The fastest way to get good atmospheric haze is to use simple camera fog, and squash your sky dome on the Y-axis so that the fog appears to diminish with altitude.

- Brian "balistic" Prince

The Fog Distance in 6.1 is changing to Fog Start and Fog End. The fog start is a distance from the camera where the effect of the fog starts, it used to start from the camera. Fog end is what Fog Distance was, the point where objects in the scene are obscured by the fog. The camera properties panel does not yet reflect these changes, but you can change them in the camera channels. Make sure you turn on Fog Start/Fog End in the camera channel properties. The other new feature is that the fog start and fog end will show up as lines in the camera cone in the Chor. The use the color of the background, which defaults to black. If you change the channel values over time, you will see that affect the fog lines in the chor. It's a pretty cool feature.

 \_       -Ken Baer.  Director Mac Product Development, Hash Inc.
<[_] Usenet: baer@hash.com="#" \, Office: (360)750-0042 Animation Master: Finally, 3D animation software an artist can afford! 

I use a material with glowing edges, then add a lens flare, it takes some time to get right. Also, add a lot of glow on the spheres with the material. This should do the trick, just practice it, and you will become a master. Thanks, back to work for me, yipee!

-Christian Cox

Well you just model the two objects and line them up, make the ball a named group called glowball or something, and the glass a named group named glass. Then you apply a glass material to the glass group and a glowing material to glowball, ambience is the property which controls how much glow.

Matt Andersen

Make a material that animates the ambiance value.

Jeff Paries.

For those of you who are having trouble getting the Glow feature to work, make sure you crank up the ambiance setting for the object.

Try increasing the specularity.

Also, are you using a material with a glow or using color on your object? I have found that using glow on a group or object level works better than using a material.

-Dale A. Carman

You may also want to consider using several hierarchical volumetric bulb type lights for the glow....

If nothing else, it'll give you more control over the effect....

-Jeff P., Hash Inc.

A very good idea. Plus, it gives me the ability to move them along the lightning, like energy bubbles inside...

-mike

I haven't worked with it that much yet but I understand if you use a dust material with no turbulence and glow settings (high ambience and low specularity) you can get a much bigger glow effect on an object. Glow doesn't expand outward from the object that much.

-Tim Elston

For those of you playing with the Lens Flares in the 6.10 beta version, double clicking a Light Object will open a light preview window that shows changes to the flare in real time.

Jeff Paries

Are you rendering the "lens flare" from the camera view? 1 on the numeric keypad, ya gotta have a camera to have a lens flare....

Also remember you can double click on the light object on the PWS to see the flare in realtime, that way you can see how the different tab settings are effecting the flare as you change them.

Jeff C.

Just set the diffuse falloff value of your background elemts to zero. You may need to expand the reach of your lights to make sure they hit all of your white bits. You will get nice dark shadows, and a bright white backdrop.

Once you did what you did, it's already in there... switch to the bones mode to adjust the light's position, you'll find it at 0,0,0.

--Jeff Cantin

Save as the old choreography with your light rig into a seperate external file (I would give my lights unique names before I do this for thoroughness), open the new project, scroll down to the choreography, right-click the choreography's name and select import choreography and point to the freshly saved external choreography file. Easy as makin' toast.

Matt Andersen

This option appears to export a version of the objects in your scene with the lighting baked into them as image maps. This wouldn't work for moving characters, of course, but it would be perfect for rendering backgrounds. Imagine a set with 60 lights taking the same time to render as a set with no lights.

--Raf Anzovin

Another use could be for texturing game textures. you could bake the lighting into the hires model and then unrap and render it to get the textures off of it.

Chris Luckenbach

Most great CGI lighting artists I've seen and worked with tend to have their own approach and style and technique. It's universal to all of them that their images look flat out gorgeous, but not every lighting sepcialist gets to Dodge on the same stage coach. Personally, I light like Cajuns cook- all by taste with no real 'recipes'. :o) When it comes time for me to light my scenes I'm cranking dozens, sometimes over a hundred test renders. So keep in mind that you'll need to spend some good quality time waiting for quicky renders to work out a good lighting set-up.

