In the first part of this tutorial, we built a lighting grid using a couple of MoGraph Cloners and a Volume Effector.  At the end of part 01 we ended up with a lighting grid made up of plain spheres (see below). In part two, we’ll model a basic light bulb and go through the process of placing that object into our cloners without “breaking” our setup (see above).

Step 01

Grab a reference model for the bulb.  Grab it from anywhere, we’re only using the image as reference for modeling.  In the front view, go to Edit > Configure.  Under the Back tab, browse and select your picture.  This will give us an overlay image to help us draw our profile spline.  Using the Bezier Spline Tool, create a spline down one side of the profile of the light bulb.

Step 02

We need to make sure that our spline begins and ends at zero on the Y-axis.  The best way to accomplish this: select the bulb spline and go into point editing mode.  Select the Move Tool, and in the tool attribute manager, go to the Snap Settings tab, and activate the Grid checkbox.  Select each endpoint of the spline and drag them toward the Y-axis.  When you’re close, it should snap into place.

Step 03

Next, while you have the spline selected, hold down the Alt key while you click to create a Lathe NURBS.  The spline will become a child of the Lathe NURBS object. Now we have the basic shape for our bulb.

Step 04

Now we’ll make some basic materials for our bulb, one glass material and one metallic material.  You can tailor the materials to your own taste, but below are some screen shots of the most important parts.

The only other major thing to change is the Lumas Shader on the metallic material. Crank the roughness of the anisotropy in one direction. This will get us the brushed metal look of the back of a flood lamp.

Step 05

Start by applying the metallic material to the Lathe NURBS object.  Then press the “C” key to make the lathe nurbs editable.  Go into face editing mode and select all of the faces on the top part of the bulb.  While you have the faces selected, drag the glass material onto the selection.

Now that we have the bulb finished, we get to the important part.  Replacing the spheres in our mograph light rig from part one of this tutorial.

Step 06

Under the bulb cloner object, make our new Lathe NURBS bulb a child.  You’ll notice that we’re a little off on the positioning and scale of the Lathe NURBS bulbs.

Step 07

Deactivate the bulb Cloner object so we can get a clear look at our old bulb sphere and our new Lathe NURBS bulb.  Reposition and rescale our Lathe NURBS bulb to make it approximately the same position and dimensions as the old bulb sphere.  When you get it, make sure to reposition the Axis of the Lathe NURBS so that it is at X:0 Y:0 Z:0

Step 08

The last step is to throw an HRDI map on a sky object to get some nice reflections out of our metallic shader (Read how to do this)

FINISHED! You should now have a fully functional lighting grid that looks decent from any angle while still being dynamically updatable.

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Filed under: Tutorials, 3D, C4d, Lathe NURBS, Materials, MoGraph, Shaders, Tutorial