Luminosity Issues (The One Ring)

[ChandlerL]

Hey all,

I'm attempting to recreate "The One Ring." However, I'm up to the point where I have created the Ring text on the outside of the ring using the bump channel. Everything is working out great.

http://www.myny.us/ring_issue.jpg

Then I want to make the text glow, so I go into the color channel and create a gradiant (WITH INPUT PARAMETER: BUMP). And I assign keys to the gradiant going from hot (White) to Yellow to Red, and finally to the color of the ring in the last key and assign that 0% alpha. The problem is my color channel is showing the text offset from the original bump text: shown here.

http://www.myny.us/ringlumin_issue.jpg

This all shows up just fine in Viper. When I go to render is when I get slapped. What have I done wrong?

I'll eventually be copying the working color gradiant to the luminosity channel to complete the effect... if I can get it to work. The same offsetting issue happens in the Luminosity channel as well.

I've linked the assets into a single zip in case anyone wants to take a look.

http://www.myny.us/RingIssue.zip

Thanks,

Chan

[ChandlerL]

Hey guys, I figured out WHAT was causing the problem. I've been discussing it with one of the best Lightwavers out there on CGTALK. Here is the link to the thread:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=53627

In the meantime, I've resposted what I figured out here for simplicity. Does anyone want to take a look at this? Any NewTek guys out there that can explain? May be I just don't have a full grasp of how Lightwave works with color/lumin channels tied to bump.. I'm really at a loss. At least now I can make the problem happen (see below) rather than grasping at straws.


***REPOSTED MESSAGE FROM CGTALK***

Waaaaait a second here. Leigh I took your advice and re-created the ring-- simple object anyway and lord knows... I need the practice-- Turns out you were right. This time, everything went swell.

As a matter of fact, I was able to complete my entire OneRing exercise without a hitch including all surfacing, glows, etc. Then just a few minutes ago, I went back to it because I wanted to center the letter text a little bit better on the ring-- I jumped into the POSITION tab under the surface bump, and moved the text and lo and behold.. The problem appeared with my new object/scene.

I went back into my original scene (the one you downloaded) and noticed I had originally messed with the texture POSITION in the Bump channel -- that is what is causing the god awful offset color gradiant and luminosity effect. I put all my POSITION elements to zero on my original broken object, and even viola, problem solved..

THE TROUBLE IS... Is this supposed to happen? Shouldn't the color & luminosity gradiants which have been tied to the BUMP channel FOLLOW the X,Y,Z positions of the BUMP channel?

Try it on my original ZIP file at the top of this thread, and you'll see what I mean-- you can restore it to working by zeroing out the x,y,z positions under the bump surface, but that means you can't move those positions without the color/lumin channels going haywire.

In the meantime, I can always manually move the text on the texture image itself prior to bringing it into Lightwave, however, I'm sure with much more advanced textures this could cause a serious technical issue.

Lemme know what you think.