Topic: Animate materials, for example emissiveness

[mischa]

Hi folks,

as far as I know it is not possible to animate materials at the moment, right? I am working on a scene at the moment where it could be nice to animate the glow effect of an object. Does somebody know a trick how I can achieve that in Lumion?

The problem is that the glow effect (had had this problem already in several projects) causes strange effects in objects that hace a refecltion activated like glass. You can see glowing objects in the reflections even if they should be hidden behind walls. The glow is visible very strong in the glass so it is realy disturbing. The only solution i know, is to render the clip where the glowing object is hidden behind the wall without the glow effect and then in the next clip where the reflecting glass isn t visible (but the glowing object) to activate the glow effect in this scene and render this scene extra.

Would be great to be able to animate this slider also! And to find a solution for the glowing bug in the reflections. Somebody has a quick workaround for me, different to mine? What I onece did was that i copied my building (without the glowing effect) in the same scene at another position and putted the reflection point to this scene. So the glass visible in the camerapath reflected the other building without the glowing lights, but that was realy complicate to find the best position for the reflection in the new generated building.

[Gaieus]

As a workaround until there is a solution, would it work to put the glowing object on a certain layer and when you need to "hide" it from the clip, hide that layer as a clip movie effect?

[mischa]

that is a great idea, never worked with that option before, it is one of the new functions right? only problem is that these glowing objects are part of one big dae object. Will give it a try and extract+reimport+align it and use the layer effect. Like that I can render it in one pass.  Will report how it worked...

[Morten]

The problem is that the glow effect (had had this problem already in several projects) causes strange effects in objects that hace a refecltion activated like glass. You can see glowing objects in the reflections even if they should be hidden behind walls. The glow is visible very strong in the glass so it is realy disturbing.

Hi Mischa, in order to try to reproduce the problem you're reporting, I've added 2 user-imported objects (spheres) to a scene and placed a house between them.

I've then added a Standard material with 100% emissiveness to the first sphere and a glass material with 100% reflection to the other sphere.

There's a screenshot of the scene below - is this the setup I need in order to reproduce it?

I then render a clip (attached) but I don't see the emissive sphere reflected in the glass, since the building is occluding it.

Could you let me know what I need to do differently in order to reproduce the problem you reported?

[mischa]

Hi Morten,

it was both an interior scene when this problem happend to me. In this scene I now disabled the glow effect so that it does not occur anymore. I will cut out the frames of the old movie and send you like where the effect is visible.

To give you a short idea of my scene: I have a sphere (an old gas holder) in this sphere is a second sphere (a planetarium). Around this second sphere is a sort of bridge, where people can wait to being let into the planetarium. Around this bridge is a glass wall so that the people can t fall down from the bridge into the big sphere enclosing the planetarium and the bridge. In the planetarium is a special planetarium projector called chronos 2 which has many lenses. These lenses are glowing and should only be visible when we are inside the second sphere. But when I am walking around the bridge, called panoramic path, I am watching out into the dark and can see the chronosglows in the reflections of the glass. The chronos is in my back, that is correct, but there are two walls between us (the second sphere). Hope these complicate and confusing description can help you to understand my scene.

[Morten]

Cool project.

As you probably know, the default setting for reflections is to use a cubemap rendered from the position of the camera in every frame of your clips. This technique is common in real-time 3D and does not produce realistic raytraced reflections, but rather reflections that look acceptable in some situations and less so in others.

In this particular scene, I'd be curious to see what happens with the glowing reflections if you use a fixed reflection position by applying a "Reflection control" effect to your clip and choosing "Custom position". Then click on "Set reflection point", choose a position inside the largest sphere and outside the bridge/curved glass wall, and render the clip again.

If that doesn't help, is it possible to email us a small version of your scene, so that we can reduce the complexity by isolating the elements that are causing the problem?

[mischa]

Cool project.

As you probably know, the default setting for reflections is to use a cubemap rendered from the position of the camera in every frame of your clips. This technique is common in real-time 3D and does not produce realistic raytraced reflections, but rather reflections that look acceptable in some situations and less so in others.

In this particular scene, I'd be curious to see what happens with the glowing reflections if you use a fixed reflection position by applying a "Reflection control" effect to your clip and choosing "Custom position". Then click on "Set reflection point", choose a position inside the largest sphere and outside the bridge/curved glass wall, and render the clip again.

If that doesn't help, is it possible to email us a small version of your scene, so that we can reduce the complexity by isolating the elements that are causing the problem?

Hi Morten,

thx for your quick reply. well as desrcibed above I know this effect and I used it in a previous interior scene where I had the problem that the glowing reflections were flickering. I positioned the same building into the scene at another place and putted the reflection point in this building. I deactivated the glow effect in this building. The camera was animated through the "old" with the glowing effect. This worked fine, but is a bit memory  consuming...
I will try our tip also (the customer has already the finnished movie, I rendered the finnish twice, one without the glow and once with it and cutted it together so that the glow effect is there when needed and not there when the reflections are visible). Will try to reproduce this effect in a very simple scene.

Mischa