And more lighting!

Andy's ship is coming along nicely and I now have the ship modelled to play around with the lights a bit more. It's as always a struggle as Mental Ray has it's own little ways of doing things. Because the scene has a lot of candle lights and foggy moon lights I thought I could use fog lights which work quite nice in Maya Software Render but to get it right in Mental Ray you have to do a lot more stuff. Another thing is that I wanted to include some glowing lights to the scene. While it's really quite simple to click a little button in Maya that says Light Glow and then create the Optical FX with glows, halos and lens flares, it doesn't work in Mental Ray. So after hours of searching the internet for answers and not getting any, I figured I could try to make an object glow and use that. So I created a little NURBS sphere and assigned a blinn to it with sharp specular attributes and turned the special effect glow on. And it works in Mental Ray!

Here are some more test renders (click on the images to see larger version).

You can see the different light elements of lanterns. A point light that illuminates the scene, another point light, with a mental ray shader and fog light assigned to it to get the light rays and the glowing NURBS sphere!

Here is where the glow is working.

There's clearly too much glow on some of the pictures, but that is mainly because all the metals in the scene have the same material assigned, so they all have the same glow. Once the texturing of the props is done this problem is solved.

Again too much glow.