Rendering a light

[Anonymous]

Hi

I've got a project which I need to render an incandescent bulb on an assembly lighting the rest of the assembly. Any tips on how to do this?, I can't seem to make the bulbs filament a light source in any way. Is the effect just achieved through the material properties?.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hey no problem. I've been busy also in 3Ds. 

I managed to get the model in from inventor, setup a scene some cameras and got it rendering in the cloud. 

for the filaments, I added a material and set it to be emissive. Is this the same as a mesh light you mentioned?. 

The biggest issue I have so far is getting things selected to assign material properties. with a large number of bulbs each with tiny features in it theres lots of hiding and moving around the model. can you select items by similar size or by name in anyway?, ideally adding these into a manageable group?. 

Also not sure if I'm missing anything obvious, but how do I make and save a scene?. I started using a workflow to pull my inventor model into 3ds. built a background camera and lights from this. I needed to repeat this for another model. From inventor you get asked to created a new 3ds scene use an existing one or merge. I wanted to save my original scene and reuse it, but I ended up with two models on top of eachother. Lots of deleting later it worked ok. 

anyway to sync materials in Max with inventor?, If I could assign a material in a part it would filter into all my assemblies. 

Anyway some images attached!. 

Not sure, if the rendering of the lights isn't very visible due to the camera distance rendering technique, ouput resolution.. or a valuable lesson was learned that rendering tiny objects on big assemblies doesn't really make a difference. 

Thanks again for your help! Its a neat little package 3DS, I've enjoyed using it will keep learning on it.

[Daniel248]

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@-niels- wrote:

Not sure what you're trying to accomplish, but here's a quick comparison between lighting a scene with a self illuminated surface and using a point light.

This is inside an enclosed box, so as to rule out the influence of the IBL.

If you take a good look at the render time, you'll see a massive difference.

If i had to render lights, i'd rather use local lights instead of self illuminated surfaces.

(2016 file attached for the heck of it.)

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Interesting light bulb concept Niels, thanks for sharing.

I've made some changes (intensity and colour temperature), and used it outside the box.

I thought I'll try to see how that might look in Studio.

Render settings: Medium, a few hundred iterations - depending on time available, patience..

All files attached in ZIP file, in case someone thinks is interesting and wants to try it (Inventor 2017 format).

[-niels-]

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@Anonymous wrote:

for the filaments, I added a material and set it to be emissive. Is this the same as a mesh light you mentioned?.

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No, an emissive material is not the same as a mesh light. Just like in Inventor there is a big difference between materials that emit light and an 'actual' light.

It's mostly prominent in how much "noise" they generate, which is much higher for emissive materials.

(which is also noticable in your screenshots.)

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@Anonymous wrote:

The biggest issue I have so far is getting things selected to assign material properties. with a large number of bulbs each with tiny features in it theres lots of hiding and moving around the model. can you select items by similar size or by name in anyway?, ideally adding these into a manageable group?.

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There might be some advanced selection techniques available, but i'm not familiar with them... best check over on the 3DS Max forum or see if you can find some good youtube tutorials.

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@Anonymous wrote:

Also not sure if I'm missing anything obvious, but how do I make and save a scene?. I started using a workflow to pull my inventor model into 3ds. built a background camera and lights from this. I needed to repeat this for another model. From inventor you get asked to created a new 3ds scene use an existing one or merge. I wanted to save my original scene and reuse it, but I ended up with two models on top of eachother. Lots of deleting later it worked ok.

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You could use an "empty" setup as your template, or save your scene then import the new stuff and save under a different name.

As for stuff being on top of eachother, if you close the group you can move it as a whole (or delete it as a whole) so you don't have to do that for each individual object.

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@Anonymous wrote:

anyway to sync materials in Max with inventor?, If I could assign a material in a part it would filter into all my assemblies.

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You can import a model from Inventor with the materials (and materials ID's) assigned, you can then select those materials with the dropper (pipet?). Once you have them on the slate/sample slot you can easily turn it into a 3DS Max material (for whichever renderer you're using) and it will change it for all objects with that inventor material assigned.

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@Anonymous wrote:

Anyway some images attached!. 

Not sure, if the rendering of the lights isn't very visible due to the camera distance rendering technique, ouput resolution.. or a valuable lesson was learned that rendering tiny objects on big assemblies doesn't really make a difference. 

Thanks again for your help! Its a neat little package 3DS, I've enjoyed using it will keep learning on it.

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Looks like you've gotten quite some work done in a short period, impressive!

For as far as i can tell this is mostly lit with the emissive material, if you did add a light to the scene it isn't a mesh light.

Similar to the advice given for the Inventor render, a combination of both emissive material and a light works best.

(this is actually how they instruct on using the mesh light on the SolidAngle webpage i linked.)

Still, i like where this is going and glad you enjoy 3DS Max.

Keep it up, can't wait to see your endresult!

[-niels-]

@Daniel248, i liked your scene so i did a quick conversion to Arnold:

Reasonably rough, overdid it on the bump a bit and not a high quality render.

