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Description
I decided it was time to do another veteran's tribute as we spool up for Honor Flight this year.

I also took the opportunity to use Reality and Luxrender's volumetric lights abilities. It took half a day of juggling before I was happy with it, but it came out well.

This looked entirely different for most of its development. I had pretty bushes, stained glass projector light, and some amazing textures from Reality and Luxrender presets for marble stairs, gold railings, the works.

But for some reason I wasn't happy with any of the pretty shiny stuff, the whole scene was "missing" something. Then I was looking at old renders and remembered the volumetric lighting I did for an alien render years ago, and the proverbial lightbulb went off over my head. I hadn't done any volumetric lighting with Luxrender, but found a handy tutorial video and went from there.

So it's worth remembering there may be times when all the work you put into staging, rigging, texturing, and animating a scene just feels wrong and you end up dumping it for something way simpler. Go with your gut!

One thing I have learned: Luxrender slows *way* down when you add volumetrics. I think I'll poke at it more to see if there are ways to speed it up, and how to tweak it with IES lights and images for IBL too if those will improve the final result (I still need to figure out how to do translucency through to LR as well yet).

V4.2, AK Angeloi, M16 by Mock, no clue where the boots and helmet came from.

Poser -> Reality 4 -> Luxrender -> Gimp 2

Description
I decided it was time to do another veteran's tribute as we spool up for Honor Flight this year.

I also took the opportunity to use Reality and Luxrender's volumetric lights abilities. It took half a day of juggling before I was happy with it, but it came out well.

This looked entirely different for most of its development. I had pretty bushes, stained glass projector light, and some amazing textures from Reality and Luxrender presets for marble stairs, gold railings, the works.

But for some reason I wasn't happy with any of the pretty shiny stuff, the whole scene was "missing" something. Then I was looking at old renders and remembered the volumetric lighting I did for an alien render years ago, and the proverbial lightbulb went off over my head. I hadn't done any volumetric lighting with Luxrender, but found a handy tutorial video and went from there.

So it's worth remembering there may be times when all the work you put into staging, rigging, texturing, and animating a scene just feels wrong and you end up dumping it for something way simpler. Go with your gut!

One thing I have learned: Luxrender slows *way* down when you add volumetrics. I think I'll poke at it more to see if there are ways to speed it up, and how to tweak it with IES lights and images for IBL too if those will improve the final result (I still need to figure out how to do translucency through to LR as well yet).

V4.2, AK Angeloi, M16 by Mock, no clue where the boots and helmet came from.

Poser -> Reality 4 -> Luxrender -> Gimp 2