Re: Osaka's art (3d&2d)
The renderer he uses creates the glowing effect using a post-render technique known as emulated bloom whereby you add a refraction off the lens in the form of a drop-shadow highlight in a pale color in the renderer's overpass which is pre-calculated based on the radient exitance which a basic renderer can't really do itself.
By using Raytracing and GI, I can create proper photon displacement of about a radiant exitance of 4.5W/srm^2 (1.0 is a passive sunlight within basic displacement at 1 kilometer, ideal for lighting stuff) with a much sharper falloff (how easily the light fails to penetrate fog or air) of about 8M/srm^4 (sunlight is actually several magnitudes higher).
I've set up materials to generate indirect illumination which the primary color is teal and the indirect refractive color is white. The result is it looks like an authentic glow and illuminates surrounding objects just as it should.
Since I'm using ray-tracing, I get authentic lens emulation which means the bloom matches the real thing when it's calculated in the overpass (post-effects, anti-aliasing, forced shadowing, gamma-tweaks, motion blur, color tweaks, lens-tweaks, crap like that).
In short, I'm using a photo-realistic renderer (means it emulates light precisely) but I'm not using photo-realistic materials or textures so it looks a bit plasticy.
And yes, I also prefer the blue. Has a weird
Tron vibe to it.
The new light-cycle looks amazing. I was trying to mimic the effect... I need to read up on the optical responses of polished chrome and make some better lighting rigs to copy this effect so mine isn't quite so blatant and rough.
