Christmas lights in Poser?

[seachnasaigh]

I've ( mostly) recovered workstation Urania's secondary E:drive. So, some screengrabs of meshes and material setups for lightcasters:

This shows the meshes of a lightsabre blade (green), its tightly-fitted Firefly IDL emitter mesh (red), and the distantly enveloping glow aura mesh (blue)...

...closeup of the tight fit between the visible blade (green) and its unseen Firefly IDL emitter (red)...

 

[seachnasaigh]

Property settings for the blade, and a simplified material setup...

Property settings for the emitter, and a simplified material setup...

Property settings for the glow aura, and a simplified material setup...

How the two daisy-chained edge blend nodes work; strongly oblique rays (blue arrow) and strongly orthogonal rays (red arrow) are "erased", leaving only those rays which are in between (green arrow):

Firefly IDL settings for use with lightcasting props:

Firefly IDL render:

I'll post screengrabs for Superfly later.

 

[Miss B]

Ohhhhh, niiiiice! Thanks for this Seach, and I look forward to the Superfly info as well.

 

[skylab]

Yes, I'm observing also....love your work Seach, and wish you'd stop by SKYLAB CHAT often to teach us new things

 

[seachnasaigh]

Thank you, @Miss B and @skylab Wow, your chat thread is long, @skylab !

This screengrab shows both the Firefly and the Superfly material setup for the lightsabre blade; I've selected (dull orange highlighted title bars) the Superfly ambient boost nodes.

There is a disconnected movie node in the lower right corner; you could use a movie for animated lightning crackles, in place of the image map.


This is the glowy aura material:

You don't need a separate emitter for Superfly; the blade itself is an emitter, with the LightPath ambient boost nodes serving to make the lightcasting properly balanced with the apparent brightness of the blade.

Here's where you can get the lightsabre and a few other glowy demo props.

If you want a lightsabre with better materials and animated energy crackles, get the Claymore III.

 

[seachnasaigh]

This might be clearer. The LightPath ambient boost nodes are selected/highlighted. Their output only plugs into the Superfly root, and they perform the same lightcasting task as the separate unseen IDL emitter does in Firefly.

Notes: The hyperwhite_amplifier node is a re-labeled math node.
The boost adjust node is a re-labeled simple color node.
Texture output->ambient is a blender.
math - make transmap is a math node.

 

[seachnasaigh]

Superfly render settings for use with lightcaster props:

• Pixel samples: Set it high; you can always cancel the render when it clears away the graininess. It takes a lot of samples to clear a dark scene lit by mesh lighting.
• Branched path tracing: Tick this box, so that when the render engine encounters an interesting effect -such as a mesh light prop- it will send more tracer rays there, and that will help clean up graininess quicker than working completely through a huge pixel samples number.
• Mesh light samples: 20-30 for most scenes with mesh lighting.
• Clamp direct/indirect samples: Set to zero so that the samples are unclamped.
• Progressive refinement: It takes a little longer than rendering buckets, but you can observe overall progress toward 'de-graining', and cancel (then export) the render once it looks clean.
• Max bounces: Set it high; Superfly won't rigidly use 16 bounces for every raytrace, but rather it allows Superfly to use as many bounces as needed to get the job done.
• Max transparent bounces: Same as above, and this in particular solves blackout areas in glass, liquids, etc.
• Bucket size: Choose a size which is a divisor of both the render height and the render width. For example, for a 2560x1600 render, I might choose a bucket size of 16, since 16x160=2560 and 16x100=1600. Or, a bucket of 32 pixels, since 32x80=2560 and 32x50=1600. The 30 pixel bucket in the screengrab would be good for a 1200x900 render, since 30 divides into both 1200 and into 900 with an integer result (30x40=1200 and 30x30=900). The reason for this is that Superfly takes nearly as long to render a fractional bucket as it does to render a full size bucket.

 

[seachnasaigh]

Aha! Having mostly recovered Urania's E: drive data, I found this Christmas tree render, which has the effect you're looking for. I don't remember how old it is, but it is certainly pre-P11, so it's a Firefly IDL render.

P9 customized splash page in the same project folder; note light cast onto water surface where pixie dust streamer passes close to the water:

Notes: The puny tree was an RDNA freebie, I think intended to look somewhat like Charlie Brown's scrawny Christmas tree. The lantern is JudiBug's MyLantern #8, modified to be a mesh light.

 

[skylab]

Love the effect in the Poser 9 splash image

 

[seachnasaigh]

...if you wanted to set up an animated version where the lights would be blinking...

I have premade materials to"breathe" pulsing brighter-dimmer-brighter, and strobe flash!-flash!-flash!...pause...flash!-flash!-flash!...pause... in which you only need adjust color blocks. Let me sift through my recently recovered E: drive files for screengrabs. I also have downloadable MT5 MATs uploaded somewhere. I should be able to find those by tomorrow.

 

[seachnasaigh]

This is a dual root (both Firefly and Superfly) material for a glow aura which will pulse (brighter... dimmer... brighter... dimmer...) automatically, with no need for keyframing. There is a stack of simple color nodes on the right; only the top one (dark grey, for high lightcasting boost) is plugged in, the highlighted ones would be deleted.

This glow aura material is an amber strobe (flash!... flash!... flash!... pause... flash!... flash!... flash!... pause...)
The logic which does the strobe effect is boxed in with pale blue.

These effects and others are in a refractive ghost and wireframe MAT pack.

I think they are also in one of these material packs in Renderosity freestuff:
Superfly material sampler
Ghost, wireframe, and Cortana for Pauline

Changing eye color over thirty frames:

 

[Janet]

This is incredible! How does it work if there's no keyframing?

 

[seachnasaigh]

How does it work if there's no keyframing?

That node at the bottom of the logic group of nodes supplies the scene frame number; you can then manipulate that frame number with math nodes to get various effects. The math nodes of the blue pulsing effect material create a sine wave timed by the scene frame number, for example. The brightness rises and falls along with the sine wave.

 

[Janet]

I am absolutely stunned! Look at this! This is Firefly I'll upload Superfly in a bit.

 

[Janet]

And here's Superfly: