Set Updates - Misc. prop work and Lighting

Hey! Beth here again. Today I got some prop work done. I made pegs for the rifle in the inside of the cabin, I made a flour bag (two actually), I made a ladder for the cabin, and I got temporary lighting done for the inside of the Fort Harrison set (aka Captain's Quarters). I haven't done much technical explanations yet, so I thought I'd try it this time.

I think I've got a pretty good plan for interior lighting (without actual lamps). Each grey ball is showing off a different light. I have three different lights here, a "shadow color" light, an "outside" light, and a "fake ambient occlusion" light.

The shadow color light is a simple point light (like a hanging lightbulb). It only gives diffuse light (instead of both diffuse and specular). The color is a dark grayish-blue. This gives the feel of light bouncing off of the walls. This lamp doesn't give any shadows, just dim light.

The "outside" light is a spotlight. It is used to show light streaming through windows and doors. As you can see in the picture, the color is slightly yellowy white, at a very bright setting. Both diffuse and specular lighting are used (you can see the brighter spot on the grey ball). Depending on the scene, sometimes it's easier to use one wide-angle light, and sometimes it's easier to use multiple tight-angle lights. For this set I'm using two spotlights, one for the window, and one for the door (you can't see the light from the door in this picture).

The "fake ambient occlusion" light is to give soft, fuzzy shadows on the floor. The way I make it is to use a spotlight again, only this time using a very dark color for the light itself (to give mostly just shadows). I also have to mess around with lots of settings to get the really soft shadows.

Ambient occlusion is a render time intensive process where the computer follows the light rays as they bounce off of objects. This makes shadows lighter sometimes, and always makes less exposed places darker. Since the Captain's Quarters set is in the same file as the Exterior Fort Harrison set, the room itself is pretty well hidden from "the outside". Thus, using the ambient occlusion for inside isn't very helpful as a brightening technique, as it simply makes hidden spots darker. Because of the neat shadow effects you get from ambient occlusion, you get the big, soft shadows under objects close to the floor (or other objects) (see below)

This light is a bit of a cheat, because it won't create the cool in-between shadows you see here ^. Instead, it just does shadows like this:

It does look different, but for just two lights, (and about two minutes worth of work) it works okay (especially when I take longer at it, these pictures are just to illustrate) The most annoying things are that the shadows on the floor aren't dark enough to balance with the shadows on the objects, and there aren't any shadows between the objects. One nice thing is that the ambient occlusion lighting often creates very "noisy" pictures. If you click on the ambient occlusion picture above, you can see the grainy noise that is there. The "fake" lighting is much smoother in that respect. Also, for this really low-poly scene, the ambient lighting takes almost exactly twice as long as the spotlight lighting.

Well, that's pretty much how I set up this lighting. I hope you could understand what I said, if you couldn't, feel free to ask a question, I'll do my best to answer. Tomorrow I'll start working on the Captain's desk. Wish me luck!

Beth