I try to use spots (kleigs in Hash-speak) as often as possible. I like the directional & illumination cone control they offer. The reason why I like that control is that I'll often use a light to rake across a specific object in a certain way. That's because a CGI scene often needs alot of little helper lights to achieve the desired goal. The whole goal of creating an image is to guide the viewers eye to the place that you want them to look (with the hope that you have something interesting to see there :o). The primary visual clue that people respond to is contrast- areas of light against dark. So shadow/light management is of primary importance to directing the viewers eyes where you want it to go. Thus you can use dark objects to frame a light subject, or take a dark subject and frame it in light. Close off certain areas of the image by placing darker/bland objects there to direct the viewers eye towards lighter spots or an area with more contrast, etc.

This is where thumbnailing the layout of an image goes a long long way. It's easier to just diddle up a quickie sketch on paper and play with it. I try to explore different uses of contrast to be a rough roadmap to my lighting set ups. And when I say sketch, I really mean sketch. It can be as simple as gestural scribbles of dark areas and light areas. It isn't finished art by any means, but it will help you wrap your mind around the task at hand (lighting wise- as well as in other areas). All of this is done to prevent the endless hours of adjusting lights to little or no effect (and I've spent too many years doing it that hard way). This may be all basic to you, but there are others to whom this is fresh news, so forgive me as I err on the side of need. All of this is the kind of stuff they teach you in art school (if you are inclined to attend one- I didn't, but I'm a different kind of bird that way. ;o) or you can glean it from countless books on painting, photography and cinematography. I learned the most about my lighting from experience and recently more from focused study of impressionist painters. Translated- I've made alot of bad lighting set-ups in my day. The legendary CALArts drawing instructor Mr. Graham often told his students "You all have a 100,000 bad drawings in you. The sooner you get them out of your system the better it'll be for all of us." I believe the same holds true for lighting. :o)

A few more general rules and tips I have for myself when lighting-

• Use color as much as you can. Cool/warm contrasts. A study of Impressionist painters goes a long way to understanding how to use color in light and shade to imbue mood and space.
• Don't be slavishly dedicated to "practical" light sources. (ie: don't try to light a room with a single bulb light inside the lamp shade. In CGI that just doesn't work unless you have a real radiosity/global illumination system. And even then you have to cheat)
• Rake light the background objects (ie: project a light along the face of the objects at a low angle of incidence to the object face) to give your subject a pallette to play against. (not always called for, but generally a good technique for interior enviro shots. Use contrasting color values to the main subject for more impact).
• Create pools of light and dark to guide the eye to points of interest.
• Don't be afraid to light objects individually to get what you want.
• Use an array of 4-8 colored specular only lights (lights which have their illumination turned off but still show up in specular reflections on materials) around shiny metal objects to give the metal more light reflectivity & life.
• Use volumetrics. flares and other light effects sparingly. If you do use them, make sure you have a very good reason to. Otherwise the effect comes off as forced, amateurish and cheesy.
• Have kleig/spot lights with an inner cone falloff to soften the light distribution across objects.
• 99.9% of lights in my scenes have falloff enabled.
• For photo compositing work, try to match light direction, hue, intensity and value (softness/hardness) as closely as possible. Then cheat the rest. ;o)
• Lastly- the final render lasts forever and is the final, permanent record of your efforts. So invest in it as much as you can. Don't be overconcerned with render times. Keep an eye on them, but don't let them brow beat you into making a bad image.

There you have it. Some rambling ideas collected from the cobwebbed corners of my brain, distilled in less than orderly fashion for others to sift through. Some folks may disagree with how I approach things. But that's OK. Like I said earlier, not everybody rides the same train to the station on this one. Use what you want of this info, discard the rest. Variety is the spice of life. And keep in mind, I am by no means the end-all be-all guru of lighting, nor do I think I am. :o) I'm better than I used to be, but I still have more to learn. ALOT more. Still I hope I've been of some use in this, cus this is one loooong post. :o) I look forward to seeing your efforts in imagery soon.

-Keith Lango

OK, a somewhat simplistic roundup:

In general, all the aspects of the CG world that mimic real-world cinematography, eg camera and actor blocking/positioning, lighting , lens choice, composition within the frame, repay study of the real world equivalents (and of books written about them!) Lighting in cinematography and CG is a huge subject!

The "three light setup" is a basic of portrait photography - the idea is to try to accentuate the 3D structure of the subject, by avoiding them looking flat (which is why those photo-booth pics always look so terrible) - essentially you have:

one bright light (Key-light), a bit above, in front and to one side - this provides the main lighting on the character, but tends to leave large very dark shadows across one side of the face, so you use....

a dimmer light (Fill-light) a bit above, in front and to the opposite side - this avoids having pitch black shadows from the key-light

a third light (Back-light) usually positioned below and behind the subject, pointing up and forward - the purpose of this is to produce a lit edge to the subject, separating them from the background

number - more lights = longer renders, but more control over the appearance of the scene - depends what you are trying to do - most movies use complicated lighting setups to draw attention to exactly the required elements within the scene - individual subjects/objects in the scene may even have their own 3-light setups

types - most of the indoor setups mimicking studio scenes would be using Kliegs (= spotlights). Outdoor scenes may use a Sun - which produces parallel light rays. The Bulb is like a naked lightbulb, producing light in all directions equally

colours - outdoor daytime is bluish light ( and by cinematic convention outdoor night-time lighting tends to be bluish too!) Indoor artificial light tends to be more yellow. Fluorescent can have a slightly greenish tinge. Traditional cinematic and theatrical lighting will often use different colours for the components of a three light setup, such as a bluish Key, and more yellow fill and backlights.

positioning - classic 3-light already discussed - some lights may be in-shot, most will not. (Think of the way in which in old movies, a spotlight was used to fake the illumination provided by a candle carried by a character) Gothic - key below, in front, pointed up. Comedy - bright even lighting. Drama - more emphasised keylight. Filmnoir - just Keylight.

Spotlights were often used to pick out a characters eyes in classic movies, but now less often ( for a recent example, see Anjelica Huston as Morticia in either of the "Addams Family" movies)

Ambience and Radiosity - in the real world, light bounces around from object to object, and may pick up some colouration from objects as it does so. In the computer, we can mimic this to some extent, in several ways. We can use a non-zero ambience (default is 20% in AM, which for many purposes is probably too high, and makes things look a bit flat). We can do a radiosity precalulation - which takes ages, and has a subtle effect similar to setting the ambience a bit higher :-) as far as I can see. Or we can use more fill-lights, which probably gives us most control. Outdoor daytime scenes tend to have higher ambience and look flatter, whereas indoor night-time scenes may have more obviously directional lighting ( and even more so for space scenes).

There's no substitute for reading some books on cinema lighting, and for experimenting with lighting in a simple scene in AM.

Also read the AM99 v7.1 manual (if you haven't already done so, download it!) which discusses the different light types, and issues about radiosity, specularity, heirarchical lights, and light lists ( which allow you to only illuminate specific objects) Also have a look at the documentation on different types of shadow production, and the control over this that AM gives you.

Dave Corcoran

Most of the time. . with indoor lighting. . . you would want to have softer shadows. That's the whole reason you have things like lamp shades and "soft" light bulbs etc. So in order to make it feel a little more believable, I would use Z-buffered soft shadows. You should also notice a significant decrease in render times. That's one of the biggest things that bugged me about the lighting in The Phantom Menace. Here Jar Jar is. . . standing in the middle of the desert, and he has a super soft "indoor" shadow. (Cover of Cinefex if anyone is interested.) So everyone, write this down.

In order to pull off nice believable lighting/shadows, match the shadow to the light source. Soft light (lamp shade, cloudy day, window blinds etc.) = soft shadow. Hard light (sun, candle, flashlight etc.) = hard shadow.

William Eggington

Coming from a 3DS background, lack of ambient color is one of the first things I noticed way back in version 4. But, in the long run, I'm kind of glad I didn't have it, because its forced me to use actual colored kicker lights instead of leaning on ambience (which seldom leads to good lighting).

You can use non-shadowing lights, set to low intensities to throw scattered light around.

Brian "balistic" Prince

It's not stated in the manual, but ya got to switch to "Klieg" type light and aim the light at your model, it'll work right away once you do this...

Jeff C.

Yes, in the 7.1 beta, it's called light lists... Drag the shortcut of the light to the shortcut to the model you want it to light, and follow the dialog boxes.

Jeff C.

In Animation:Master, a sun-type light is cast from an infinitely-large plane, not from a bulb like the other light types. The penumbra of a shadow depends on the size of the lightsource casting it, and therefore calculating soft shadows for a unidirectional light is impossible.

Just use a klieg or blub, placed far from your scene, then set your bulb width (bigger = softer) and the number of rays you want to calculate.

Brian "balistic" Prince

Kick the Rays up on the ray traced shadows higher for more softness.

