Car Headlights Render

[BOON]

Hi guys,

I'm trying to render car headlights in Houdini. Below is a test render image of my scene, I applied glow shader for the geometry and spotlights attached to the position of the source.

And this link here (http://www.dmmultime.../3dtips_04c.htm) is really how I want my lights to look like. I really like the way how glare and glow work so well in that scene. Does anyone care to show me how, or where can I learn how to render realistic car headlights?

Thanks

[old school]

For best rendering efficiency (avoid using caustics for illuminating your scene) you can combine two main light types for car headlights, tail lights and whatever lights. It's a common approach btw. I'd probably save the glows for comp but you "could" put a low res volume container around each light to pick up some glow. The other light effects are lens effects (flares) and you can save these for comp. If you want to use depth of field, you can use bokeh to get that type of lens effect in the render.

First light types embedded in the light fixture only used to light the fixture and the components around it.

Second set of lights using ies illumination profiles for illuminating all surrounding objects and not the light fixture.

The above lights come in pairs of course. If your headlight has 4 illumination sources, you'd have 4 pairs of lights for 8 in total.

Embedded Lens Spherical Area Lights

One light embedded in the light fixture itself. Use a spherical area light and turn on rendering of light geometry. Lens is to be modelled as a two sided surface and interior chrome parts properly modelled. A displacement shader is applied to the inside face of the lens to get a realistic look.

IES Lights for illuminating surroundings

Pick a decent ies profile from the thousands available on line by companies that provide these (phillips, ge, rudd, etc). I just threw any ies light profile in there that is kinda ok but not really. Go find a profile that works for you. Or just use a cone on top of the disk area light as is.

simple_headlight_v004.zip

[BOON]

Old school thank you so much for your time and effort to go through all these explanations. For sure rendering realistic lights is going to be my next big thing now.

I was doing a shot for my showreel and was not able to render good looking lights in close up, so I decided to pull the camera back further and got this: https://vimeo.com/76943241 (the first shot).

Light geometries were rendered with 2 glow shaders each (1 full intensity for bulb, and lighter glow for lens).

Cheers!