Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
their areas of influence don't cross, it will work. For an additional
enhancement, you can add an upward-pointing, low-energy green
hemi lamp to suggest light reflected from a grassy field.
An Effective General Indoor Lighting Setup
Indoor lighting is much more difficult. In fact, the indoor lighting
problem falls into two distinct categories, due to their very different
natures. The first is lighting an indoor space that has no access to
outside (natural) light. This might be a room without windows, or
one with windows but at night. The other case is when there is
access to natural light, through a window, doorway, etc. Let's tackle
the completely artificially lit space first.
The BLEND file provided with the Web Bucket for this chapter
contains the default objects that were created in Chapter 4, plus three
different lighting schemes. The scheme on layer 2 (simply Shift-LMB
on layer 2 to enable it) is the outdoor setup from the previous
section. Layer 3 is my general solution for completely artificial
indoor lighting without using ray tracing. Once again, ray-traced
environment lighting can really add some punch to your indoor
scenes, and, if you're only creating still images, feel free to use it.
For animation, however, you still need to deal with alternatives.
Figure 5.26 shows the scene with a simple, windowless box around
the objects to stand in for an enclosed room. In order to provide a
reasonable source of illumination, the flower has been swapped out
for a lamp shade, a matter of adding a tube mesh and scaling the
upper ring of vertices toward the center.
The really hard thing about interior lighting is the way that light
bounces around in the confined spaces and manages to permeate
every nook, while giving soft reflected light to everything in the
room.
Before we turn on the table lamp, let's get the baseline illumination
for the room setup. A tiny bit of environment lighting is in order,
but for speed we use approximate instead of ray traced. If all of the
lights are off in the room, we don't want much in the way of
ambient light, so environmental energy should be very low: around
0.05. This will provide just enough to give a little bit of detail and
contact shadows in areas where no other light reaches. Make sure
to use the White Color setting, as we don't want the sky to influ-
ence anything here.
Figure 5.24   The  spot  lamp  settings.
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