Realistic Lighting Rig

A great idea to make everything a bit more user-friendly is to set up a bank of sliders to control the main parameters of ControlSkyLight.

To do this, use the Generic plug-in "Add Slider Bank", and select the appropriate channels of ControlSkyLight to use as sliders. By clicking on the Sliders tool underneath Move, Rotate, Size, etc., you can move, resize, and adjust the sliders on the panel you just created.

The final lighting rig with sliders

Here's an example of the Mitsubishi model (156,072 triangles) lit by this rig

(15 sec to render)

These are four examples of using 40 lights created by luxigons from a tesselated sphere

30 degree cone angle (28 sec)	60 degree cone angle (26 sec)
60 degree cone angle, raytraced instead of shadow mapped (129 sec)	30 degree cone angle, raytraced with spinning light motion blur trick to soften shadows (435 sec)

For comparison, I rendered a version with full radiosity, and it took two seconds longer (see below) than the raytraced motion blur rig. So by using the rig, you get near radiosity quality with the added bonus of motion blur! Admittedly the shadow of the car is somewhat lacking, but for my Mitsubishi composite I did a seperate shadow pass, so this wasn't a problem.

Full radiosity (437 sec)

A great way to use this lighting rig, is to use it as a realistic alternative to setting an Ambient value. By using a fewer number of lights and combining them with one strong key light, the lighting rig acts like a fill-in light, and it can give that required extra dose of realism. It also hides many of the problems with shadows that are visible in the above images.

This was the final method of lighting for the Mitsubishi composite animation. While not a perfect lighting model, it gets the job well, and done fast - ideal for those tight deadlines.

Final lighting

You can download both lighting rigs and the luxigon models below:

Download: Tutorial01.zip (8.74 Kb)