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Greetings all!

So I have been flicking through a lot of painting threads and commission based work lately and there's one thing that has been bugging me and that is object source lighting.

Now I think the effect is great and a lot of the guys doing it are very very talented individuals.

My gripe with it though is that it seems to be done to death on absolutely everything which I find detracts a lot from the finished model

What does everyone else think? How do you find the latest osl trend?

Like the last Too much osl thread a while back..

It can look nice when done subtly, but many overdooitohmy god what is your avatar?

That's artwork from the recently deceased H.R. Giger, the artist that inspired and worked with the Alien movie. Though many of his works were of a highly sexual nature, including the avatar above.

i occasionally do it if theres a lantern or lamp or something in a diorama, but i think it looks a bit crap when every model has all its eyes OSL'd and every lamp on every vehicle. less is definately more with OSL

We had this discussion not long ago:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/601299.page

My general opinion is that it looks good in dioramas but usually doesn't look good on table top models.

On table top models, you can only have OSL on the model itself, not the surroundings, so it looks silly.

The other problem is people paint their models as if they were in daylight and we view the models in good lighting. When you have good natural lighting surrounding something, a bit of a glow from something should not be noticeable. Turn on your cars headlights in daytime and you can't see the glow from them or if you can it's only faint.

Unless you are actually painting a night scene, OSL is almost always inappropriate.

Don't like it - not at all.

I don't even like it for dioramas (prefer real lighting for that). Take a look at some of the work by Sheperd Paine for some insanely well done - lit dioramas.

About the closest I will get is dealing with specific light sources on the model itself. Glowing eyes might extend out a bit from the eyes for example.

Other than that - if I want lights, I will light it up. I've done flames, light sabers and Iron Man styles bits on stuff as small as 28mm humans. The fun part is figuring out how to power and control them.

Granted, I also feel the same about NMM and the like. We live in a time where if you want something to look chrome...you can actually get it to look like it had been dipped in chrome. Why not take advantage of those materials.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
Don't like it - not at all.

I don't even like it for dioramas (prefer real lighting for that). Take a look at some of the work by Sheperd Paine for some insanely well done - lit dioramas.

About the closest I will get is dealing with specific light sources on the model itself. Glowing eyes might extend out a bit from the eyes for example.

Other than that - if I want lights, I will light it up. I've done flames, light sabers and Iron Man styles bits on stuff as small as 28mm humans. The fun part is figuring out how to power and control them.

Granted, I also feel the same about NMM and the like. We live in a time where if you want something to look chrome...you can actually get it to look like it had been dipped in chrome. Why not take advantage of those materials.

I can appreciate wanting to use real lights in dioramas, but if you want the diorama to look like night time even though it's a well lit room, you can't really do it with real lights. Also if you want directional lighting, like headlights of a vehicle shining on something, trying to achieve that with real lighting is pretty hard, having to create lenses and focusing mirrors to do it.

.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
Don't like it - not at all.

I don't even like it for dioramas (prefer real lighting for that). Take a look at some of the work by Sheperd Paine for some insanely well done - lit dioramas.

About the closest I will get is dealing with specific light sources on the model itself. Glowing eyes might extend out a bit from the eyes for example.

Other than that - if I want lights, I will light it up. I've done flames, light sabers and Iron Man styles bits on stuff as small as 28mm humans. The fun part is figuring out how to power and control them.

Granted, I also feel the same about NMM and the like. We live in a time where if you want something to look chrome...you can actually get it to look like it had been dipped in chrome. Why not take advantage of those materials.

I can appreciate wanting to use real lights in dioramas, but if you want the diorama to look like night time even though it's a well lit room, you can't really do it with real lights. Also if you want directional lighting, like headlights of a vehicle shining on something, trying to achieve that with real lighting is pretty hard, having to create lenses and focusing mirrors to do it.

Like I said - figuring them out is a big part of the fun for me.

In terms of what can or can't be done - take a look at what has been done, before saying it can't be done:

http://sheperdpaine.com/gallery/boxes/index.htm

Night Watch is a good example of the depth of shadow that can be achieved. Remnants of an Army is another good night scene with real source lighting. Hamlet is a crazy cool one which actually uses a mirror in order to achieve the ghost in it (he used the ghost trick in other dioramas as well).

It does involve boxes to control light pollution of the scene - but you can build those as frames to hang on the wall like a picture.

Ah didn't realise about the previous thread, he had a poll and everything! Not like a noob like me....

And yes, it's Giger in the avatar, check his stuff it's awesome and yes very sexual a lot of the time

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
Don't like it - not at all.

I don't even like it for dioramas (prefer real lighting for that). Take a look at some of the work by Sheperd Paine for some insanely well done - lit dioramas.

About the closest I will get is dealing with specific light sources on the model itself. Glowing eyes might extend out a bit from the eyes for example.

Other than that - if I want lights, I will light it up. I've done flames, light sabers and Iron Man styles bits on stuff as small as 28mm humans. The fun part is figuring out how to power and control them.

Granted, I also feel the same about NMM and the like. We live in a time where if you want something to look chrome...you can actually get it to look like it had been dipped in chrome. Why not take advantage of those materials.

The work required to pull off metalisized (alclad etc) chrome is significant. It most certainly is not a case of just spray it on or apply the gilding. The surface has to be absolutely right. On most small miniatures correct senmm works better if you want to keep the exaggeration of shape.

The same is true for real lighting against OSL. It's situational. And correctly done it works well enough; wargames miniatures painting in particular is as much an artistic field as it is a technical one. Even so, there's a lot of cross-pollination with the scale modelling world.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
Like I said - figuring them out is a big part of the fun for me.

In terms of what can or can't be done - take a look at what has been done, before saying it can't be done:

http://sheperdpaine.com/gallery/boxes/index.htm

Night Watch is a good example of the depth of shadow that can be achieved. Remnants of an Army is another good night scene with real source lighting. Hamlet is a crazy cool one which actually uses a mirror in order to achieve the ghost in it (he used the ghost trick in other dioramas as well).

It does involve boxes to control light pollution of the scene - but you can build those as frames to hang on the wall like a picture.

Oh I never meant to say it can't be done, I've seen those dioramas you've linked before. You touched on one of the points I was trying to make with your last sentence... you need to control light pollution. If you don't want that, and just want an open diorama to put in a display shelf or in the window of a shop, OSL can be the better option as you can force the lighting you want even if there's light pollution.

The other problem is directional lighting, some types of directional lighting can be recreated easily or not like you see in those dioramas, other types of directional lighting (like vehicle headlights) are very very hard to recreate, as real headlights involve lenses and focusing mirrors that don't scale down all that well. Sticking LED's where the headlights should be doesn't create the correct effect. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's hard to do, you almost have to turn the entire interior of the vehicle in to a light box to recreate the headlights, which may or may not be practical (some vehicles it may be impossible).