Example gallery

Example gallery

Images made by an architecture company on the rise, located in Stirling, Scotland. TensARC specializes in the fabrication and design of light-weight, deployable and above all affordable tensile structures. They also have a remarkably realistic visualisation service. Because of their extensive knowledge of digital imaging, they were also part of the beta-testing process of UVeclipse.

Some amazing images done by Rinus Roelofs (an artist from The Netherlands) in cooperation with the inventor of the fascinating Spidron project, Dániel Erdély (a designer from Hungary).

Below you can see a comparison table for digital renderings using UVeclipse lightdomes and the Flamingo 2.0 render plugin for Rhinoceros 3.0
The duration of the rendering has been noted in seconds in the upper right corner of the images. All images are scaled down 50% but otherwise unaltered.
"Soft shadows" in Flamingo means the same as "Area shadows" in most other rendering packages.

	Default rendering. All white materials, a single, white directional light with soft-shadows. The dragon contains nearly 110,000 mesh-vertices and almost 220,000 mesh-faces. The 3D scene remains unchanged throughout the comparison series. Only the lighting conditions change... *Model courtesy: Georgia Institute of Technology.*
	Added a small, timid lightdome with 35 directional lights. The sources in the dome do not cast soft-shadows, this would increase rendertimes rather significantly. Note that the increase of light-casting sources is starting to overexpose the horizontalish areas of the geometry.
	Added a medium size, blue coloured lightdome with 61 directional lights. Even more overexposure than in the previous image. Even the groundplane has been overexposed, but since the lightsources are mostly pointing downwards, vertical geometry can still be very dark.
	Lightdome only setup. Lightdome wrapper was handpainted as a duotone image. The left half of the dome is blue and the right half is orange. 33 directional lights have been placed on the dome. Note how the orientational angle of the geometry on the XY-plane controls the colour of the surface. Because there is no main light-source in this setup the entire dome has been rendered with soft-shadows.
	Lightdome only setup. Lightdome wrapper was handpainted and is a duotone image. The bottom half of the dome is green and the top half is orange. You can see a scaled down version of the wrapper bitmap in the upperleft corner. 24 directional lights have been placed on the dome. Note how the orientational angle of the geometry on the XZ- and YZ-planes controls the colour of the surface. No soft-shadows (hence the shadow artifacts on the groundplane near the dragon and the significantly shorter rendertime).
	Another setup like the one above, only this time with different colours and different sources. Here we used 45 pointlights, which results in a more washed-out but also more natural palette. Again, no soft-shadows.
	A typical evening-sun lighting setup. A lightdome with 50 blueish point lights, distributed unevenly over the sphere (see inserted screenshot), counterbalanced by a very pale orange directional light. Note that the accumulated brightness of the entire dome is about the same as the brightness of the single counter-source. If the lightdome and the counter-light are properly balanced, they will result in white light when seen together. Therefore the counterlight must have approximately the same brightness as the dome and it must have a hue that is opposite to the dome. In UVEclipse you can analyze the current lightdome and see what settings are required for a good counter source.
	A typical interior lighting setup. A panoramic photograph of a home was used to place lights with the paint-splatter algorithm. Most lights are reddish-brown but there are some blue and even a few green ones in there. Since the environment we're trying to mimic is almost completely dependant on indirect lighting, there is no need for a counter-source. Counter sources are used to represent strong lights in the environment such as the sun, campfire or artificial lights.
	Here you see a lightdome with a very centralized group of green and blue spotlights. When a lightdome does not reside outside the 3D scene bounding box, it acts as a glowing object. Since the dome is relatively bright in this setup, the shadow artifacts are very clearly visible. Soft-shadows with large source radii and high sample counts would have fixed this issue at the expense of speed.

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