A arcing stream of more than one hundred traditional Chinese paper floating lanterns for your night skies.
The lanterns are paper, using thirteen different paper patterns (textures). Each lantern has a candle placed in it, that is mounted on X-crossed bamboo twigs. Each candle has a flame object, and a point light is pre-positioned within each flame.
The lanterns are grouped into three groups, with the group at the point of origin (closest to the ground) being high-resolution. The lanterns in the two other groups have slightly less resolution to help reduce the polygon count of the entire mass of lanterns.
The purpose of breaking the mass of lanterns into three groups has to do with rendering speed. Because the lanterns have several hundred point light sources, renders of the entire group will require some time to complete. If you are making a close-up, you should consider deleting the lanterns that will not appear in your scene, in order to speed up the render. One group of lanterns consists of those at the point of origin - these have a steep arc up into the sky. The second group of lanterns are those at the apex of the stream, which is relatively flat. You may want to include just one of these two groups in your scene. The third group consists of all the remaining lanterns.
The pre-positioned point lights have been put into groups of their own, within these three groups of lanterns. This allows you to quickly select all the lights in a group, and adjust their power and/or color.
Each lantern, of course, is an individual object that you can move, re-scale, rotate or save out for another scene as its own object and light.
Software: Vue 9
