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| AMATEUR'S ANECDOTES |
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Speaking Volumes
Written by Philip M. Ware
vol. I, article 6
Speaking Volumes
There was only one thing I really wanted to do with the scene that I flat out wasn't able to do. I had these nice columns in a temple like thing with a little altar in the middle where the text would be displayed. There was a "lifted" stock photo as the background, so a little mood lighting wouldn't hurt anything, and, in fact, would give the Temple of AFCEA that "Phil" touch that it was missing. Unfortunately, this was one of those "you have two days -- impress me" projects that got dumped in my lap, so there wasn't that much time to diddle with it. What is "it?" What is this feature that I couldn't squeeze out of POV-Ray 2.0, TrueSpace 2.0 or Lightwave 5.0? Volumetric Lighting.
I've always been drawn to things that make a scene look creepy. Remember, Rule #1 is one that I flagrantly ignore -- if you can creep out your audience, as long as they're not paying you, it's OK. Why is it I'm not in the 3D business again? At any rate, there's nothing that can add atmosphere to a scene like volumetric lighting.
An operational definition of volumetric lighting would be, basically, light you can see. Now, I don't mean light that casts itself on an object and because there is a color or brightness change on that object, you "see" the light. This means that you can see the rays, the perturbation of the atmosphere as the light passes through it. You can, literally, see the light (hallelujah!). The name volumetric implies that the light has volume, space, contains matter -- which any good physics man will tell you isn't strictly the case, but it sure looks cool.
So, none of the packages I had supported it. That's OK. I didn't use it in the scene and it looked pretty blasé as a result. What that scene did do, however, was pique my interest to a point where I went out and shucked out $50 on a book called "Power Lightwave 5.0" or some such, and was drawn to the pretty glass face on the cover with apparent volumetric light streaming from its eyes. It was the same old trick, however, and that was making a nice cone with properties making it glass, mostly transparent (transparent edges), etc. I didn't want to do that. That's faking it. The again, what can you do?
In Lightwave? Not much else, other than the cone trick. Well, you could do the other nasty trick I tried that both failed miserably and severely annoyed my P6-200/128MB. Create a clear box with about a bazillion points inside. Actually, closer to 30,000 points. That's about as many points as you can have in an object/scene before Modeler wigs out and tells you to K.I.S.S. These 30,000 points were very, very dense within this cube. They were close enough together that they came across a very dark grey, even though their surface color was off-white. Now, when light shines through this, it lights up only the fronts of the points, which act more like 2D surfaces, and therefore look like dust particles just floating around in there. Well, in theory, anyway. They looked that way up until the final image rendered. Then, it just looked like a black box blocking out every ounce of the light. Oops.
Well, that's OK. The project was due and I didn't have the creepy lighting in it. Actually, I had fully intended to use non-creepy lighting, but since I didn't have the opportunity to try it, it didn't matter much for that project anyway.
For the next project, however, I had Max2 at my disposal, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but not only volumetric lighting but volume fog as well! Let me tell you, the FMOS never had a bolder, more creepy, logo. I loved it. It was an oval logo with the FMOS letters subtracted from it sitting in flaming volume fog. Very cool. The final touch was the volumetric light placed behind the logo that caused the light to stream through and around the logo. Very sweet, very underappreciated by the corporate powers that were. That's OK. I was pleased with it, and I was able to do something I had been waiting almost two years to do - volumetric lighting.
Would you like to add, share, or correct some information? 3D ARK welcomes your contributions. Send mail to: webmaster@3dark.com
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