This is found in the light properties/shadows

OKAY, heres how I do it:

set up 3, yes, 3 lights. a little trick learned in RIVEN. blue directional light pointing down. this is for the sky color, atmosphere.about 65% intense. brown(or whatever color the ground is) directional light pointing up.about 35% intense yellow directional(or point)light aiming at an angle for the sun. full brightess

-joe

Thanks for everyones advice on this. I am going to use a light Gel. It will work out fantastic for what I want to do!

Each light source shortcut has checkboxes on the Properties Panel that allow you to disable Diffuse and Specular properties cast by a light. This should give you a way to illuminate an object/scene without causing any highlights.

In addition, each object shortcut has checkboxes on the Properties Panel that allow you to toggle the Cast/Receive Shadows/Reflections properties of a model.

Jeff Paries

I did a project just like that ( a pumkin) The booleans do cut holesl and light will shine through, but only in actual render. If you do a quick shaded renderthe boooleans wil show up as part of the model, and not as holes.

MAtt Bjerk

By design. However, shading is used, so if you turn on the shaded mode in the chor window (for example), and drag a light around, it will affect the scene appropriately.....

Jeff, Hash, Inc.

Using a transparency map, volumetric lights do go through windows.

I think what you're asking is for the additive effect, where the light beams would appear the color of the object they are passing through.

If this is the case, no, the software does not do it.

Jeff, Hash, Inc.

I misunderstood the question....

Volumetrics do not cast shadows from transparency maps. Only real geometry. They do, however, go through transparency maps (like a dirty window).....

Jeff, Hash, Inc.

I had to have a volumetric light pass through a translucent patch. What I did was set up two lights - one on the inside of the object and one out side. They were both along the same sight line facing the same direction (aim one light at the other or put both on a straight path aimed at a third object) and then set the second lights properties to match where the first leaves off. This turned into a better solution than having it done automatically because, by using constraint offsets and second set of properties, I could manually adjust the second light to compensate for refraction without the time-consuming process of letting the renderer calculate it.

ed Lynch

Sure, in your Action or Cho (wherever you want to animate), switch to skeletal mode and select the lights bone. Once selected, in the Properties window General tab you will be able to activate channels for all the various light key attributes.

-GaryM

If you ever want your lights to EMIT darkness intead of light put a negative value for intesity. Yes shadow EMITTING lights.

Rasika

I'm using version 5.25i. The color "white" seems to be just as effective as "black" or "red" or any other color, basically color doesn't seem to matter. The light type that I did the shadow thingy with was an omni light. Also the light was attached to a bone of an object, so maybe that had something to do with it.

If you want to attache a light to an object:-right click on the object in the PWS (the actual object, not the shortcut to the object in the Cho), the choose New>Light. A light magically appears at the top of the bone heirachy. You can drag this light and re-arragne it in any where in the hierachy the same way you would a bone.

Go to the general tab of the object's choreography instance, it's the 4th of the 5 icons in the lower left hand of the properties box, you want to turn off the wireframe mode (button in the up position) it won't render but it will stop light and generate shadows.

Matt Andersen

Change the light to type "klieg" and turn on "shadow maps" in the light's attribute box.

Mike Caputo

First of all, you need to render to disk for this to work. Yes, you have a Klieg with the Use Shadow Maps checked, but you have to have the Intensity extremely low or the light washes your models out. In my playing around my setting was .25. You also need to have your Distance to Fall-Off ending before it reaches your model. Fix this visually in a front or side view. Now, when you render it leaves a vague shape of your model with no shadow or values, and it looks like crap. So, you have to add another light in the same position, without the Use Shadow Maps checked. this creates more of a natural lighting with the illusion of volumetrics.

I hope this helps anyone trying to achieve volumetric lighting. I had storyboarded an animation that would benefit from such a thing but never expected to use it with Hash. Bonus! I just wonder if this is an accident, or was this planned by Hash? It would be very cool if this stayed. Nothing crashed while I was playing with this, so thats a very cool thing.

Scott

I don't know how well the volumtetric lighting works in MH3D, but you can do amazing special FX type stuff with it.

Yes.

Um, depends. I haven't seen how they work in MH3D yet...possibly.

Give ambience to a room filled with sunshine. Give "moodiness" to a dust ridden moonlit dungeon where visible light shines through cellar windows. Do the classic put-a-light-behind-an-object (often done with text) and see the effect. Give a neat murkiness to underwater scenes. Do the classic 20th Century Fox intro with the waving spotlights (which I don't believe are actually volumetric lights, but you get the idea), etc. etc.

Really, there are a lot of things you can do with volumetric lights.