This is lit with only the 3 lightbulbs again, emissive materials on the filaments and 3 mesh lights connected to each of those filaments.

Had to put a bulb on the ground, otherwise that would've stayed dark, since there is no IBL for ambient lighting.

Fun to convert, thank you for the scene.

(3DS Max 2018 Arnold file attached.)

[Anonymous]

Thanks, its coming on pretty well I think.

I've looked all over but I cant find Arnold.

It's not listed on my products and downloads page, so in 3DS 2018 I only have:

Quicksilver

ART

Scanline

VUE

Within 2017 I have IRAY which I've used for my renders so far. 

I've a product design suite ultimate, so it should be available?. 

Does mesh light work with all rendering engines?, or is it only Arnold?. 

If I can get Arnold up and running I'll take another pass with a mesh light. 

Btw, the scene you sent over. it had mesh lighting and a "light". do you need a light in the scene or will a mesh light work as an only source?. 

Thanks again! much appreciated!.

[-niels-]

@Anonymous, did you read the link on downloading Arnold i posted?

It's a bit tucked away, on the "all products & services" page you need to expand your PDSU and click on the "downloads" below the 2018 version.

On the window that pops up you need to select the "Updates & addons" tab, the Arnold render engine download should be there.

(might need some browsing/filtering/searching.)

I think the "mesh" light might be Arnold specific, though i never tried anything similar with MentalRay/iRay so i'm not 100% sure.

The mesh light will work as the only lightsource, in my scene those were the "Arnold light".

Not sure what else there was in there, but maybe it got converted to a regular "light" because Arnold isn't installed.

(if you're talking about the scene i made in reply to Daniel's post, the model in there was called "light"... but that's not a lighting object.)

[-niels-]

@Anonymous, it's been a few days, i'm just wondering if you managed to find the Arnold renderer and if you're still making progress?

[Anonymous]

Hey

Not yet. I only get time to work on it over weekends generally.
I did find Arnold on a 3rd party site. I've not installed it yet but will over the weekend.
Thanks

[Anonymous]

Quite interesting Arnold, I never realised it was used in all sorts of computer games and movie cgi.
Does Arnold work with the Autodesk cloud?, or does the cloud only solve the rendering engines it has?. Arnold appears to be a 3rd party plug in.

[-niels-]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Quite interesting Arnold, I never realised it was used in all sorts of computer games and movie cgi.

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Yeah, i liked that bit too. i love what they can do with cgi nowadays.

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@Anonymous wrote:
Does Arnold work with the Autodesk cloud?, or does the cloud only solve the rendering engines it has?. Arnold appears to be a 3rd party plug in.

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Arnold is a "3rd" party plugin, but SolidAngle is owned by Autodesk so it's more of a separate install.

I don't really know about the cloud, as i render everything on my own pc or laptop.

From what i've tried with the cloud render option just now, it doesn't seem like it uses Arnold but it's own A360 Cloud renderer.

Is there a specific reason you need to render in the cloud? (low processing power on your pc?)

Arnold is relatively fast, so it might not be necessary to do so...

[Anonymous]

Hi Niels

Got Arnold installed and running, 

I've got a test case with a pair of bulbs. added a mesh light to them both.

Results look pretty noisy. I think this is because its not rendered long enough. Took maybe 30seconds on my pc. I was expecting it to be much longer. 

Is there a setting for number of iterations?. 

It also produced an error message about all my material properties being invalid. Are these render engine specific?, or are they a symptom of importing a 3DS 2017 file into 2018?. 

Few images attached, 

[-niels-]

Hey @Anonymous,

Yes, for Arnold the materials are render engine specific.

Arnold does not work well with the standard materials and will use approximations for them instead.

If you open my lightbulb .max scene it should have the sample slots filled with the Arnold presets.

If for some reason i forgot to add them in there, you can download them from the SolidAngle website here:

https://support.solidangle.com/display/A5AF3DSUG/Material+Library

I suggest using those, there's a glass preset and a "incandescent bulb" (which is emissive) that are probably well suited for your situation.

There's also plastic and metal, which you might need to tweak the color for a bit.

As for the noise, this is most likely because it's still on the preview setting.

You'll have to adjust the render settings to get the image to have less noise.

The overall setting is the Camera (AA), increasing that value will reduce the overall noise.

Since you're rendering lights and emissive materials, there's a high chance you'll have to increase the specular and/or diffuse values as well.

If you have see through glass and it appear black in the render you'll have to bump up the transmission ray depth (2nd box) to 4 or higher. (i usually set it to 6 when there is glass involved)

I suggest having a read through of some of the tutorials / info on the solidangle website, the "removing noise" section is probably  a good read.

I really like the design of your lightbulb, it will look great once you get it set up properly.

If you can share your model with me i could lend a hand with the setup, though i think you're more for figuring it out yourself.

I'll try to answer any questions you have, but don't expect it to be too fast over the weekend.