Finally making some progress, using new Vray 1.2 It's possible to use proxies with mograph thus allowing vast numbers of polygon objects to be rendered. Image below is made up of thousands of transparent spheres, thus creating a volumetric effect like fire where each sphere is additive so when they clump or overlap it becomes brighter shifting the color up thru the hues to the point of white, which is how light behaves opposed to say paint where it gets darker as you add things.
You can render it using an unbiased light cache method too which actually works pretty fast considering, and gives it a more noisy/stochastic kinda look which smooths out the longer you render (like maxwell render)
Getting it to balance memory and cpu cores was a bit tricky, default render settings tend to lock up and not use multi cores properly when geometry is this dense. Also it seems when polygons overlap exactly as they often do in these cases the renderer locks up focusses on one thread/core hanging all the others and then eventually pushes thru. Tweaking render settings seems to have removed this issue or at least made it less apparent keeping all cores at 100%
In any case it renders fairly fast now compared to previous efforts, though It's still devastatingly slow for animation.
Lots of balls
:-)
And cubes
Found some brilliant tools for simulating lens flares in AfterEffects, works surprisingly well, It's not physically accurate or anything like Maxwell render but It's can recreate a lot of the cool effects with added bonus of tons and tons of manual control.
It's called Optical Flares and is quite quite good
:-)
Link: www.videocopilot.net --- opticalflares
Sadly again this helps me little (not at all) in making actual textures or art for lumen, but is cool still.
Gear doodad I made as an initial visual concept test and to test the procedure for normal map creation:
Making of below:
One half with normal map one half without showing how many polygons it really is
Doesn't look too bad now from far away, It's screwed up in the middle due to crappy uvmap and crappy alignment between low and high res mesh.
Versus this without normal map:
With edge breaks and phone smoothing... something I should be able to simulate by disconnecting the polygons but cinema doesn't seem to have a way to do that!!! so instead it looks like below with no angle limit or breaks:
With some specular, does show more issues then. Also I have some dents going on most of the outside prongs due to me being a idiot I think
PLus some ambient occlusion
Put some bright orange in instead? aswell?
Color themes for maps, green, blue, red etc, possible to change color by code or over time
My R&D into Splitting Light / Dispersion/ Chromatic Aberration using Vray and Maxwell render
These are tests done in Photoshop:
These in Maxwell and Vray:
Could be animated and used for weapon sprites
Nexus Work:
