3D Room

3D Room

Large Room Lighting in the 3D World
By Daniel Kreimer - Ezinearticles

Because you will usually want to illuminate a larger room using Inverse Squared Decay, you may need to illuminate the room with more light sources than usual. The technique mentioned previously in which you actually use less lights (in favor of more Omni lights) will usually not work unless the light is cast in some sort of pattern that can be easily duplicated in a 2D image. Large room lighting first requires that you set up the room as it would normally be lit. This is typically darker than is acceptable. You now have two options as this point:

1] Increase the normal lighting of the room via multipliers. Note, with your 3D application you can now globally increase the lighting through the Global Lighting setting located in the Environment dialog.

2] Add lights that emanate from around the camera and point towards the camera's POV. The lights themselves do not need to be full brightness, so just make them bright enough to properly illuminate your subject. Profile lighting is typically used for dramatic effects on profiles of characters. Profile lighting can either completely darken a subject against a very bright or white light or light a subject through unusual angles, as discussed earlier. The technique of illuminating a subject from behind and having the profile cast a shadow onto a surface introduces a whole new topic: translucency. Translucency is a function of the new raytrace material.

By applying a translucent material to a thin surface, say a box with 0 height, you can accurately reproduce the effect of a projected shadow profile. Simply aim a shadow casting light source at your surface and place the object which you want to profile somewhere in between the light and the surface you are projecting on. The raytrace material can simulate the effects of translucency, which is needed for realistic profile lighting. Translucency is the transmission of light through an object. A lit candle illuminates the wax near the flame, for example.

As the distance between the stem of the candle and the location of the flame increases, the amount of light transmitted through the wax is diminished. So, the correlation between the thickness of a surface and the amount of translucency plays a role in how much light actually passes through it. Light, because it is passing through a surface, will also become tinted from the color of a surface. With the new raytrace material, you can now simulate the effect of translucency through a color or a map.The color of the map controls the color that is tinted in a translucent surface.

3D Room