STEP ONE: Approximating the Lighting
First of all, as Doc says, "Forgive the crudeness of this model." Geometric precision isn't important in this test, nor is absolute accuracy with regards to lighting. What's most important is that we get the general angle, proximity and intensity of the lights correct, and we've done that.
I have NOT addressed the lenses yet - what you see here is simply the same lenses from the previous test. (Sort of on the way to the right color, though, huh?)
A bit about the science here: These images are being rendered in an unbiased spectral renderer. Unlike traditional CGI, where you just "fake it" until it looks right, this engine strictly adheres to the physics of light propagation and can't be altered. It accounts for all common propagation factors, like dispersion, diffraction, Index of Refraction, Fresnel, surface roughness, anisotropy, transmission, attenuation, reflectance, etc.
What this means is that if I modeled a prism and fired a virtual light source at it, it would do all the prismatic dispersion of light. In fact, here's an example of that happening using this engine:
Everything in the above image is CG. So what we'll be doing is assigning a material to the lenses, in this case, acrylic, for which we have known photometric data - that is, having been previously measured in a lab, the particular ways acrylic interacts with light are known and stored in a table which this engine references, to obtain an accurate solution. We use this in product visualizations all the time, so that manufacturers know exactly what something will look like in the real world without actually having to build it.
We also have photometric data for human skin, for a wide variety of races. We'll be plugging in the average data for North American white male on the head inside the helmet.
We can also change the temperature of the lights through the entire range of Kelvin, but film set lights are usually only in a few frequencies, which we'll try. There are no colored filters on the lenses of the cameras in any of our reference shots. So what we'll really be left to focus on then, is the coloring of the lenses themselves. Now that this part of the simulation is ready, I'll begin that stage.
_Mike