When you see visible light, it's generally due to tiny particles in the air...water vapor or dust which catch the light. That's why laser shows usually have the smoke machines turned on, right? (last one I went to was 6 or so years ago).

Zero Z. Batzell Dean

This is always true on any cloudless day, snow or not. The sky is an all encompassing source of blue light. Look around on a partly cloudy day when the sun's behind a cloud; no sharp directional shadows since everything's lit by a bright blue hemi-sphere.

I simulate this with four blue (RGB = 16, 96, 254) parallel light sources, with shadows turned off, placed in the four corners of my scene. You have to keep their intensities fairly low since they generate what I consider unrealistic specular highlights. The affect of specular reflection from the sky is more like ambience.

Rodger Reynolds

Another one (that I haven't played with yet) is light projectors. Right click a light, and add a Rotoscope to it. Now the light will cast the image applied......

Jeff, Hash, Inc.

Select the Camera. It has a "Global Ambiance" property that you can set to a plus or minus value.

-mike

For me it depends on the scene. I generally don't try to override the Ambience in any materials (unless it's for a good reason like a glow): that way I can easily override it at the model level, and have other materials inherit the setting.

For a daytime scene, it's usually worth sticking some ambience in.... 20 is in fact a good value, IMHO. If you set it all the way down to zero, you can get a very strange (although not entirely uncompelling effect) of items being brightly lit, but having these bizarrely dark shadows. Ambience helps to simulate the effect of light scattering off of objects (and is much cheaper than applying a radiosity algorithm).

On the other hand, if you want a dark alley in a noir setting, zero ambience in a must.

And if you want a classic "Floating in the light" Sci-Fi scene, you can get away with setting Ambience way up towards 50 or 60... maybe even higher. I haven't really tried it.

In general though, unless your object is glowing, there are few situations in which you want to set the ambience of a material different from the ambience of its model. There are, of course, exceptions. In medium lighting situations, bumping the ambience of the hair on a figure will make it look like it has a fluffier surface (if you've textured on some fine detail, that is). And, of course, the whites of a cartoon characters eyes should almost always be 100% ambient: that's how, when they walk into a cave, you can still see their expressions! Make sure though that you use an Ambient map to bring the ambience of their -pupils- down to a more reasonable level... preferably zero, so that you can get a nice dark pupil occlusion when they walk into the cave.

OK, I've babbled enough. I hope this helps someone....

-- Tony

I'm using AM98, but I'm pretty sure the answer is the same for 5.25 as well. Expand the menu tree for the Shortcut to Light1 (or whichever light you want to animate), in the choreography listing in your Project Workspace. You'll see:

Shortcut to Light1
|
Choreography Action
|
Shortcut to Light1
|
Channels for x,y,z and roll

Click on the second Shortcut to Light1 (under the choreography action) and take a look at the Properties Box. The General tab has a listing of "Available Channel Items", most of which are unchecked. Check "Intensity" and there you are!

David Fontes

Yes. Right click a shortcut to light and select New Rotoscope.

Jeff Paries

Make a bone in your object that is at the position you want the light. Then, in choreography, just add a constraint to the light to 'Translate To' that bone. If the light has facing that you want to be animated along with the character, you probably want to also make a constrainto to 'Orient Like' the bone in the model. Then, just animate the model, and the light will follow. Magic!

-- Tony

For Intel V5.19:

make a light, select klieg, select soft shadows or ray traced shadows, then select volumetric. Try casting shadows on a wall or ground.

Glen

A good way to avoid this is with a basic three-light setup (two lights if you don't wanna fool with the backlight).

• Key light: This is the main light, generally a spotlight/klieg. This is at intensity almost independent of the scene, generally around 80% or so. This points fairly directly at the scene of the action. The actual light is positioned above the scene, somewhat to the right of the camera (so that the light shines down on the scene in a long diagonal). This gives nice highlights and helps to contrast and define features. Key light is the only light that has shadows assigned.
• Fill light: This is the light that lets you light the scene evenly without light-burn on the highlights. This is generally either a wide-wide klieg (if you want some side/corner shadows) or an infinite light that lights everything evenly. This should be about half as high off the ground as the key light, but to the left of the camera, also pointing to the scene. This light will fill in areas that the key light leaves in heavy shadows. The fill light's intensity does a lot towards defining the mood of the scene: set it down around 5-10% for dark moody lighting, or up around 30-40% for a bright summer day.
• Back-light: This is a light to increase the contrast of edges that are against similar colors. It is positioned behind the scene, and down at ground level (or even below) pointing up toward the scene. Intensity should be around 10-20%. This light is generally a spot-light.

