Rendering time

[Fletch]

We were able to open the .skp in the RAR, Thank you.

[Fletch]

1. Use Template>Architectural Glass>Reflective instead of "real" glass, as the "Real" glass is trying to make the decorations appear to be made from solid glass, and not a thin glass shell.

2. Set Light Emitter material to "Fake Emit". This will instantly make the scene render much more quickly.

3. Put Point Light inside of your light components.
1mm radius
power of 5 watts
Turn off soft shadow
Turn off shadow for these lights to make them render nearly instantaneously.

4. Use "Bloom" in "Post Process" panel to make the lights have a "glow" or "halo" effect.

5. Copy a slightly smaller sphere inside of the spherical ornament and also make it the Architectural Glass Reflective, so that there are more reflections on that ornament.

6. Set Sky to Background Color so that the render engine ignores the sky settings while rendering. And Disable the Sun for the same reason.

7. Delete lights that are too close to the back wall. Or carefully position all lights for best lighting effect.

8. Place Christmas Light component at original origin of scene, explode - select all of component parts and make new component - this is to eliminate strange scaling issue and odd component axis position and orientation of the Christmas Light component. After making new component, place this on the tree delete the old ones. Use Twilight V2 Pro Proxy Tool to place the lights on the tree quickly if you have Twilght Pro.

9. eliminate ceiling light inside space

10. For Light Bulbs: Try Emitter, set to FAKE EMITTER 40 Watts per meter Squared. Set material to be 5% opacity in the pulldown at the bottom of the Twilight material editor. This increased rendering to 1m17s
In this case just delete or hide completely the geometry inside of the light bulb.
(by mistake the glass on the light bulb was hidden in the last rendering and attached file - open the component in SketchUp and unhide the glass)
Adjustments made in the scene attached. It renders in 21s on Low render setting.

11. Play with different bloom settings they can make a giant difference when the light bulbs are fake emitters.

[Fletch]

11. Play with different bloom settings they can make a giant difference when the light bulbs are fake emitters.

[Fletch]

I remembered this Glowing Crystal Chandelier material. It would look great on the glass ball ornaments, or on the light bulbs.
Follow link above, and follow instructions for installation.

glowsettings-chandelier.jpg (159.03 KiB) Viewed 9425 times

Then choose the light bulb material in your scene and import/apply that Chandelier library material.

Then set it to be very fast rendering by turning off emittance (fake emitter) and casting or receiving of shadows or caustics.

If you set it to the following in the Deep Material Editor (Pro users only) it renders super fast and looks great in combination with the Bloom settings show.

Not shown in video below: set power to W/m2 (watts per meter squared) it defaults to "Watts" and this must be changed to get it to work correctly.

matsettings.gif (3.01 MiB) Viewed 9425 times

[Fletch]

Not shown in video above: set power to W/m2 (watts per meter squared) it defaults to "Watts" and this must be changed to get it to work correctly.

[Fletch]

2000px wide

[Fletch]

Here's the scene with blue lights.
Changed material to the thin glass.

[zarnollistudio]

My godness, I have just realised there was an answer ready for me.
And what an answer !!

I first want to thank you very much, and I am going to follow all your instructions, as soon as I get back to this "lights work".

Regarding the different tries you made, I am wondering about the see through balls.
I made in purpose 3 kinds of ball : gold metal, green metal and see through one.
On each try you made, the see through one does not look glass (talking about ball not bulbs), do you know how we can make it look see through glass, like a soap bubble ?

Have a nice day.

Chantal

[Fletch]

My godness, I have just realised there was an answer ready for me.
And what an answer !!
I first want to thank you very much, and I am going to follow all your instructions, as soon as I get back to this "lights work".

Regarding the different tries you made, I am wondering about the see through balls.
I made in purpose 3 kinds of ball : gold metal, green metal and see through one.
On each try you made, the see through one does not look glass (talking about ball not bulbs), do you know how we can make it look see through glass, like a soap bubble ?

Have a nice day.

Chantal

In the first post I believe I shared the scene with Architectural Glass > Common (see through, thin glass).
It is difficult to tell in the rendered image, as there is nothing behind the glass balls in most cases except a blank white wall.
I added a sphere inside of the original sphere, just for fun/visual interest. You can delete that sphere no problem.

[Fletch]

Using the iridescent procedural in the deep editor you can create this type of effect.
Download the component with the material below.