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Luckily, the techiques involved in lighting
curvy, organic ships are very similar
to those used in lighting tech-based ships
For this lesson, I will be using my Whitestar
v4.0 as the ship that we will be lighting.
If you don't have a copy of this ship,
you can download it from here.
This object is in Lightwave format, but
several versions for other 3D animation
packages are also available, including
two versions for 3D Studio Max by Gerardo
Ramirez and William Johansson. A quick
search of the web will locate these. {I
will update this page when a permanent
link is available.}
Open Lightwave Layout with a fresh scene,
and use the Load from Scene function
to load in the Whitestar template scene,
which will also load up the lights attached
to the ship. The instructions for using
this object are included with the zip
archive,
When lighting organic ships, it is always
important to make sure that your object
does not appear too flat. When you are
lighting tech-based ships, the very nature
of the shapes you are lighting ensures
that the 3D form of the objects is apparent
(so long as you do not use ambient light,
that is).
Once again, however, it is the highlights
and shadows that will bring out the best
when you are lighting this type of ship.
With organic ships, however, there are
rarely any large, flat panels that will
act as huge reflectors for light, so we
can be a little more free with our light
positioning, without destroying the look
of the ship.
The key light is always the most important
light when illuminating organic ships.
The curved nature of the surfaces on organic
ships means that highlights will tend
to accumulate on areas of the ship where
there are 'corners' or 'edges' in the
hull. This works to our advantage, as
it can often give a good visual cue as
to the true shape of the surfaces. The
fact that sharp highlights form easily
also means that we often do not need to
use such high intensities for our key
lights.
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Compare these two images:
Both images use a single white
spotlight at 100% intensity
with a shadow-mapped shadow
at 1024 size. Naturally, ambient
light intensity is set to
0%.
However, image #01 does
not offer any visual cues
as to the shape of the main
upper hull, which looks fairly
flat under the protruding
bridge section.
In image #02, this light
has been placed to the rear
of the ship, at a more oblique
angle to the surfaces. This
results in a sharp highlight
travelling down the length
of the upper hull, which clearly
shows the change in angle
between the sides of the hull
and the top.
It also instantly adds more
atmosphere and mood to the
image, creating more contrast
between the dark and light
areas.
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Spend some time getting your key light
positioned just right. Don't worry if
the majority of your ship is in darkness,
so long as you have at least one really
nice highlight that shows off the shape
of your ship. We can always combat the
darkness later on with fill lights.
I plan to add a red nebula to this scene,
so I am going to now lighten-up the lower
portions of the ship with a very red fill
light.
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Organic ships often respond
well to deeply coloured lighting,
so I am going to colour my
fill light pure red (R.255,
G.000, B.000). The dark colour
of this mans that we can give
it a fairly bright intensity
without it looking too out-of-place,
so I will set it to 35% intensity.
To compliment this fill light,
I will be altering the white
colour of my key light to
R.254, G.244, B.211 (a pinky-orange
colour). I will also raise
its intensity to 125% to compensate
for the slightly dimmer colour.
I will place the fill light
below the ship pointing almost
straight upwards in order
to spill some light onto the
lower-nose section of the
ship (image #03), and
to generally light up the
rest of the underside (image
#04).
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So that sorts out one side
of the ship... however, this
light is heavily biased towards
illuminating this side, and
the opposite side is very
dark (image #05).
As there is (or will be) a
nebula on the opposite side
of the ship, we can use this
fact to add a fairly bright
kick light, which will pick
out some nice edges on the
ship when we view it from
this side, or will act as
general illumination when
we view from the other side.
The kick light was positioned
on the opposite side of the
ship, pointing almost straight
down the X-axis (towards the
camera), and I gave it a bright
orange colour of R.255, G.155,
B.081, with an intensity of
70%.
As you can see from the rendered
images, the position and orientation
of this light hardly affects
the side of the ship at which
we have so far been looking,
except for adding some nice
orange highlights to the extreme
edges of the ship facing where
the nebula will be. (image
#06)
Looking at the opposite side
of the ship, however, we see
that the the orange kick light
has bathed the ship in a pleasant
light that removes the oppressive
darkness we had before. However,
the highlights from the key
light are still quite apparent,
without being drowned-out
by the orange light.
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Finally, the addition of the
nebula and starfields (from
our space scenery scene) in
the background helps to tie
the image together, and the
reason for the orange and
red lights becomes apparent.
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For your information, these are the light
settings used in the scene I have been
demonstrating:
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Key
Light |
Fill
Light #1 |
Fill
Light |
| Type |
Spotlight |
Spotlight |
Spotlight |
| Colour-R |
254 |
255 |
255 |
| Colour-G |
244 |
000 |
155 |
| Colour-B |
211 |
000 |
081 |
| Intensity |
125% |
35% |
70% |
| Cone
Angle |
30.0° |
30.0° |
30.0° |
| Soft
Edge Angle |
5.0° |
5.0° |
5.0° |
| Shadow
type |
Shadow
Map |
Shadow
Map |
Shadow
Map |
| Shadow
Map Size |
1024 |
1024 |
1024 |
| Shadow
Fuzziness |
10.0 |
10.0 |
10.0 |
| Heading |
21.8° |
135.3° |
253.0° |
| Pitch |
34.9° |
-18.3° |
12.0° |
| Bank |
0.0° |
0.0° |
0.0° |
| Position-X |
-45m |
-67m |
118m |
| Position-Y |
82m |
-40m |
27m |
| Position-Z |
-150m |
63m |
21m |
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That concludes our look at scene lighting.
Obviously, lighting a scene is one of
the most subjective parts of any CG scene
setup, but I hope that these lessons will
give you some good ideas for setting up
your own lighting rigs, and help you to
avoid that nasty, flat lighting that is
all too commonly seen.
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