Beyond these basics, my best advice for figuring out new ways to light things is to look at movies and TV and try to figure out how they did it. You can learn from both the good and the bad: for example, Bladerunner will show you what to do, and then X-Files will caution you not to take that too far :)

-- Tony

Firstly turn down the intensity of the other lights except your main light (sun) The first point to me be made is this, start from a single light and only add in new lights ad they are needed ... But that assumes you know what to look for.....

Lighting is there to give mood, But i think that in 3d its mainly there to define form, when you add in a light render the scene and see how well it gives 'shape' to the rendering. Its easy to kill an object by lighting it from all sides and using too many bright shadow casting lights. ( Just think - "shadows are good - they are my friends.")

Most of the time I use the following 'standard' setup ...Imagine your the camera looking at an object:

1. Key light, or Main light (100% white or slightly yellow - Kleg) ... as default I position this light at 45 deg up to your right, this 'lights' the scene
2. Fill light (50-70% Blue or cool Kleg or Omni)... It sits opposite this light, and lightens the shadow areas of the model .. Turn down the intensity of this light to about 50%
3. back light (30-100% white - kleg)...A light that shines down on the back of the head/body .. I dont use this often but its useful to get some light reflecting off the shoulders/arms/head
4. Spot fill lights (50% White) if I see areas that need attention I sometimes add in non-shadow casting lights to add ambiance. (also turn off specular hilights for this light)

Also remember, that appart from the main light, other lights dont have to be in a logical place, ive often had shadow / fill lights floating in a room .. its whatever looks good, so if your lighting a room for mood dont feel constrained to sticking all the lights on the wall and roof.

I dont really see it being affected alot unless they all are casting shadows.

For a good starting place, lets look at how scenes are lit for real film. While it does not necessarily follow that this is how computer scenes should be lit, it will allow you to understand certain looks that you see on TV or in film, and get a good start on how to duplicate them in the computer.

Before a scene is lit, you decide what effect you are going for. Some things must be calculated when deciding what types of lights to use. Light is described as hard or soft, hot or cold (bright or dim), and by its color. Soft light comes from a larger source, and cast less shadows. Hard light comes from a smaller, less diffused source, and cast hard shadows. The color of the light is just what you think. Now, for film, color is very important because the film is color balanced, but on the computer you don't have to worry about that. Hot and cold refer to how bright the light is, and is not necessarily related to whether the light is hard or soft (a large fill light may be thousands of watts, but is still a soft light).

The vast majority of scenes are lit with what is called three point lighting. The funny thing about three point lighting is that you rarely ever see it in the real world. Three point lighting means that there are three lights on the subject, a key light, a fill light, and a backlight.

The key light is the brightest light in the scene and is usually no more than 45 degrees off from the camera, shining on one side of the subjects face. The fill light is no more than 45 degrees off the camera in the opposite direction, and is softer then the key. This light provides illumination to the parts not lit by the key, but does not create major shadows or reflections. The back light is directly behind the person and usually higher, shooting down (to avoid lens flair or a silhouette), and provides texture to the hair (it is sometimes called a hair light).

With these three lights, a hard, hot key, a soft fill, and cold hair light, you get the common TV look. The key cast some shadows and secularity on the subjects face, which gives the 2d picture depth. The fill light illuminates parts of the scene that would otherwise be in total shadow, and is often used to raise the overall scene to the amount of brightness you need to expose the film, and the back light adds texture to the hair, as well as a slight glow around the person, which helps separate the person from the background (doubly important in black and white).

Beyond the three point lighting, you use smaller, dimmer lights to light anything in the scene that you want to be visible, such as a picture in the background or a tree or whatever. These lights are called specials and often are not a fancy set up, just a light aimed at the right spot. One important thing about specials is that the background, unless otherwise desired, should always be lit. Especially if there is a wall close behind. This prevents the "spotlight" look, where the subject is the only thing lit up.

Lights are often raised up, to keep a glare from appearing in the subjects eyes and to keep the shadows low rather than shooting straight back.

Of course, these basic rules are broken every day for special effects and mood. Horror films often have very specific lighting - only one thing in the frame lit at a time. News often uses two point lighting, removing the backlight, for ease and time. MTV uses whatever it wants, etc.

