3DEngine Lights?!

[Deleted User]

Right so far my transports have been going okay. The textures are pretty much nearly finalised... The only problem im having is. The way i have done the engines... using multiple omni lights. As i have 2 lights per engine. ONe with a bright white atmospheric effect and the other with a soft blue glow to it. It looks good but 2 things happen

a ) the lights at range pixelate regardless of what ever renderer i use.

b) the scene takes ages to render as it is preparing lights... now this is not ideal as i want to do long long animations with them at some point. What is the ideal way to make nice looking engine glows or practical engines for animation?

thanks in advance...

Buckaroohawk

I stopped using video post stuff like glow effects in animations a long time ago. The only exception is if I'm rendering a still image. The pixelation just bothered me too much, and I've never found a way around that problem. Instead, I now use omni lights linked with atmospheric effects. I also found a way around the longer rendering time for the atmospheric effect by making the omni lights non-shadow casting and I set them to exclude all objects in the scene. The omni lights and atmosheric effects give off a nice glow that can be seen even at great distances with no pixelation problems. I'll take a look at the models I've used this trick on and try and get more detailed settings for you. If you take a look in the gallery on my profile page here you'll see some examples of how the effect looks.

JWWright

Buck, you rock. Thats great information, I cant wait to try it.

Buckaroohawk

JWWright wrote: »

Buck, you rock. Thats great information, I cant wait to try it.

Coming from you,JW, that is high praise indeed! The trick isn't perfect, but it serves my needs for rendering images and animations. Let me know how your own experiments go with this.

Padraig: Have you given this a try yet? I hope the info has been useful for you.