSTANCES:*

I have this in my ifd file:
ray_start fog # {
ray_transform 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1
ray_property fog name “/obj/fog_lights”
ray_property fog lightmask “”
ray_property fog shader opdefShop/v_litfog maxsteps 10 stepsize 40 doshadows 0
ray_end # }

So the Light Mask isn't use like define in it …?!

These names exist only for mantra, you can't use it on Houdini, right?

Anyway, I've checked and indeed, light masking seems to not work with instance names…

I'm pretty sure you can refer to instanced object's name in vex masks (like reflection/refraction). I would assume this also works for light masking, though I've never used it this way.

The explanation that comes to me first, is that Houdini tries to resolve names in light mask parameter, and encounters error (there is not such an objects in Houdini) so returns empty string, whereas in case of shaders, strings are passed into a shader untouched, and Mantra can find those objects (as they already exist).

This is my pure speculation though.

SYmek
These names exist only for mantra, you can't use it on Houdini, right?

ok. I put directly by editing ifd file the good light mask, and it's working.

Anyway, I've checked and indeed, light masking seems to not work with instance names…

I'm pretty sure you can refer to instanced object's name in vex masks (like reflection/refraction). I would assume this also works for light masking, though I've never used it this way.

I will check how define vex masks and try it.
Thanks a lot SYmek for your help.

I have not been able to work on this for a while, so I thought I would post what I currently have.

This image is done with no motion blur even though the the craft is in transit.

Here is the same frame with motion blur.

[s987.photobucket.com]
Click to View

This is a quick render, if you can call 14 hours a quick, so that I can show family what I do with Houdini.
BTW i went from 960 lights to none. though I would like to turn my background into an environmental light.

Thought about rendering via the Amazon E3 cloud ?

Rob

Dark_Ego
BTW i went from 960 lights to none.

What was your choice ? geometry lights ?

circusmonkey
Thought about rendering via the Amazon E3 cloud ?

Rob

I am not sure how to use the cloud nor the cost of doing so, bI amIam looking into it. I want to replace the current background with actual clouds for the nebula (or is Nebulae) and particle based stars.

fsimerey

Dark_Ego
BTW i went from 960 lights to none.

What was your choice ? geometry lights ?

After doing a test with the Geometry lights it was a no brainer. The background is is an unlit texture on a sphere and the lights are all instanced geometry.