Taking these rules to the computer is pretty easy. The computer actually has quite a few advantages over the real world. You can control which lights cast shadows. The lights are not actually visible, so you don't have to worry if the camera can see the light. You have control over secularity and reflections, etc. This removes 50% of the difficulty of lighting a scene. Then again, the computer has disadvantages. It cannot do radiosity, so you must use ambience. Lights in the computer are infinitely small single sources, where lights in the real world are glowing filaments and thus larger than a single point.

Once you calculate all that in, you can begin lighting the scene. Let say you want to light a character just standing looking at the camera, with a room around her. Use the three point model. Put a key off to the left of the camera, a fill to the right, and a backlight behind her. In Hash terms, use a klieg for the key, a point light for the fill, and a spot light for the backlight. Set the key and the fill to cast shadows. Make sure to set the key's intensity higher then the fill, probably by quite a bit. That is all for the lights. But, you have to use some material properties to compensate for those things the lights don't do. Set the specular size and intensity on the hair high enough to catch the backlight. Set the rest of the specular values so that the key actually creates small shines, without making the character look like polished metal. Use all white lights. Don't turn on reflections on anything unless it is absolutely necessary. Use secularity to create things like the shine in the eyes or moisture on the lips (this is easier and will save render time). If you find the scene too bright, try lowering all of the lights by an equal amount. If you find just one light is creating too much glare, adjust just that light.

In all of it, remember that film and video do not reflect the real world, especially when it comes to lighting. If you wanted a scene to look like you see it, say an office building, you would place the lights as they exist in the real world. But when setting up a scene in film, you do not place them where they would be in the real world, you place them where they make the character look best and still convey the lighting of the real world.

Sorry this got so long and is still not complete, but as you may guess, you can write a book about lighting alone.

Dan Pisarski

I couldn't get the X-Orient to give me a full rotation either, so I did this.

Created a circle model, added it to cho aligning it to the center point of light, added a null object, constain the null obj to the circle as a path, then I had the light aim at the null object. Around it goes. You can adjust the speed by changing the size of the circle path or using the ease channel. Repeating is a problem though. :(

Also tried just adding a null object (no circle path) and then had it move in a circular motion around the lights center point, then click the "repeat box" on the x,y,z translate properties under the shortcut. This will give you a repetitve rotation with the light following the moving null object no matter how long or short your cho at a constant rate.

If there is an easier way to get a light to rotate with a constant repeat throughout the cho, I'd like to know.

Brian

Here's how to easily make a light that spins around forever...

Create a new model and put a light in it. Then click on the model's icon in the worksheet, a black bone will appear. That bone determines how yr model's main bone shows up in direction mode. Orient it upwards so that it's will roll around Y. Then orient the light as you like, I just put a klieg pointing along Z.

Put the model into a cho and in the roll channel, setup two keyframes, frame 1 = 0, frame 30 (or whatever) = 360. In the worksheet, click on the roll channel entry under the shortcut to your model and toggle on 'repeat'.

That's it. The light will rotate forever at a constant speed. You can animate the light further in skeletal mode. I'm not sure how to actually animate the light's attributes while it's embedded in a model however, but I'm sure someone will tell me. :)

ken morton

I played with that for a while, but it got a little complicated. For that example, I have one light tied to the camera, and one high and to the right.

When I want a figure with three shades (highlights, mids, shadows) I've gotten good results using:

1. a light tied to the camera
2. a light about 45 degrees to the right and a little high, and
3. a light about 90 degrees to the right and way high.

Looks good, and less filling!

Mike Caputo

I've got two more Light TIPS:

#1: In a Cheo, Add a new null object and call it "Light2Targget" Or the like, Then right click on your Kleg and add an "AIM AT Light2Target" Constraint ... Just place the null object where you want the light to aim at.

You can also use the same AIM AT constraint to aim at a bone in the character, Ie the Head, Where ever the character walks theres a light on his/her head.

#2: Press

3

on the keypad, This will change to a 'light view' and you will be looking through the light as if were a camera, Pressing

3

again will allow you to cycle through the Lights. This is great with two windows. One for moving and one viewing from the light, Its then really easy to line up shadows etc...

- Glenn Wilton

I dunno about everyone else here, but I cheat. Specifically, I do the following:

• Model exterior of lightbulb. Make it mildly transparent. Make sure it has as few patches as conceivably possible.
• Copy. Paste. Scale down, placing a new copy slightly inside of the lightbulb itself. Modify CPs so that it centers around the fictitious "filament". Make this very transparent. Make it white/gold/whatever for color. Crank its Ambience up to something like (say) 100. Set its transparency method to Additive.
• Copy. Paste. Scale down slightly.
• Repeat to your heart's content.
• Make sure that the lightbulb doesn't cast shadows (or it will totally obscure the light inside of it).

