Lights for Urban Sprawl, Greeble, etc

BC Rice

Was wondering if anyone knows if there are existing Carrara lighting setups for Urban Sprawl and perhaps Greeble city blocks, and pretty much all Stonemason city stuff. 

If not, I might be open to commissioning someone to create light sets for me. 

Headwax

If you can identify the window shaders you could replicate light bulbs on them

or add glow to them and then add a scene filter 'aura' 

BC Rice

head wax said:

If you can identify the window shaders you could replicate light bulbs on them

or add glow to them and then add a scene filter 'aura' 

Hm...the shaders wouldn't work because it would impact every single window. There'd be no variation, ya know? 

Bulbs wouldn't really work for me, either, since light doesn't operate that way in my renders. I only work in two-tone colors, and the light is just white or nothing. The only thing I can do (marginally) is change brightness of a light. So, I suppose...hrmph...theoretically, I could green out all the window shaders. set lights on the windows I want to light up...and then keylight the dark greens one color and the lighted greens another color (and assign a glow). That seems like it's opening a huge ball of crap, though. haha Also, Stonemason's stuff sometimes has window (glass) on its own, but more often you're getting windows as part of a whole side of a building texture, ya know? I could manually color in all the shaders with green and do the keylight approach in AE...but the shaders repeat so there'd just be the same pattern over and over again. 

None of this is an issue for a still frame, but once I'm moving around in space, it gets pretty hairy. 

I'm surprised there's no light sets for Stonemason's city stuff. It's pretty popular. Are there any city models in the shop that have lighting set ups that you know of?

3DAGE

 

I'm surprised there's no light sets for Stonemason's city stuff. It's pretty popular.

 

As these are external scenes,. and the building can be repositioned to suit the users needs ,. the most common lighting would be natural daylight (Sun light)

any preset lighting (for each building) would need to be applicable to each building it was intended for,. wherever that building was placed in the scene by the user,. Clunky.

If you're doing a night scene, then as Head Wax suggests,. light a few windows,. or adjust the window shaders to add glow,. and maybe add a blue "Distant" light,. and set up the Moon light system, rather than sun light.

Depending on the texture maps,. you may be able to create a simple B/W mask image,.  based on the window positions in the texture maps, to act as a Glow texture.

there's also some ability to randomise positions of lights using replicators or shaders,. have a look at Sparrowhawke 3D's Instance randomiser plugin.

 

(IMO) There's no real need for Green screens, or keying of 3D renders,. use alpha channel , or multipass render layers, to create pre-keyed.

if you're using AE,. consider loading the models directly into AE using Element3D. especially when working with other "real footage" or keying,.

working with the models inside AE, with shaders you can adjust as needed, should make it easier to create lighting and adjust it to suit what you need.

Hope it helps :)

Stonemason

a lot of the windows in the urban sprawl buildings have two materials, .windowA & window B,these have been setup in a random pattern so you should be able to just set one of those materials to be illuminated

argus1000

I don't know, but if I was to light Stonemason's "Urban sprawl" during the day, I would use the realistic skies; with a sun.  During the night, I would put a light bulb into every lampost (maybe with a cone and some aura.)  You don't have to do it for every lampost unless you do a panoramic shot.  And I would add  a night realistic sky with a moon. I did it once with all the lamposts lit. It was great, but I erased it.

BC Rice

3DAGE said:

 

I'm surprised there's no light sets for Stonemason's city stuff. It's pretty popular.

 

As these are external scenes,. and the building can be repositioned to suit the users needs ,. the most common lighting would be natural daylight (Sun light)

any preset lighting (for each building) would need to be applicable to each building it was intended for,. wherever that building was placed in the scene by the user,. Clunky.

If you're doing a night scene, then as Head Wax suggests,. light a few windows,. or adjust the window shaders to add glow,. and maybe add a blue "Distant" light,. and set up the Moon light system, rather than sun light.

Depending on the texture maps,. you may be able to create a simple B/W mask image,.  based on the window positions in the texture maps, to act as a Glow texture.

there's also some ability to randomise positions of lights using replicators or shaders,. have a look at Sparrowhawke 3D's Instance randomiser plugin.

 

(IMO) There's no real need for Green screens, or keying of 3D renders,. use alpha channel , or multipass render layers, to create pre-keyed.

if you're using AE,. consider loading the models directly into AE using Element3D. especially when working with other "real footage" or keying,.

working with the models inside AE, with shaders you can adjust as needed, should make it easier to create lighting and adjust it to suit what you need.

Hope it helps :)

Loading the models into AE would present a lot of other challenges. Animating characters in Carrara and then bringing those animated figures into the models they're meant to be standing on/surrounded by would be way more difficult, I think. 

