Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Note
Because lighting is so extremely important to
how
every
form of visual art impacts its audi-
ence, it's a great idea to explore lighting in
as many fashions as you can. Go through
your art history topics and see how masters
like Rembrandt and Caravaggio handled
lighting. Take a class on black-and-white
photography (where the focus is
light
, not
color). Take a class on theatrical lighting, or
volunteer at your local community theater as
an assistant lighting technician.
The more angles you can approach your
work from, the better your work will look.
(Besides, learning new things is fun!)
Step 2: Global Intensity
Clicking on the Global Illumination button
in the Light Properties window (select the
light and press <
p
> to activate the Prop-
erties window) brings up the Global
Illumination window in which you can
specify a variety of settings.
Using Global Light Intensity, you can
scale
every light in your scene at once. You
can think of this as a way to adjust the con-
trast of your scene's lighting if you like. You
can do the same thing with lens flares (the
stars and sun dogs you see when you aim a
film or CCD camera at a light) with the
Global Lens Flare Intensity setting. (Used
with
subtlety
, lens flares can be great tools;
used garishly, they can make an image look
cheap.) You can also disable and enable all
flares, shadow maps, and volumetric lights
(lights where you can see the beam of light,
like sun filtering through a window).
Step 1: Load the Base
Scene
Load
Scenes\Chapter_04\ StillLife_
01_Lighting_Raw.lws
from where you
have stored the companion files, and press
<
F9
> to give it a render.
Figure 4-11: The still life from the last chapter. Just
as rendering it in pencil would help us to under-
stand lighting in drawing, working with it here will
do the same thing for 3D.
Figure 4-12: The Global Illumination window.
