Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Now that we have a camera set up, we can focus on lighting.
Since this topic is printed in black and white, I'm not going to
focus on color but brightness. To see my final color images or
the actual scene, you can download them from
http://www.wordware.com/files/3dsmax2008/.
For quick light setups, most of the time I use omni lights.
My logic is that all lights in real life are omni lights. The fila-
ment inside the bulb burns and gives off light in all directions.
A spotlight, on the other hand, casts light on a specific spot, as
it is constrained by the cylinder around it. Also, with omni
lights, you can set attenuation. This gives the effect that the
light is “falling off,” or getting dimmer as the light travels.
For this example, we'll use Mental Ray area omni lights.
This is because they have a great way to set the amount of
energy emitting from them so we can control how much light
bounces off of surfaces they are hitting. Go to Create > Lights
> mr Area Omni, and in your Top viewport place an mr area
omni light somewhere to the left of your camera.
Raise it up around eye height like a tall lamp. Because this
light is an indoor light and I wanted to create a contrast with
the outdoor lighting, I set it to a
very light blue, almost com-
pletely desaturated. I also
enabled shadows and used
shadow mapping because this
light would cast a shadow around
the corner to the right as seen
from the camera. Set its Multi-
plier to 1.3 because we want a
nice-looking key light. Scroll
down until you see Far Attenua-
tion and check the Use box.
Scrub up and down on the Start
and End boxes until you get a
similar falloff as in Figure 8-26.
Figure 8-26: One of the major
lights
 
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