I think I'm probably just going to have to manually place hundreds of lights on the windows I want lit. There's not a new texture for each individual window, ya know?  

BC Rice

Stonemason said:

a lot of the windows in the urban sprawl buildings have two materials, .windowA & window B,these have been setup in a random pattern so you should be able to just set one of those materials to be illuminated

I haven't found that. It seems that all of his stuff, whether it's a brick wall or rows of windows, it's just one small shaded repeating over and over again. There is the A and B...but it would still be the same over and over again within the square of each JPEG. 

3DAGE

Have a look at Element 3D over at Videocopilot.net

Fenric created an OBJ sequence exporter for carrara,. but his store seems to be closed :(

look at the "Metropolitan" pack,.. (City buildings with day and night options)  also check the video tutorial of Sam jumping from the roof .

Rendering figures from carrara on alpha backgrounds,. should be no different from a layer of real footage on green screen,. in AE you should be able to place it wherever you need it,

use "null's" to place and attach it to any layers or motion track.

You can also import animated OBJ sequences into Element 3D,. and since it's a replicator ,. one animated obj figure,. becomes many,. there are also options to offset the animation of each OBJ seq randomly and adjust the height of each randomly.

you can aso create a simple animated walk or run cycle in carrara,. export as OBJ sequence of say 24-30 frames,. and loop that inside Element 3D,. inside after effects,.

Alternatively,...

You could take the existing window maps from the building you're using,. and make some glow maps, where you have a white (or coloured) area for each window you want illuminated,. you could make several of these glow maps,. and create new shaders for each building,. so that each buiding has a different set of lights to appear more random in a replicator,

You could also create those glow maps as a little Sequence file set,. and build an animated shader,. so that the lights would change, over time.

 

3DAGE

doubble clickkk

BC Rice

3DAGE said:

Have a look at Element 3D over at Videocopilot.net

Fenric created an OBJ sequence exporter for carrara,. but his store seems to be closed :(

look at the "Metropolitan" pack,.. (City buildings with day and night options)  also check the video tutorial of Sam jumping from the roof .

Rendering figures from carrara on alpha backgrounds,. should be no different from a layer of real footage on green screen,. in AE you should be able to place it wherever you need it,

use "null's" to place and attach it to any layers or motion track.

You can also import animated OBJ sequences into Element 3D,. and since it's a replicator ,. one animated obj figure,. becomes many,. there are also options to offset the animation of each OBJ seq randomly and adjust the height of each randomly.

you can aso create a simple animated walk or run cycle in carrara,. export as OBJ sequence of say 24-30 frames,. and loop that inside Element 3D,. inside after effects,.

Alternatively,...

You could take the existing window maps from the building you're using,. and make some glow maps, where you have a white (or coloured) area for each window you want illuminated,. you could make several of these glow maps,. and create new shaders for each building,. so that each buiding has a different set of lights to appear more random in a replicator,

You could also create those glow maps as a little Sequence file set,. and build an animated shader,. so that the lights would change, over time.

 

Rendering a toon style city in AE, and then the massive workflow issue of compositing any kind of dramatic camera moves...I'll look into it, but it seems like it would take significantly more time than would simply addressing the issue directly in Carrara. 

I agree with the potential to create shaders...but that would definitely be an entirely new discipline. I mean, Stonemason didn't even create full textures for his models. Like I mentioned, they're just tiny little squares of artwork that repeat across the building. I'd have to somehow know how to create a texture filled with hundreds of windows, etc, that would perfectly wrap a 3D building. I just don't even know how to begin to do that in Carrara. I can't even make a drag and drop texture for characters. haha

Oh, as an example -- this is just keying out a window using the window's texture. Unfortunately, that one texture is used on two different windows in this Stonemason scene, hence the texture (and thus key) being applied to both windows. 

I really just need some work around wherein I can key out a bunch of windows. It takes two seconds from there to simply knock those out and apply a glow in AE. The key is changing each window's texture indvidually. 

BC Rice

Okay...I did find some nighttime windows in Urban city...But...they're pretty limited. Basically there are some lighted windows and then the rest of the texture is black. So it would work as a flyover scene, or a background, but not really an environment you're interacting with. 

But I may be able to do something with it. There'll still be the issue of repeating textures...but he seems to have spaced them out enough where it could suffice. I'll get to work on it and then see what I can do. 

BC Rice

Alright...so it's not too terrible just changing each texture and then keying the windows. There is a repeating pattern, but it's not obvious -- and will be even less obvious in movement. I just changed a single facade texture and it changed multiple buildings, so it'll work. A bit of tooling around, but that's fine.