All posts related to V3
#390038
I have to do some rendering for a law enforcement boat. I took a stab at a blue light model... and well... you can see the result below. Any ideas for making it look more like the photo.

If I had the actual light on hand I could see how it's made and try and reproduce it so maxwell simulation would do its thing. But I just guessed. It's some emitters in spherical reflectors shining through a lens that is ribbed on the inside and smooth on the outside.

Image
#390039
I'm going to move this to the main forum for more exposure, since it's not plugin-specific.

My thoughts on the topic are that in the example photo, what you're seeing has less to do with the lights, and more to do with the (camera) lens, and the atmosphere. It will be relatively expensive to render lights with reflectors, lenses, etc, when in the rendered image, the light ends up only a few pixels wide. More important, I think, would be to think of the dynamic range -- the relative difference between the dark surroundings and the bright lights.

With that in mind, and a render in Maxwell, you can play with the Simulens parameters, applying diffraction & scattering to create some drama like in the example. You can do glare effects in photoshop, but working from an MXI, Maxwell has more knowledge about the image. And there is where the dynamic range comes in -- for instance, mapped down to 8-bit color, no two pixels are further than 255 from each other in value, so you can't tell which regions are supposed to have been drastically brighter than others, and therefore can't be sure which regions would produce glare.

Just be sure you don't enable Simulens before the rendering is finished, because it will slow things down unnecessarily.
#390041
yeah, so basically you want to take what you are referencing and try to mimic that in a way that is most affordable given your production scale. If you're taking a shot of the product, then by all means model the living shit out of those led bulbs and enjoy pronounced render times with any engine let alone maxwell. If your shot is on the bow, then you can back down a bit. If your shot is at the distance of your reference, then you can make those lights so dumb they don't know what they're doing.

just note that half of what you see is physically engineered and the other half is perception.
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Will there be a Maxwell Render 6 ?

Let's be realistic. What's left of NL is only milk[…]