I have made a fluorescent lamp that lights the area with it’s emission.
There is a problem with the emission, as i note emission makes too much noise.
I have render my area with 500 samples but i still get too much noise.
So, i am looking for an alternative way to create light from my lamp.
So, how many alternative ways to replace the “noisy” emission do we have?
Thanks!
I have uploaded my lamp’s rendered image and…
Using constant mixing factors (in the Mix shader) is almost always a suboptimal idea - you can achieve so much more, if you drive the mixing factor with nodes that are based on the glancing angle or the Fresnel.
Here’s a little test (the effect is overdone to make it clearer):
Node setup:
The Layer Weight > Facing node drives two color ramps, one from white to blue for the emission color, one from white to black for the emission strength - but: only for the camera. For all other ray types the material uses a plain white emission material with a higher strength. This boost the light intensity emitted from the bulbs without blowing out the luminous gas for the camera.
In addition to that I made a glass casing for additional reflections. As I said, the effect should have been more subtle, but this gives a quite bit more depth to the bulb material.
Where i can find that “multiply” layer effect? (with the blue color)
I have looked up everywhere but i can’t find it, i’m using blender 2.7.3
What version of blender did you used?
Thanks!
That’s either a Converter>Math, or a Color>Mix RGB.
In this example, it is a Converter>Math.
thanks both of you!
edit: can i also see the renderer settings?
i still get some noise
1 more question…How did you made your lamp’s glass so nice…I mean your glass is 3D while my lamp’s glass looks like 2D.
Your glass shade well while my glass shade bad.
So, how do i fix that?
Extra info: My lamp’s glass is nice with nice shading only when the lights are off (when i turn the emission to zero).
Does this have to deal with the emission?
You might have noticed that the node setup I showed above has no glossy component: That’s just the glowing gas part of the bulb.
For the glass I added another layer of geometry around the glowing gas and gave that a glossy/transparent mix material - again with Layer Weight > Facing to drive the mix factor. Call me “old school”, but I like to model things like they are built in real life. So, if the real bulb has a glass encasement around the glowing gas, I want that, too. For the spiral model I think the glass encasement is in fact a little too wide…
Anyway, that’s where the reflections come from. But the color ramps on the emission material alone should get you a long way.
To note, the most accurate simulation of such a lamp would make use of a glass object with an emission volume (as in, the light rays are coming from the region inside the mesh itself). To create, just plug an emission node into the ‘volume’ output.
You might need more samples to render the lighting though compared to Ikari’s method.
