Talking about lighting with the wide range of modeling/rendering programs is a lot like talking about color, without some sort of context. Because PIXAR and Caligari accept the same conventions for light types, so will I here.
There's three general lights the user has control over:
•Directional lighting-This lighting type is good for covering a lot of area in a scene without resorting to a "sun" type lighting. It is very useful as the starting point for illuminating a scene, and you might drop it, and let it have served as a work light before you're done. Directional lights are primary lights (as opposed to key lights) and usually they have the capability to cast shadows.
•Point light-This type of light is good for "painting with light". If you have a corner of a scene that is poorly illuminated, you pop one of these suckers in there, and you've solved a lighting problem without messing with your other lights. Point lights do not usually have the capability to cast shadows. Imagine a perfectly spherical light bulb---that's a point light.
•Spotlight--This is my favorite type of lighting because it doesn't *have* to cast a spotlight effect. You can arrange a spotlight so that it covers a wide area with diffuse falloff at the edges of the spot. Spotlights usually can cast shadows. Work with this light type, and see if you can't get a very wide range of effects with it at different aperatures, falloffs, and strengths.
•Ambient light-Usually, you have no controls to noodle with, with ambient light. Ambient light is indirect light--it appears to come from all over--it is the result of reflection from, say, white walls in a room from the sun. This is a good option to turn on when your lighting setup is of a very key lit nature, and you want just a squeak of overall illumination to hint at the modeling work you did in the background.
As for the best lighting setup, for beginners I'd use the two light setup--one primary light to illuminate the scene, and a kick light (cache light) pointed in the opposite direction as the primary light and a fraction of the primary light's intensity. Doing this helps make round shapes look round instead of letting a round surface fall off into the shadows.
Hey, not lighting isn't everything that contributes to our 3D paintings here. a lot of times, if I change the surface property of an object, I do not have to chane the lighting.
Finally, for now, a very simple trick for making a scene look 3D, is be gradually throwing the scene out of focus. In Photoshop, you drag a gradient Quick Mask across the picture from top to bottom, go back to Standard Editing Mode, and then use Gaussian Blur to heighten reality.
The biggest trick is removing the atmosphere between the eye and the monitor!
I've got such an example of the blurring posted here. The jello mold was a mother to create, and Ron Pfister showed me how to do a spoon. All software is legacy stuff--E3D, trueSpace 3, and Photoshop 3. And XARA 2.
Regards,
Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks