You will encounter many types of lighting situations when creating your animation masterpiece. This next section steps you through a common lighting situation that you can use for character animation tests, product shots, or logo scenes.
Simulating Studio Lighting
One of the cool things about LightWave is that you don’t have to be a numbers person to make things happen. You can see what’s happening throughout the creation process from object construction to surfacing to lighting. Exercise 4.2 introduces you to basic three-point lighting often used in everyday video production. You can apply this lighting style to LightWave and create a photographer’s backdrop (or cyc, short for cyclorama) to act as a set for your objects. Creating a set in LightWave is a good idea so that even simple render tests are not over a black background. By rendering objects on a set, you add more depth to your animation.
Exercise 4.2 Simulating Studio Lighting
1. In Layout, load the Teacup_NotLit.lws scene from this topic’s folder on the accompanying DVD (in the "Projects\Scenes\Ch4\" directory).
This loads the multilayered object, which includes four layers—the floor, the teacup, the saucer, and a light box. The light box is a flat polygon that will be used to help light the subject. Figure 4.9 shows the loaded scene.
Figure 4.9 A preexisting scene with one multilayered object, perfect for testing some lighting configurations.
2. Click the Lights button at the bottom of the Layout interface (or press Shift+l) to select the only light currently in the scene, which is generically named Light. (If the scene contained more than one light, you’d also need to select the one you want to work with from the Item drop-down.) This is a distant light and is not the most effective lighting. To see how it lights the scene, press F9 to render the current frame (Figure 4.10).
Figure 4.10 Pressing F9 lets you preview a render of the current frame render. By default, the render isn’t any different from what you see in Layout.
To see the render when you press F9, be sure that you have Image Viewer selected for Render Display selected with a chosen resolution (such as 320×240), or choose Render Frame from the Render dropdown. Go to the Render tab at the top of Layout. On the left, under the Options category choose Render Globals, and then apply the various options as shown in Figure 4.11. If your panels start to get in the way, feel free to move them aside as needed to free up screen real estate. It makes you want to go out and get that 30-inch display now, doesn’t it?
Figure 4.11 To see your render in progress, set Render Display to Image Viewer in the Render Globals panel.
3. With the default light still selected, press p to open the Light Properties panel. If the Render Globals properties panel is still open, press p twice; the first time closes the panel and the second opens Light Properties.
4. In the panel, change the Light Type setting to Spotlight.
This spotlight will be the key light, or the main light, in the scene setup. You’ll be creating a three-point lighting situation in this scene.
5. Change the Light Intensity to 90%. You can do this by either clicking or dragging the value slider in the Light Properties panel, or simply entering the value. Figure 4.12 shows the panel with changes.
Figure 4.12 Change the default light to a spotlight for more accurate lighting, and set the Light Intensity to 90%.
Note
Three-point lighting is a common lighting setup used in most studios. It consists of a key light, which is the primary source of brightness; a fill light, which is less bright than the key and used opposite the key; and a backlight, sometimes referred to as a hair light.
6. Set the Light Color to off-white (R: 245, G: 245, B: 220). You can do this by clicking and dragging directly on the RGB values or by clicking the color swatch and using your computer’s color picker to set the value.
You’ve set the Light Color to off-white because light is never purely white. In a studio setting, the key light burns with a slight off-white tint. At the bottom of the lights panel, set the Spotlight Cone Angle to 40 degrees and the Spotlight Soft Edge Angle to 40 degrees. This creates a nice edge falloff for the key light (Figure 4.13). The cone angle determines how large the spread of the light will be, while the soft edge angle determines how soft the edge of the light cone will be.
7. Click the Shadows tab and set the Shadow Type option to Shadow Map, which creates softer shadows than ray-traced shadows. These are created from system memory, rather than processing power. The result is a soft, fast rendering shadow. Nice!
Note
You can use shadow maps only with spotlights.
Figure 4.13 In the Light Properties panel, you can change the light color and the cone angle.
8. Change the Shadow Map Size to 3000. This setting is the size of the pixels of the shadow map. Leave Shadow Fuzziness set to 1.0.
The larger the Shadow Map Size setting, the more memory LightWave uses to calculate the shadow. Larger shadow map sizes produce cleaner shadows but increase render times. Choosing a value between 1000 and 2000 gives you a good size to work with, and you generally only need to boost Shadow Map Size to 3000 or more if you increase Shadow Fuzziness to 8 or so. Our Shadow Map Size setting of 3000 is a bit extravagant in terms of memory usage, but the result will be very clean shadows. That’s not to say this is an unreasonable setting—just be prepared to have a lot of RAM if you have multiple spotlights with shadow map sizes this large. One or two lights are not a big deal.
Note
If you want to convert the Shadow Map Size to actual megabytes, square the size value, multiply by 4, and divide by 1,000. So, (2000 x 2000 x4) + 1000= l6MB.That means a Shadow Map Size of 2000 will take an extra 16MB of memory for calculation.
