Theatrical Stage Lighting for Events

[dpwr]

I'm having trouble creating stage lighting in V-ray. Is anyone creating events that show lighting effects like in the attached image?

I learned to get this in RenderZone, but don't understand the V-ray tools. I've experimented with plane, mesh and sphere lights but I'm not getting anywhere.

Are there any tutorials or pointers for the instrument lights above (I watched a little of a god-light tutorial for 3DS Max, which wasn't helpful), the light wash on the audience, and the gobo lights? Do you still use a dome light in this setting? What about the ambient light control in the lights palette, is that still used with a dome light?

I feel like a beginner all over again, and it's fun!

Edited April 26, 2021 by dpwr

[Justin Montoya]

The short answer is YES, but you need to approach VRay lighting like real world lighting.  Since this type of scene is only lit by the spots, gobos, and screens, that's the kind of lights you need to use in VRay.  

A basic dome is fine, but since you are completely inside a room, it won't actually affect much.  

Start with you dark room and add a single spot light in color to see how you might need to setup the dozens of others.  Know that they multiply as more are added, so will likely need to be a tad darker than a single light, so the multi lights aren't blown out.

Gobo's are the same as spot, just with an alpha Tiff for the cutout.

Screens should be done with emitter light materials.

[dpwr]

Thanks, Justin!

I've been trying different things and tweaking a lot of settings.

I brought in a Renderzone project that i use for this type of environment and spent yesterday and last night moving lights and converting non-V-ray (mostly projector lights) to cones. It's cumbersome that light groups don't work to control color, intensity and cone.

I ran into a problem with V-ray sphere lights showing as wire frame looking objects even with visibility turned off, and I'm working to get the multi-lights working with each other.

I'll post some progress when I can. Thanks for the helpful suggestions above!

[Justin Montoya]

I agree about the missing VRay light group controls. Very frustrating!  You can try making clones, but I'm unsure if that currently works either.  

Look forward to seeing your progress.

[dpwr]

I have an "acceptable" image for delivery... but I'm still not getting some things to work well.

I have a working light plot except:

1. V-ray Sphere lights render as a cage showing segments even when the visibility is checked off. Support advised to deselect "affect camera rays" in the Volumetric Environment tab of the v-ray settings pallet. Unfortunately this cancels out any "beam" that my stage lights were making in the environment.

2. The lighting instruments I'm using to wash the audience are represented by cone lights. I got nowhere close to the effect of color blending and softness of the example image I posted. Eventually went with a solid wash on the chairs.

3. My emitter materials (glowing LED edges, LED strip lights) look good with the Bloom settings in the v-ray frame buffer. However, when I send images through Imager the Bloom Effect doesn't happen and my emitter materials resemble the constant shader in Renderzone.

IS anyone else having this issue with sphere lights? If so, what are you using instead?

Is it possible to keep the Bloom Effect in Imager renders, or to post-process Imager renders in v-ray to add the Bloom Effect back in?

[dpwr]

Oh, and:

4. Textures added to a v-ray cone light repeated at a smaller scale than wanted. I couldn't figure out how to map the "projected" texture. For example, instead of the gobo pattern light in the image above, i had maybe 5x5 or more like 10x10 of the image repeated in tiles with no way to adjust the size of the texture.

Where are those controls?

[santa]

6 hours ago, dpwr said:

Where are those controls?

There aren't any. A light only projects a single image texture. Unlike a material texture, It cannot be tiled or edited.

[dpwr]

7 hours ago, santa said:

There aren't any. A light only projects a single image texture. Unlike a material texture, It cannot be tiled or edited.

Interesting... the result I got looked like it was tiling the image map. What I want is a single image texture like you say. I'll try another map and see what happens!

[Justin Montoya]

On 5/2/2021 at 1:50 PM, dpwr said:

I have an "acceptable" image for delivery... but I'm still not getting some things to work well.

I have a working light plot except:

1. V-ray Sphere lights render as a cage showing segments even when the visibility is checked off. Support advised to deselect "affect camera rays" in the Volumetric Environment tab of the v-ray settings pallet. Unfortunately this cancels out any "beam" that my stage lights were making in the environment.

2. The lighting instruments I'm using to wash the audience are represented by cone lights. I got nowhere close to the effect of color blending and softness of the example image I posted. Eventually went with a solid wash on the chairs.

3. My emitter materials (glowing LED edges, LED strip lights) look good with the Bloom settings in the v-ray frame buffer. However, when I send images through Imager the Bloom Effect doesn't happen and my emitter materials resemble the constant shader in Renderzone.

IS anyone else having this issue with sphere lights? If so, what are you using instead?

Is it possible to keep the Bloom Effect in Imager renders, or to post-process Imager renders in v-ray to add the Bloom Effect back in?

Hey!

I haven't run into the sphere light issue, do you have Specular turned OFF?  You could also likely use some box mesh lights instead of the sphere lights if you absolutely need that type of small area light.

VRay cone lights are tricky in completely dark situations.  Did you try using an IES file for the spot lights?  This will give you a much more realistic blend and softness.  I downloaded a bunch of free Blender IES light files and they work fine in VRay for FormZ.

 

Bloom in Imager?  Nope. Currently FormZ Imager is broken for VRay if you want to use any advanced rendering settings like Bloom.  It only renders the basic VRay image, and not the other advanced passes like denoiser, bloom, etc.  You will need to render each image in the VRay Frame Buffer in FormZ without the Imager app to get the much needed advanced render settings.  Complain to support about this, we desperately need them to hear more people are struggling with this shortcoming.  Hopefully VRAY 5 is coming any time now and will resolve some of these issues.

I will have to check on the gobo tiling issue, I don't seem to remember that being a problem here.  Were you using an alpha channel equipped TIF file?

Edited May 4, 2021 by Justin Montoya

[dpwr]

Ah, no to the IES file, but I'll download that and see what I can get to happen. The beam is one part, the pool of light on the floor is another. Looking at the example image again, the chair shadows look like there is another light creating the pool on the chairs and floor, different from the theatrical instrument lights at the ceiling.

I'll go back and check specularand other settings, and I talked with Brandon about the bloom issue. He said he wasn't aware of it at that point yet.

Yes to V-ray 5. I have a lot of hopes for that. I'm disappointed a lot of the features of V-ray still aren't working with Imager after years and multiple versions of FormZ. Imager is essential to my work flow.

I have a reasonable theatrically lit environment for Renderzone, but would like the emitter glows and better look of V-ray. And Twin Motion is also really interesting, especially for animations.

[Jaakko]

I hope ADS get Imager working. It would be very nice to have for over night renderings.

[santa]

Since we are on the topic of stage lighting, has anyone watched Eurovision 2021 last Saturday? There were some fantastic effects, coupled with an equally expensive power bill, I bet!

Who was your favourite? Mine was Ukraine, and a band called Go_A, led by a Matrix Trinity lookalike gal, with a song called "Shum". It's a techno-folk-rave type ditty that really goes off, and demands repeated listening at high volume. It's one of those songs that you either love or hate. Needless to say I love it.....check it out, and enjoy:

 

[Des]

Yeah it was very good this year, although I'm glad the winning song won.. rocks not dead 😉

[santa]

Very good indeed! Politics did not raise its ugly head this year. I got the impression that the UK was receiving payback (0 points) for Brexit. There was also controversy over winning Italy's lead singer, because he was spotted leaning over the table as though snorting something. A fuss over nothing it seems, since he passed his drug test.

Edited May 24, 2021 by santa