Final Sets and Backgrounds - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 236

molding, producing bad results even at very low and
slow levels of error tolerance. It is worth a try in your
own production to test AAO for the interior shots.
It may be that there are no ugly artifacts present, but
remember that it will be an all or nothing proposi-
tion. Using AAO on only some of your shots, but not
on others, will produce an uneven fi nished product.
An examination of the set fi le for The Beast will
show the fi nal part of this interior lighting tech-
nique. While the walls, ceiling, and fl oor are capable
of receiving shadows, they cannot cast them. This is set by turning off the Shadbuf button in the Links and
Pipeline panel of the Material buttons , as shown in Figure 13.23. This allows the light from the surround-
ing lamps to pass through the walls on its way into the set, as though the light were refl ecting from the wall
itself. Notice how the size of the selected lamps in Figures 13.21 and 13.22 roughly matches the dimensions
of the outside edges of the wall and ceiling so that a good simulation of refl ected interior light occurs.
Another way to accomplish this effect is to allow the normal shadow casting properties of the walls, etc., but to
carefully set the Clipping distance of the shadowbuffer calculation so that it begins only inside the walls. Because
I wanted to make all the lamps instances of the same base lamp object for ease of overall energy adjustment, and
the clipping method requires fi ne tuning of each lamp individually, I decided not to use this technique.

Figure 13.23 Turning off cast shadows for the walls, ceiling,
and fl oor

Layering

As you construct your fi nal sets, you should keep in mind that often the camera will not see the whole thing
at once. Work through your storyboards and story reel with an eye toward which portions of the set will
be seen in which shots. Because one of the goals of set design is to minimize render times, it is a good idea
to break your set up into layers. Figure 13.24 shows three different layers of the set from The Beast . While

Figure 13.24 The different layer breaks of The Beast's set (walls, ceiling, and lamps have been removed for clarity)