Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Lighting Objects
Figure 6-13: An example of a well-lit sphere
Don't just throw a single light on your object, render, and call
it done! Spend some time on lighting your objects to show all
the detail you've slaved over! For this example, let's use
Mental Ray as we did in the last chapter.
After you've selected Mental Ray as your renderer, we
need to turn on Final Gather, which is a very handy tool in
Mental Ray. Open up the Render Scene dialog box as if you
were going to change your renderer, only this time select the
Indirect Illumination tab. If the tab isn't visible, you don't have
Mental Ray selected as your renderer. Go back and set Mental
Ray as your renderer as we did in Chapter 5.
Now that you have Mental Ray selected, let's turn on
Final Gather. To put it simply, Final Gather does light bounce
calculations based on all of your lights and surfaces, which
makes the scene look very believable. Click on the Indirect
Illumination tab and check the Enable Final Gather box.
