Car Trim
Headlights - Page 3
So what are headlights without lights in them? Well, they are just glowing objects on the front of the car. Which actually could be useful for 90% of all cases, come to think of it... but it's always nice to have the option of being able to light up the surroundings as if the headlights are functioning. Without getting too deeply into complex fakes, this method is a pretty good start.
General Tab
Here I merely set the color of the light up to be a warm yellowy halogen light color you might see. I suppose you could go for a whiter color, or a slight blue tinge, or base your colors on what type of light you think is installed in a certain car... I didn't get that scientific, I just went for yellow'ish'.
This is to be an omni light whose rays are controlled and directed by the opening of the headlight chamber... soft shadows works... and volumetric lighting so it goes through our transparent lens object...
The 'Show' checkboxes I just have enabled for editor feedback... hmm... "High" requirements, oh well...
Details Tab
Here I merely set up an inner color for the light... it's debatable whether any of that is necessary. Everything else is pretty default except for the fact that I enabled ambient illumination - for some reason or another. It works okay.
(Gee, up till now, I may have given the illusion that I know what I'm doing!!! I hope you weren't fooled, I'm really very much a 'try till it works' sort of person! As you can see, I even experimented a bunch with clipping settings I ended up not using...)
;-)
Visible Light Tab
There actually isn't a lot of point in the visible light settings... I mean, after all, the light iteslf is going to be ensconced in a headlight chamber that sits inside the front of our car surface. Who's even going to see the light? Well, noone really.
But I used the settings merely so that the light might glare off the inner chamber surface (chrome lined) and shine brighter through the semi-transparent headlight lens when the lights were lit.
Whether this is necessary or even helpful or not, I don't know... If you know better, and can tell definitively one way or another, give me a shout and let me know! :-)
Shadow Tab
Basically, the only things I altered in here are the map size. I needed a larger shadow map for my soft shadows because the scale I was modeling at, I needed this setting improved to make the shadows work. (In case you didn't know, the light has to cast shadows, as it relies on being stopped by the edges of the headlight chamber but being able to pass through the chamber opening and the lens in order to shine as you might expect.)
Oh, and in order for the light to pass through the lens object, that 'Transparency' checkbox must be checked!
The light is oriented in such a way that it sits relatively far back in the chamber I created, and up towards the top. The reason being is the edge of the chamber opening casts a shadow from the omni light, effectively directing the "beam"... in this case the light will appear to be aimed towards the ground out in front of the car, like headlights usually are.
This is just a render with the light on and glow enabled on the lens texture. There is a LOT of room for improvement, but it'll give you ideas anyway.
So once again, lights off effect is achieved by disabling the headlight light objects and disabling the glow channel in the lens material.
And the lights on effect uses the headlight light objects enabled, as well as glow enabled in the lens material.
This is a shot of what I like my headlights to look like when they are on and the scene lights are out. This is a very low key, "low beams" look. Maybe you'd like to include the volumetric beams or whatever, but not me! (Besides, if you shine this through fog or particles like heavy snow or rain, you get those visible beams... which is really how real life headlights work anyway!)
The above headlight illumination could be improved upon with an SLA gradient in the lens material transparency... the added control would allow you to tweak the falloff of the light beams as they hit the ground or front wall to widen the area illuminated without causing any annoying additive light overlaps... play around with that concept a bit if you have SLA... you should see what I mean relatively quickly!
But for now, I'm moving on to tail lights... and the big advantage of those is that they don't have to project light in quite the same manner as these headlights had to!!!