Hi all.

I saw a great model on the Modo forum of a lamp and I thought that is should be much easier to model that sort of thing with NURBS (a very frequent thought for me, as I have not yet really figured how to model anything good with sub-d polygons and the like).

It was a fun project but it took me much more time than I had expected, as I am still learning the ropes of MoI. The screw at the tip in particular was a good case of helix, as is the “bulb”. Now is the time to get it into a renderer (Modo, I guess) and do something with the geometry. I attach a rendering from Flamingo, which has some basic features but nothing like Modo or the big guys, but it is super easy to setup and it is a plug-in of Rhino, which means cut and paste from MoI for quick test renders.

Your thoughts on the model are more than welcome.

Jean-Paul

It's looking great Jean-Paul, looking forward to seeing it rendered!

- Michael

And here it is rendered with Modo.

Not too exciting a project in fact but fun to make. And export to Modo went like a breeze, with nicely shaped polygons and all. Rendering in Modo is a tad more complex than I care for, but the output is superb.

Jean-Paul
Paris

Looks great Jean-Paul!

I was thinking that you would have the coil actually emitting light in the rendering... But I guess that since it is just sitting there on its own and not actually in a socket, that would not make sense anyway. :)

- Michael

This is easy enough to fix, but that looks a bit spooky. And I guess I should set up some sort of background for the light to reflect on or something.

Cool model. I would just watch that coil shadow - if it was emitting light there wouldn't be a shadow there....although you may have just changed it in PS - if so it deserves another render! ;-)

Nice model, next thing is to make a socket, so it has power :-)

I have also found MoI to modo works well using LWO.

Also, try turning on bloom in the modo render to get some glow to the bulb part.

Great model.

You could also throw it into an unbiased renderer like Lux render and it would look awesome.

Lux Render ? I'd love to try that. Precisely how should I do that? Remember that at this point Modo is the full extent of my foray into the magic world of rendering...

Well, it's a multi-step process. I'd first export it as an object and then import it into Blender. Once in Blender, you can create your scene. You then install the Lux script into Blender which allows you to use Luxrender as the render engine instead of Blender's.

If you wouldn't mind posting your 3dm, I could do a tutorial of how to get MOI files into Blender and then how to do a simple studio setup in Blender and then in Luxrender as well. I've been wanting to do that for a while now.

Great idea! Here is the model, split into six components (by intended material). Looking forward to the tutorial.

Awesome!

I'm pretty busy this weekend, so most likely I'll get working on it next week.

Here's a render in Lux render. I didn't optimize the geometry right on export so there is some faceting visible on the bulb and base.

All of these images are created using a single render in Luxrender. I created each bulb and set each light to be it's own Light Group. In Lux, you can then change the amount of light gain for each light group during the render at any time. Luxrender is an unbiased renderer, which means that it can produce realistic images at the tradeoff of time. The render never finishes but slowly converges on the correct physical solution. You just watch it until you are happy with the quality of the image and then stop the render.

I let this run overnight and then stopped the render. I then adjusted the gain of each light group to show the effect of each bulb on the scene. You can also change the color of the each light on the fly in Luxrender as well.

This is what I'll be showing in more detail in the tutorial along with the general use of Blender.

Fantastic ! I am so proud that my humble model turned out so well.

Looking forward to your tutorial.

I've been wanting to try a light bulb render in modo. Here's my attempt.

I think you guys will get a better looking render if you change the initial model a bit. For the bulb, you actually want a two part piece, first a thin shell, and then the solid core. When rendering, if you set the shell to be glass and then the core as the light emitter, you'll get a much better representation of the actual lamp. It's especially obvious when you look at the sides of the bulb (relative to the camera), where in a real bulb, you'll have a small patch of transparent glass, as the emissive coating is on the inside of the glass. If the bulb is lit and putting out a realistic amount of light, of course, this will mostly (but not entirely) not be visible. It's a thin layer of glass, and it won't matter unless the bulb is going to be seen in closeup.

Wanted to try this myself too. Here's my shot at it in modo. Didn't change the model at all though.

Very nice!

Would you mind posting your Modo settings for the light?

Here's the settings for mine. I also used an HDR probe to get some reflections off the filament. I'm not sure about modifying the model since it's yours :-)

I've attached the modo file for my setup, feel free to have a play. The shaders are all from the presets that come with modo, but I've tweaked them a little to get the effect I wanted.

The light is the fluorescent preset.

Like RAY I didn't want to mess with your model ;-)