Keepin it simple

[mattjgerard]

Sometimes I tend to over think things, and stuff takes way to long to concept when the message trying to be portrayed is super simple. Case study- One of our fastest growing markets is in Multi-color LED indicators and lighting. For the sales sheet for a new batch of products, they wanted to just have a simple graphic of colored lights. I was given the image in the first pic as the "idea". They wanted to make it 3d. Okay, sounds simple.

Except when you are me

I immediately saw this as a chance to use the spotlights and scattering medium to create a volumetric lighting effect! So cool, I could see it in my head. 10 min to set the scene up then I spent 3 hours trying to get the material and lighting settings to work. Just could NOT get it to work. Diffusion was off, the colors mixing didn't look right, the noise OMG the NOISE! I even took it into KS9 beta and tried the denoiser, and I am pretty sure I could hear tiny little voices cussing me out coming from my computer.

So, I stepped back and started from scratch. Rebuilt the scene (which was just 4 colored spotlights and a floor) but then remembered back to my on set video days and how the gaffers were always taking a ton of time throwing slashes of light on walls, objects, plants, props to make them pop. They didn't use fog machines to get volumetric lighting effects, just surfaces. So, I put a plane in as a wall and bam. 12 minutes and I was done. Its not anything special, but the client was very happy with it, it was a couple steps up from what they had, and it worked, and I learned something new

While this isn't some amazing drifting car with smoking tires, etheral space scene or some piece of beautiful jewelry that I see on here all the time, I like to post the simple stuff too, just the every day jobs that get work done and get checked off the ever growing list of tasks that flow across my desk on a weekly basis.

Now off to the other end of the spectrum and start working on an entire distribution warehouse showing pallet and product flow.

[NM-92]

I totally agree with your way of thinking. I just talked about that on my last post on my thread (NM Render Thread). If you see the last scene i've set up, you can see how a simple setup, and mindset can lead to a super decent result. I reduced render time, increased flexibility on the scene and you can barely notice it's built with simple planes.

[RRIS]

It's surprisingly easy to think of something and expect that to be the best way to do things. You know how you'd do it in real life, so that's how you should do it in your render software!.. only to find out that the best guys out there know all the 'hacks' to get similar results in a fraction of the time. Meanwhile you're sitting there thinking 'how the hell am I going to render an animation of this without it taking a whole damn month!'

[INNEO_MWo]

in my experiences an intersecting wall with a simple "advanced material" to drive the transmission an perhaps the transmission roughness works fine to show light beams.
and I also spend several hours with these kind of scenes