Wall lamps

I have been making a recreation of the hallway scene from Inception, and so far, the modeling has been pretty simple, now I am working on the lighting in the scene, and for those of you who have seen the film, I am having some difficulty with the wall lamps, for those of you who have not, there are metal wall lamps down both sides of the hall with glass shades on them, I am having a really hard time setting up the lighting for this.


I feel like I am getting close, but I really don’t like being able to see the shape of the light in there. I have gotten this same result using any lamps, I thought I might be able to do what I want a little better using a cylinder with an emission shader and a lamp output.

If anyone has any suggestions, that would be really great!

P.S. I am using Cycles render for this project.
Thank you! :slight_smile:

Think you are using this as reference


You can make the Glass a translucent material mixed with SSS and bit of transparent with a lamp inside
Like:


alternatively
a fake method.



… and you could also incorporate both Cycles and BI outputs, composited together. The choice is completely yours.

To not-paraphrase Gordon Gekko, “Fake … is Good.™”

“Look at the light.™”

Look at the total effect that you want, and, I suggest, break it down into component elements that you can deal with using separate passes, which then would be composited together. For example, “a wall lamp” generally has three factors:

  • The illumination that it appears to(!) contribute to the scene, in the form of areas that “are brighter” in a way that is visually-consistent with what the lamp would do … including, if applicable, shadows cast by portions of the lamp itself. This illumination almost-certainly isn’t originating from the lamp.
  • The appearance that “there’s a light-bulb (or a flame) in there.” That is to say, the lighting of the usually-diffuse piece of glass, which appears to(!) actually be “caused by” that bulb or flame. (If there’s no flicker-animation involved, you can literally “paint a plane” and stick it in there, and no one will know!)
  • Pools of light that the fixture appears to(!) cast upon its immediate surroundings.

The key “cheat word,” of course, is: appears to.” This is CG, and CG is totally-fake. Therefore, feel free to “fake it, Ingrid.”

Don’t feel obliged to do it in one pass; don’t feel obliged to use Cycles for all the passes. Yeah, at first-blush it might seem that you’re going through a lot of extra work … until you reach the point where you’re tweaking them in the compositor and you realize that you only actually rendered, each of the things that you are tweaking, once.