Volumetric Stage Lighting

[3dreamstudios]

Anyone have ideas of how to get good volumetric stage lighting? So in real life (which we will probably have to deal with in Octane since it's based on real physics) you have a bright light, a shadow GOBO pattern and fog/atmosphere in the room. Your light produces rays/beams of light depending on the pattern.

I've tried several things without any looking good at all in Octane 3.x Beta.

I tried making a physical light fixture with a surface that I made Emmisive, then put a piece of geometry in front of it for my shadow GOBO and added a scattering medium to my environment but it just doesn't come through.

I tried haveing a real Octane Light with Shadow GOBO and this didn't turn out good either.

Has anyone ever tried this...any guidance would be very helpful. I was able to get regular lights to show up with IES and such with my MEDIUM but when I put the shadow GOBO in the mix it just doesn't look correct....almost like there is a resolution issue with how it's calculating the medium...

Thanks.

FYI, here are some images of "Stage Lighting" looks I'm trying to achieve. https://www.google.com/search?q=stage+l ... 80&bih=923

[juanjgon]

Render this kind of effects should be fairly easy using the volumetric medium environment and modeled gobo lights. Attached you have a sample scene.

-Juanjo

[3dreamstudios]

Yea I sure thought it was going to be! I'll pick this scene apart and see what I missed. Thanks so much for the quick sample!

[3dreamstudios]

Yep that does it, thanks!

Is there a quick explaination about each of the settings for Medium? I'm just not following how they work together....for me they seem to be backwards and possibly not named appropriately....but that's probably because I just don't understand.

In layman's terms I think we would want to see these types of descriptions affect the behind the scenes calculations....

Density - This works just fine as is and is understandable.
Phase - Not sure what this really does...
Color of Scatter - This to me should be a slider 0-255 rather than White to black....but having it as color may give us more flexibility.
Color of Absorbtion - Similar to above.
Medium Radius - This is the biggest confusion for me. To me it would mean the amount of scattering or absorption is spread throughout this radius (I'm guessing from camera center) Is this correct?

[juanjgon]

From the standalone docs: "The phase function controls in what direction light gets scattered. There is currently one kind of phase function defined, with one parameter, scattering_direction. If set to 0.0, it means light gets scattered the same amount in any direction. A setting larger than 0.0 means forward scattering, the larger the value, the more light is scattered in a similar direction as it was traveling. 1.0 means it doesn’t change direction. A negative value means backscattering, so more light is scattered back to where it came from."

The volumetric medium works inside a "virtual" sphere around the camera with the radius "medium radius".

-Juanjo