9. Be sure the Fit Spotlight Cone box is checked. This tells LightWave to make the shadow map match the light’s cone angle, which is what you’ll most often do. Uncheck it to activate the Shadow Map Angle option, which lets you set a custom shadow map angle so that, for example, your light might shine over a large area of the scene but only casts shadows within a smaller region.
10. Press 5 on your numeric keypad to switch to Light view. Looking through the light to set it in position is the quickest and most accurate way to set up lights.
11. Press t to select Move from the Modify tab, and then right-click the light in the Layout viewport and drag the light about 2.025 m up the (vertical) Y-axis. The right mouse button will only affect the Y-axis. Pressing the left mouse button will move on the X- and Z-axis. Keep an eye on the information area at the bottom left of the Layout to see your movement increments. You may also choose to enter the value numerically. To do so, press n to enter the numeric value controls. Mac users with single-button mice, don’t forget to Cmd-click to access right mouse button functions. Feel free to position the light while in Light view to focus it on your objects.
12. On the numeric keypad, press 1 for Back view or 3 for a Right (side) view to see the light’s new position. You might need to use the various view tools in the upper-right corner to adjust the Front or Side view so you can see everything. Figure 4.14 shows the Back view of the scene.
Note
When using a Back, Right, or Top view of your scene, you can press a to fit all elements to view.
Figure 4.14 The Front view of the teacup scene with the spotlight moved up.
13. Switch back to Light view (press 5). To make sure your light is pointed toward the teacup, with the left mouse button move the light back away from the object so that it has a larger coverage area, as shown in Figure 4.15. Also, be sure to create a keyframe at frame 0 to lock the light into its new position.
Setting the position of the spotlight from the Light view is quick and easy. Because of the way the object is shaded, you can see that the light is in front and to the upper left of the set. Often, a main key light like the one shown here works well from an upper side view, but you can place this light anywhere you like. But feel free to adjust as you like.
Figure 4.15 By adjusting a light from the Light view, you can easily and quickly place it into position.
14. Save your scene as MyTeacup_Lit or something similar.
Before you add the other lights, you need to rename this light to keep your scene organized.
15. From the Light Properties panel, select the default light name (which is just Light) and rename it to Key_Light, as in Figure 4.16. When naming lights and objects in LightWave, you can use spaces. However, it’s good practice to avoid them to make searches easier, for organization purposes, and to prevent any confusion. Try using underscores instead of spaces.
You now need to add another light to create the fill light.
16. On the Items tab, click the Lights drop-down and choose Spotlight. After you add the light, LightWave asks you to name it. Name this light Fill Light (or Phil Light if your name is Phil).
17. In the Light Properties panel (select the light and press p), change the Light Intensity setting to 75%. Change the light color to a soft blue (R: 135, G: 170, B: 230).
Figure 4.16 Rename a light from directly within the Light Properties panel.
Adding a blue light as a fill light is often a nice touch when setting up lights, either in a studio or in outside situations. It helps create the feeling of distance while illuminating unobtrusively. It’s also great for illumination at night.
18. Change Shadow Type to Shadow Map for this spotlight, as you did with Key Light; change Spotlight Cone Angle to 40; and change Spotlight Soft Edge Angle to 40. Do this from the Basic tab of the Lights Properties panel.
19. Move the fill light to the right of the teacup, which is towards the +X-axis. It might help to switch to a Perspective view to see more of your scene and the light position. You don’t need to move this light too far from the teacup, but consider it in a position opposite of the key light. Press y for rotate and remember to rotate the light to encompass the entire teacup. Set the light lower to the floor in the scene. Create a keyframe at 0 to lock the light in place. Figure 4.17 shows a view of the set from the fill light, and Figure 4.18 shows a Perspective view of the entire scene so far.
Figure 4.17 Rename a light from directly within the Light Properties panel.
Figure 4.18 In this overview of the scene,you can see the key light to the left and the fill light to the right.
You need to add one more light to the scene to set up the backlight. This could also be a spotlight, but instead, let’s use that big white polygon that’s been hanging around behind the teacup. Now, a little clarification here before we continue. A typical three-point lighting setup means that you are using three lights. Duh! However, LightWave’s Global Illumination features allow you to incorporate indirect lighting from the rest of the scene. With that, you can create a large, luminous polygon and use it as a light source. Cool, huh? But why would you do this, you ask? Good question! A large flat polygon that is bright white not only produces a soft subtle studio lighting effect in your scene but also creates a very nice reflection in your object. Dual purpose! Read on to set it up.
20. Based on the settings for Key Light and Fill Light, you could add another spotlight and set the values similar to the key light simply by cloning one of them. Instead, the white polygon is set above and to the rear of the teacup, out of camera range. When you position and size the large polygon, consider the size of the objects in your scene. If you’re using this object as a reflection element (which you are), you should place the object in such a way that it reflects well in the teacup. To see how it looks, press F9 to render the current frame to see how your scene is looking.
Note
You can quickly choose different lights in the Light Properties panel by clicking the small drop-down arrow to the right of the Current Light drop-down list.
21. After the render appears, you’ll see a better lit scene than when you started
Figure 4.19 A quick frame render shows how the lighting setup works.
