CGTalk Lighting Challenge #30: Old school Smoke

Zom-B · Post by **Zom-B** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 6:30 am

Here is my final submission for the CGTalk Lighting Challenge #30: Old school Smoke.
The base models where done by Giorgio Luciano.

cotty · Post by **cotty** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 7:41 am

I took a look at the others and... they will have no chance

StompinTom · Post by **StompinTom** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 8:16 am

Nice one! Looks ace!

Stinkie · Post by **Stinkie** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 10:23 am

Indeed it does.

zeitmeister · Post by **zeitmeister** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 8:19 pm

Bosseye · Post by **Bosseye** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 8:57 pm

Stunning! Incredibly atmospheric.

Polinalkrimizei · Post by **Polinalkrimizei** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 11:49 pm

Nice one Zom-B, and good luck for the competition!

I can actually smell this picture.

PureSpider · Post by **PureSpider** » Tue Jan 08, 2013 12:06 am

Wie gern würde ich sowas auch können... ich bewundere dich, Arthur!

Zom-B · Post by **Zom-B** » Tue Jan 08, 2013 12:58 am

Hey guys, thanks a lot for the kind words

I share two nice "techniques" that I used to create that picture:

The Smoke (The credits for this one goes to fused since it was all his idea ^^)

The smoke was created using 3 what is called "Sweep-Nurbes" in C4D. Its a modifier that creates a object out of two splines, one "rail" and one for the thickness.
So we use here a rail spline based on a Helix with tight swirl radius on the bottom and wide on the top.
The spline for the thickness is a longer shape with some irregularities.
This smoke mesh is kind of low poly and gets smoothed out by Indigos subdiv, the smoke material is also kind of simple.

: The smoke mesh

: Two splines that a smoke swril is made from.; screenshot.2.png (3.64 KiB) Viewed 10642 times

: The smoke material

The Caustics
I played around quite a long time to get some proper caustics for that glass, but I failed with each approach.
Until I had the idea of a "laser-pointer", that should only bring out the caustics but don't lit the scene further.
So I created a IES file that was kind of a bundled beam of light and shot it into the glass to get fancy caustics.
I decided to have a little broader beam, so the caustics don't get ultra sharp, I felt that would disturb the choosy atmosphere.
Finally I realized that rendering the scene took way to long and the caustics needed ages to clear out. This seems to be related to Indigos importance weighting of lights. If I would render 5 light-sources individually for 1h and merge them in PS together, the resulting image would be way cleaner then rendering all of them together for 5h!
So I rendered the whole scene without the "IES lightbeam" and did the laser beam solo and merged it in PS.

: Render of only IES light beam only

CTZn · Post by **CTZn** » Tue Jan 08, 2013 1:16 am

Fine techniques really, and a great image !

ritter · Post by **ritter** » Tue Jan 08, 2013 6:26 am

Very nice image and amazing texture.

pixie · Post by **pixie** » Tue Jan 08, 2013 6:31 am

Zom-B, you cheater!

Great work!

Post by **fused** » Mon Jan 14, 2013 11:45 pm

Beautiful work!

pixelmonkey · Post by **pixelmonkey** » Fri Jan 25, 2013 10:54 am

Absolutely amazing, bravo!

RusGun · Post by **RusGun** » Wed Feb 06, 2013 5:11 am

Nice work! Can you tell about that how you make greys parts of sigars? And can you share your settings and placement of lights in scene?

PS Вы ведь русский ? Модель Имрода была победителем на Dominance War, на сколько я помню)