Final Sets and Backgrounds - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 241

The Peach Perspective
On set lighting: How crucial was the implementation of Approximate Ambient Occlusion to the
lighting schemes of your sets? Please take a crazy, wild guess at how much time it saved the set
and lighting designs.
Andy: I would go to the extent of saying that, without AAO the movie would not have been
possible. It really helped us a lot and saved us approximately 75% overall. All of our scenes
either were in bright daylight or in deep forest. The main problem with these settings is that
it's always hard to fi ll them up with a general environmental (bounce or fi ll lights in that mat-
ter) light scheme. Sure, you can use Sun or even Hemi lights in Blender, but that way you also
lose a lot of depth and detail. The crucial feature for AAO was that it produced very subtle con-
tact shadows. These are absolutely vital (for example) to connect a character to an environment
or vice versa. So in many cases we ended up using Spot lights for the main and bounce light
sources, and AAO for the fi ll. In nearly all the cases, the AAO was rendered out as a separate
Render Layer to get more control over the depth and color of the contact shadows.
When using localized light sources such as spots on animated characters the problem is to
deal with the terminator lines (the area where shadow meets light). If there are too many lights
(too many terminators), things tend to look very busy, especially in the face area where your
main focus is. As a lighting artist, it's your goal to support the animation! So in reducing the
Spots on characters and replacing them with AAO, the characters were a lot more expressive
and had more appeal.