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Hi guys!

There was a competition to create a lighthouse render based on an actual lighthouse... but I completely forgot about it until 3 days ago. The competition finished before I entered but that's ok, I had fun making it. I'm going to make a day and night scene.

So far here is my daytime scene which took me about 3 days from start to 'finish'.



I say 'finish' because the trees are bothering me and I might redo them. They're Paint Effects trees so I can modify them a great deal if I need to.

It rendered for 3 hours and reached SL 13, but the straight render looks quite different. I quite heavily modified it in Fusion 5:



A very very nice benefit of being able to do everything with the new Maya plugin is that I could easily just switch to Mental Ray and render out many different matte passes etc and it matches up perfectly!

Hope you like it. Next I'll work on the night version unless people have some suggestions for this daylight image.

Oh! My lighthouse is based on the Sugarloaf Point lighthouse:

http://www.lighthouse.net.au/lights/NSW ... 0Point.htm

Nice lighthouse, Jared. Congratulation.

but IMHO, your leaves need clipmap. Yours are just rectangle plane.

and need more light to look a lively(like a rendered image).

and I prefer the rendered water pattern.

sandykoufax wrote:your leaves need clipmap. Yours are just rectangle plane.

Yes that was giving me issues, hehe. Silly old Maya uses GIF and TIFF files for the Paint Effects texturing (like ewww GIF? c'mon seriously now) and Maxwell refused to render them. I tried to fix it but it didn't really work. This was my first go at doing anything clipmapped too!

As for the water, I like both hehe. I think the really dark water looks too "way out at sea" and so I made it more "close to the beach" looking

Looking foward to seeing the night version.

The light house itself is very nicely done.

On the other hand the sea does not look right (the waves look too smooth and large ... like a sea of oil). Seawater, especially from a distance, would look more flat but rough at the same time.

http://www.kahl.net/camping/graphics/lighthouse.jpg

Mmm yes, the water looks out of scale with the rest of the scene. Ok ok, I'll fix the water and the trees. Though I just discovered that my tree clipmaps are actually working fine, that's how it's meant to look!

Soooo... maybe I'll find better leaves.

very nice scene Jared ! agree about the ocean...

Precise!

I think the problem that I have with the water is that it doesn't look like the ocean from any kind of distance. (I suppose the lighthouse could only be 10 feet tall...Never thought of that) For some reason, it looks like a closeup of water on a pond or something. Maybe it's the lack of haze. No idea.

Love the lighthouse itself, though.

Looks good!

Post this at the depot as well, i'm sure everyone would love to see it.

Jared,

could you post the link to the contest results? would love to see how others approached lighthouses, I am a huge lighthouse fan, since ages...
I am doing a 'cut in half' lighthouse just for fun, but it will take ages to finish I am afraid. I finished the fresnell lens a while ago... the brass material is off, I know, will refine that.



thanks
wim

wimver
The competition was on vizdepot.com, if you wish to see all final works - they are here:
http://www.vizdepot.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=87

WOW wimver.... I initially wanted to model my lens correctly but from the limited reference I could find on my chosen lighthouse I didn't attempt all the radial pieces.

Really good job!

I was working on mine again the other day and I got the water replaced, but then Maya crashed and I lost it, haha. It'll get there.

Thanks Jared for the compliment, and Vansan for the link. there are some impressive renders there too!
personally my all time favorite when it comes to australian lighthouses, is the point perpendicular lighthouse (new south wales) which I had the occasion of visiting many years ago (before the solar powered tower was built)

wim