This -should- give you a nice fading glow from any angle whatsoever (I haven't tried it with a light inside, but it works fairly well for jewel-tones (which is what I originally thought up the technique to handle)). If you only want to look from one angle, I'd recommend just an Ambience Decal aligned with the camera.

Be warned that this will slow the renderer down substantially for that section of the scene. After all, it's running through several layers of transparency. For mercy's sake, -don't- make the interior light-glows any more complicated than they need to be: don't apply procedural materials or roughness or (worst of all) reflections. It would not make your render times happy.

I'm interested in hearing how other people manage this. Maybe we can even get some input from someone at Avalanche Studios on how they did the glow in the windows in the soldier scene (an effect we can all gander at, since it's in the start-up picture for MH3D).

-- Tony

Well, I created an initial AVI of my simple ceiling fan/light model. Thanks for the suggestions as to how to do lightbulbs. I liked Tony Lower-Basch's idea of creating successive glowing spheres inside each other, and that would have given a good effect, but for my purposes I was more interested in the shadows on the ceiling and not the lightbulb itself so I didn't implement it. I used 5 light sources for each fan, each at an intesity of 10. I applied 180 degrees of motion blur. Check it out at:

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Realm/9820/fan.avi

Here is how I did the lights... after reading this and looking at the animation, if someone has a better way to do it, let me know. I wanted the light from the fan to cast realistic shadows of the blades against the ceiling. To do this, I needed to put the light sources inside the bulb of the fan. I needed an opaque effect for the bulb, not a transparent one, and so I made the bulb solid and set it to not cast shadows. This would allow the light to pass through it and hit the blades. The problem was, you can only set the entire model to not cast shadows, not specific parts of it.

So the ceiling fan model is actually 2 separate parts. The blades and support cord make up one model and the light globe makes up the other model. This way the lights shine through the globe and hit the blades just like I wanted. Everybody's happy...

EXCEPT... I wanted 2 ceiling fans to see the interaction of the shadows. Everything was fine until I noticed the shadow of one ceiling fan on the side wall caused by the other light. Since the globe was set to not cast shadows, it appears invisible to the other light, so the shadow on the side wall shows the cord and the blades but no globe! D'OH!

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? This all stems from the fact that I don't want the globe to be transparent. It must be opaque. Is there another way to accomplish the same effect? This surprises me, because that means any similar model has to be in 2 pieces, which is inelegant if nothing else. I can hear Tony now: "he should have listened to me in the first place!" Maybe Tony's way is the only way.

-Jim Sherwood

---

---

---

---

Particles

---

1. How could I make cool fire and smoke particles in Animation Master.
2. Why do streaks behind an object appear on top of it at certain camera angles?
3. How can I make particles go towards an object instead of away from it?
4. How do I emit particles on some frames and not on others?
5. What's the difference between choreography gravity and particle gravity?
6. How do I make blobbies fall?
7. In my recent quest for fire...
8. I need to learn how to make my decal animate so the tip goes from red to a burned look.
9. Just some idle caffeine-deficient thoughts.
10. How do forces work?
11. I have lost my materials such as crumple, dented etc. and my material effects like dust.
12. Do you know how to animate streaks's properties(emission rate, etc)?
13. I can't get particles to work!
14. How can I build a library of tested particles?
15. Would someone lend some info on how they got particles to work?
16. Can you also post the setting of the particles? I can't seem to make it work.

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

Radiosity

---

What's new...

• Does radiosity produce its own shadows?

---

1. Help! My computer takes forever to render a radiosity map!
2. Is AM radiosity *true* radiosity?
3. Is radiosity working?
4. Can anyone explain what radiosity is and how to use it?
5. I don't believe I have heard of anyone getting it to work.
6. When I attempt to calc the radiosity, it continues until I kill the process.
7. I usually let mine go for 5 minutes before I stop casting rays.
8. Are you saying it only works at the model level?
9. I would have at least thought bouncing off the floor was enough -- hrumph!
10. Okay, my last stab at it -- I attempted a typical test for radiosity.
11. I did notice that AM doesn't let you use the same rmp filename for subsequent calcs.

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

Weathering

---

1. Does weathering work?

---

---