Author Topic: MATERIAL BASED Light Source Reflection EXCLUDE for glass/mirror heavy scenes  (Read 1006 times)

2022-04-23, 05:58:46

Yudi Nishi

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SCENARIO:
You are working on a Blue Hour scene that has a painful amount of mirrors and/or glass surfaces. Glass windows and doors, Mirror covered columns and Metal covered walls EVERYWHERE. For the style you are going for, you need to have MANY different Corona Lights to light paint your scene and they are all being clearly reflected as planes, spheres and discs on those surfaces.
You CANNOT afford to turn off the "visible to reflections" checkbox on your lights because you still NEED those nice light reflection effects on other objects that aren't as glossy as those. Now your only option is to start adding those many Glass/Mirror/Metal objects to the Corona Lights exclude lists. All 20 of them that sadly could not be instanced... 

AGGRAVATORS:
-> You are in a studio pipeline that makes it so that "person 1" is lighting and wrapping up the scene, "person 2" handles modelling stuff after the client sends back all his revision comments (including major changes to the architecture), and "person 3" will handle adjusting the scene for rendering the post revision image (and so on).
-> If they are the same object, you also have to detach the glass elements from the frames which you still want reflecting the light source. You do that and now you start hoping the client doesn't change the window frames project when reviewing the image and the modelling sector isn't then forced to UNDO all of the work you did.
-> The scene is actually an animation and now just about any light in the scene can show up clearly on any of those objects as the camera moves.

PROPOSED SOLUTION:
Add a checkbox to the advanced options of the Corona Material that makes it so we can turn off the ability of that particular material to reflect Corona Light sources. Now instead of having to manually exclude the many Glass/Mirror/Metal objects from those 20+ different shaped lights, we can quickly go to those 3 materials and check the new feature box and then proceed to smiling from ear to ear remembering the times we couldn't do it so easily.

I talked it over with the artists from my studio and also some friends from other studios and every single one of them immediately opened a big smile on their face for the short moment they were able to feel a world in which this feature existed.
I really wanted to bring attention to this quality of life improvement so the community could see it and hopefully agree with us to make this post big.
If you read this and liked the idea, please let the devs know how good this would be on your pipeline with a comment bellow, maybe even adding your own view on the matter!

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this!
Have a wonderful day!
« Last Edit: 2022-04-23, 06:02:09 by Yudi Nishi »