And the Final Render

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This one took 5 hours, 22 minutes, and 10 seconds

Well, finally done. I think I’ll render a wallpaper for myself, and then move on to something else. I think the flame still looks a little funny, but close enough. Funny to think I started this one in June. I have a few thoughts on possible variations on this, but I think I’ll wait on that a bit.

Polishing Time

— Posted inUncategorized — 1 min read
3 hours, 50 minutes, and 27 seconds to render

So, I finally put together an array of boards with a wood texture for the wall, added a hook to hang the lantern from, a simple textured ground plane, changed the light to a pair of area lights, and changed the camera to a shallow depth of field. I’m just noticing that the flame isn’t there, though. I wonder if it is because I added fog? Checking now…
Nope, still not there. I worked too much for it to just disappear. Hopefully I can figure this out.

I still have to modify the light to have a more realistic falloff, and maybe tweak the ambient lighting downward, close to zero probably. At least it’s looking close to done.
Update: turns out that it was one or both of the planes I had added; they were not specified as hollow, and the media was apparently inside one or both of them, so it wouldn’t show up.

It’s a Little Dark Out…

— Posted inUncategorized — 1 min read
A ghost story sounds appropriate right about now.

Well, I think I got the flame looking about right, just need to change the light to an area light, switch up the background a bit, and maybe add a couple attenuated light sources for a bit of atmosphere, then it should be done.

Things Are Getting a Little Blurry Here…

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Well, the last part of the lantern is the flame, and it shouldn’t look like it has a hard surface. So I’m putting together something to try and make it look blurry.

I’d read something a while ago about using partially transparent copies of what you wanted to blur, but it’s going to take a bit more experimenting to get it just right.

Found another website

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I was poking around Gilles Tran’s website, and found a link pointing to Christof Horman’s website. He is one of the developers of POVRay, and it looks like he still updates his website. Well, he updates his blog regularly; it looks like the rest hasn’t been touched in a few years. He does have a decent POVRay section, including some tutorials.

Details, Details…

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Well, more polishing on the lantern; I’m really itching to be done with this, but I don’t want to leave it unfinished. This is for the mechanism that lifts the globe up in order to light the wick. I’ll be adding a wire structure between the two blue bits above, and after that there’s only the flame to add in.

Just One More Thing to Go…

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I just finished the handle definition, and added in a small hanging loop at the top. I used the include file I made for the sidepipes to make both of them. Now I just have to add the flame, and make it the light source. I can think of a couple other possible things to tweak, but I’m really itching to start on something new finally. And just realized that there is still that mechanism to lift the globe is still not in.

Polishing the Wire Array

— Posted inUncategorized — 1 min read

Well, it took a bit of doing, but I managed to splice a few sets of points together into one series to make the wires that wrap around the globe. I learned a bit about working with cubic splines. I might switch to a b-spline just to see if it’s a bit straighter than cubic. Another thought; it might be good to put all the points into an array before feeding that into the sphere sweep object. That would make it possible to tweak individual points later.