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Direct View RGB LED Strips


smeshenberg

Question

I'm being asked to create a rendering of the exterior of a restaurant that my company is proposing some lighting upgrades for.  One of the options is a direct-view flexible RGB LED rope-light-like solution around the top of the exterior wall.  In order to get the brightness that I need out of the glow or backlight textures, I have to pump the brightness up significantly in order for them to look correct.  But the amount of light that they are throwing off onto my exterior walls is too much.  I thought maybe I could make some sort of "invisible wall" for the lights to throw their light into that the renderworks camera could see through, but I don't think that will work because in Vectorworks, if an object is transparent then light passes through.  Anybody got any ideas?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

You may be able to overlay two viewports, the background viewport with the lighting at the proper level for the exterior walls, and then the foreground viewport showing the very bright LED strips and any objects that should react to that bright light, but disable the classes/layers of the other objects like the exterior walls that you don't want overlit.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Work is definitely needed in that area. It also isn't easy/possible to get audience blinders or other lights that flare or shine directly into the viewer's eyes to appear properly, which are important elements in architectural interior, entertainment and showcase scenes as well. I have a few wishes logged related to things like this:

 

 20120922-louise-wedding-interiors-91-hdr.jpg 483564369.jpg10-Lens-Flares.jpg

 

A lot of this is currently done in post in Photoshop, which of course is cheating ;)

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Since I read this post I decided to give it a try and test Renderworks and its ability to handle materials and lights. Here is what I did, basically is a matter of creating a extrude along path, then add little spheres inside and a point light source. The trick is on the materials and the light control. I created a render style that will allow me to create a bloom effect and wait for it to cook.

 

Here is a before and after photo editing.

 

What you think?

 

 

before.png

after.png

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Looks really good and conveys the idea quite nicely.  LED lighting is always tricky. One thing that helped me out rendering these things was to understand that to our eye (camera), overly bright objects will make other objects appear darker, if only just in a subtle way. Since the gamut of our screens cannot pump out more light than 255, 255, 255, of any pixel, once you've achieved the correct amount of light spill, then the surrounding should be darkened to simulate what our eye would perceive. Your photoshop render shows this with darker darks. 

big ten1.jpg

Chicago7.png

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@Luis M Ruiz  In the 'photo edited' image here, did you apply the star style lens flares in vectorworks? If so, is it part of the bloom effect and how do you enable it? ....and (one more question) do I understand correctly  that you add a bloom effect to a Renderworks Style and not just a RW Camera? How is this done?

 

Many thanks!!!

photo edited image.png

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