Moonlight

Hi, I just finished modelling this scene (http://www.pasteall.org/blend/29618) and I want to fake night-time where the moon (that huge sphere behind) will seem to be the source of the light.Also I want to fake this “huge close moon effect” that we can see in videogames.

Any help/suggestions/ideas are appreciated.Thanks!

Edited:I will add textures(normal and bumps) to everything.Have this in your mind,while suggesting.Unless it is not recommended.

Neat model!

You can fake the direction of the light camera left of the house so that you get some nice rim making sure your shadow isn’t too off. You should move that moon over a bit for composition (imo).

Lighting something other than architectural in Cycles is very difficult because you have so little control over your lights. You can control the falloff type by adjusting the “size” of the light. The smaller that value the harder the light (and the harder the shadow). You don’t have any way of controlling how far it falls off (as far as I know).

http://www.pasteall.org/blend/29636

My quick take on it. I would think there would be a warm foreground light on the house somewhere to give it focus. I would add a nice bloom to that moon also. I think you have to do that in comp in Blender. It would be better if the house were darker but I don’t think you can control how much bounce a light attributes in cycles. :frowning:

Oh… and I use that bottom right window to run the render real time while I’m working. Helpful to be able to see the scene lit while you work. Just set it to “Rendered” in the bottom display menu.

Oh also… you will notice that I grabbed all the parts of your house and hit CNTRL + J to join them together into one object. You can still have many materials but your scene will be much cleaner that way. I also named them properly. So much easier to find stuff in the Editor there when they are named. :slight_smile:

Personally, I wouldn’t join such a complicated model. It makes it a nightmare to tweak later, and there’s just no good reason for it. Just parent it to an empty if you want to clean up the outline. Although if it’s so complicated you are considering things like that, that’s a good sign you should put it in it’s own file and link it in as a group. That way it’s in separate pieces so you can make changes easily, but it exists in your final shot file as a single empty.

I like the general light setup though. Use the moon sphere as your “fake” light, and use the sun lamp to actually shine the light.

Btw, you can control falloff by attaching the “light falloff” node to the strength on the emission shader. Also, you can use the “raydepth” output on the light path node to adjust the power on subsequent bounces. You could switch to a lower power after the first hit, or use math nodes to make the lamp power get divided by the current bounce or something.

@@tommywright thanks for the help so far.What you did with the lighting looks great.Gonna try to move it to my updated scene and play with it.Gonna come back for more questions :smiley:

@@J_the_Ninja thanks for the info.Gonna check it out too!

Ah… yeah, much better advice. :slight_smile:

I had no idea. I want to request this stuff to be in the light’s properties rather than having to use nodes. Same with glow/bloom on objects and lens flares. I think these should have simple setups ready to go because they are so often needed. To create a node setup every time seems like a waste of time for the artist… and complicated.

Just got the time to play with the info you gave me.I did not succeed.
@@J_the_Ninja this is a picture of the nodes I was playing with.Most of combinations I tried were killing the light.I checked the wiki,and the strengh/smooth=actual strength , did also not work.Can you give me an example in order to try to reduce the light that bounces so much,especially at the ground or lessen the strength of the light the further it goes.I will add the blend file too.



And one last thing.Since I use same mat/tex in the bushes and the leaves,I wanna add some “rim” lighting.I think that’s the term.Should it be a plane that emits light with low strength between the bush and the tree(and whose mesh the camera won’t be able to render)?

http://www.pasteall.org/blend/29699

Thanks in advance!

?
What are you trying to do? I was just listing some ways to get the functionality that @tommywright
http://blenderartists.org/design/baorg2012dark/images/statusicon/user-offline.png was talking about. Those weren’t specific suggestions for your scene. Your scene’s biggest lighting issue is that you have a huge amount of ambient/front light. You already have the rim light effect (look at the leaf and roof edges), it’s just being washed out by the front light.

You’re scene is just too messy for me to look at. I can’t find your lights with all those primitives in there. You can also embed your images so we don’t get pink materials.

Your lighting looks pretty simple so your front fill is either coming from bounce or the sky. Remember, the sky contributes to the ray tracing in Cycles so the brighter that color is, the more fill you will get.

If you can clean up your scene and embed your textures, I’ll take another look at it. :wink:

Seems that what was visible during real-time rendering was noise.I just gave sampling a boost and it disappeared.Although I read somewhere that cycles leaves some noise,anyways…

@tommywright
I parented the objects to an empty.All except from the lights and the moon.I moved all points and the sun to layer 3.
Here is the new blend file.http://www.pasteall.org/blend/29708
Here is the zip with the textures. http://www.sendspace.com/file/i3z3mk
My guess is blender will understand where to look if you place them on the same file,right? They are properly named.

If you have any advice or suggestion try to make it simple or give me a print screen example if possible (if it is about nodes).Unless the wiki covers it.

Thanks for bearing with me and for the help. :eyebrowlift: