3D room lighting and texturing

[Carlos]

Hello

I'm developing a project where the scene is gonna be a hospital room, with a lot of elements, all modeled in 3Ds Max. Since lighting in ventuz is such a pain, I'm thinking on doing the lights, reflections, shadows and so on in Max and then bake the texture on the materials, import the geometry, and apply those textures.

The problem is that the user is going to navigate through the room, and I don't know how this is going to look.

Do you think is a good approach? What would you do in my place? I would like to hear your suggestions before doing lots of work for nothing!

Thank you so much.

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

Bake the Ambeint occlusion for all your objects and do the rest of the Shading in Ventuz, i.e. Specular/Reflection/EnvMaps. If you have static textures on your objects you can bake them together with the AO but the reflections/EnvMaps you have to do in Ventuz so you can move around with the camera.

[Carlos]

That's a great option, thank you!

Just a couple of quick questions... Do you know any way of faking casted shadows? I know how to fake the reflection on the ground, but I don't have a clue on how to fake cast shadows in Ventuz...

And another one, how can I fake volumetric lighting in Ventuz? I've seen the plugins from Glare Technologies, but I wonder if there's another way

Thank you so much

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

Actually there are a few ways on how to create "live" shadows. The fastest and easiest is half-real and half-faked. You basically duplicate the objects you want to cast a shadow without any shading just in black on a white background. Then you place a camera exactly at the position of your light source and look at the scene from the POV of your light. Render all that into a Render Target and display it on your ground using a Simple Blur Texture. Problem is that it only works on flat surfaces or you use projection mapping but that one is afaik not available out of the box. A little HLSL shader will do the trick. And you will have to add and tweak a projection node for those shadow objects to tweak the aspect ratio of the render target content. A much better way is to use a little Script to calculate the shadow matrix based on light position. There is a very old demo scene that did just that but it does not work anymore because of all the internal changes Ventuz went through since versions 2006 and 2008. Luckily I very rarely have to deal with animated shadows. If I have to then I usually manually animate additional blured alpha textures to simulate the look and feel. In the end I would have to say, creating cast shadows is either done properly (which you can but it just requires know-how i don't have) or fake it in a way I described above.

Volumetric lighting is a very open playground. There are so many different versions that you would have to be more specific. Do you mean shadow rays? (The usual example being sunlight shining through a tree) If you have light shining through a window for example you could use rectangles with a gradient alpha mask on the to simulate the look. That's how video games did it for a very, very long time. But for the sake of saving time and nerves I would just go with the Glare Plugins. They work excellent.

[gabrielefx]

Hi Carlos
Ventuz is not ok for architectural walkthroughs but if you want to explain how a car engine works you need Ventuz.
Sandbox, Unreal engine and Unity are tools good for rt archviz applications, not only for games.
Watch ENODO works on YouTube.

regards

[Daniel Willer]

[Christian Krix Schmidt]

Lol. That's a perfect example. Bake the textures with Ambient Occlusion and add Reflections/EnvMaps in Ventuz. Looks great!