Final Sets and Backgrounds - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 234

Figure 13.18 Shadow Only spot settings

provided by a Sun Lamp, and direct shadows are provided by a shadow-only Spot Lamp. The deepest shad-
ows, then, will be found anywhere the spot-cast shadow and AAO shadowing coincide. A midtone area will
be created where the spot-cast shadow falls, but AAO provides full illumination. Finally, the brightest areas
will be places where AAO creates the most light, faces point toward the Sun Lamp, and no shadows from the
Spot Lamp fall. Adjusting the outdoor lighting, then, becomes a process of tweaking the AAO settings to the
range of light present in shadow areas, the Sun Lamp energy and color for the proper amount of direct illu-
mination, and the shadow only Spot Lamp's energy and shadowbuffer settings for the correct intensity and
sharpness of direct shadows.

Lighting Interior Shots

Interior shots are signifi cantly more diffi cult to light believably than exteriors. Many of us (especially com-
puter people) spend an inordinate amount of time indoors and have a well-developed sense of the subtle
shading and radiance effects of interior lighting. The best advice to give about working with interiors is to
approach it as though you are a retail store designer. Take a trip to your local mall or shopping center, walk
through some of the more upscale places (as long as security doesn't tail your silly artistic self), and observe
the way that the store is given a very natural look even though there is probably no natural light whatsoever.

If you've even been on stage in live theater,
or, less likely but even better, been on a sound
stage for fi lm or television production, you
will notice the gigantic array of lights that are
needed to produce a natural effect. You will
be doing the same thing in 3D.

Figure 13.19 shows the large array of spot
lamps that were used to create a decent base
for interior lighting in The Beast . Each of the
lamps in this confi guration is a Spot Lamp
with very low energy, a relatively small shad-
owbuffer, and high shadow blur. As you can
see from the render in Figure 13.20, it gives
an “okay” interior Ambient Occlusion effect.

Figure 13.19 The lamp arrays for set lighting on The Beast