3D Modeling: Lighting

*Whew!*

This one was a challenge.  The good part is, it was easier than any of the others.  I don't know whether that's because I'm finally getting it, or because there was so much less to do.  I took the "ammo room" I textured in the previous assignment and applied lighting to it, instead of the generic "everything is magically lit" way it showed up initially.

First we had to light the room as a whole.  I decided I wanted the feel of a quiet room late in the day.  I took the overhead lamp hanging from the ceiling and made that my "spotlight".  I added a, slightly yellow-orange, omnidirectional light outside the window.

Screenshot before rendering

It took a huuuge amount of fiddling, clicking, and head-scratching to do this.  Added to this is the fact that I couldn't seem to get started.  It wasn't until late afternoon/early evening that I really managed to get settled down to work.  I only got the overhead light done before I had to leave, though.  It was my fiancee's birthday and we were meeting about 16 friends and family for dinner out.  Great study break.  After a nice dinner and dessert out I came back home and put my poor inebriated sweetie to bed.  She shooed me out of the room to finish my homework so it was back to the keyboard for me.

The outside picture doesn't look like sunset and I didn't have time to adjust it.  Pretend the sky is orange, okay?

After I did the first two lights I decided to put the third light outside the slightly opened door.  I spent what seemed like forever tweaking the settings and moving the dadgummed thing around.  I couldn't seem to get the background picture I had placed outside the door to work properly.  At some point I recalled that I'd inadvertently erased it from the Materials Editor at the end of the last class.  I went out to http://www.morguefile.com to grab another desert scene.  I quickly assigned it to the plane outside the door in a fraction of the time it took me last week.  Hmmm... maybe I am learning something.  I went to the closeup cam at the table and turned it towards the doorway.

I set the bitmap for the desert scene to self-illuminate.  This turned out to be a terrible mistake.  I suddenly couldn't see the desert outside the door when I rendered!

What the heck?!!

Just a white glow.  It didn't look that way in the viewport.  I then spent AN HOUR fiddling around with settings in the renderer trying to get my bitmap of the desert to show up the way I wanted.  Nothing I tried worked.

  I started to despair that there must be something wrong with me and maybe I'd never learn 3D Studio Max.  It's always one thing after another.  After clicking options, rendering, seeing that it didn't work, resetting and picking another option to change, I turned off the self-illumination of the desert map outside the door.  The desert picture suddenly rendered, but very dim.  I'd set some kind of background lighting setting to a salmon pinkish orangey color and that tinted everything more like a sunset.  It was kinda dimly lit but, by this point, I was done.  I punched up the specularity on the bitmap in the Materials Editor and did my final render.

You can make out a fuzzy ball of light peeking around the doorway between the door and the desert scene.  That's my omnidirectional light reflecting off the plane that the desert scene is mapped onto.  I might go back and fix that but not tonight.

Part two of this assignment was way easier.  Pick an object and give it three-point lighting.  Use a main light, or "key" light.  Add a "fill" light to bounce light around the scene.  Finally, include a "rim" light to flesh things out.  I'm still not 100% satisfied with the results.  I know that as I get better at this (if I get better) I'll be able to light things more realistically.

First I used a directional spotlight next to the camera for my key light.

I used an omnidirectional light off to the right for my fill light.  Shadows were turned off and it was given an brownish gray glow to blend with the wood of the table and the stone of the walls.

I decided to place my rim light outside the window since it was an obvious light source.  It seemed silly to pretend that it wouldn't add light to the scene.  I did use a light so pale yellow it was, pretty much, white.

The asssignment instructions said to turn off shadows for this rim light.  A rim light is normally supposed to add depth to your object without looking like there's an obvious light somewhere in the scene.  I looked at this image and decided that the bars, without shadows, just looked fake.  I tweaked some more setttings until I got some shadows to fall across the table.

I didn't get them to fall across the edge of the window like I wanted.  Perhaps adding a more directional light, shining from higher up, would accomplish that.  Anyhow, this image ends up looking a little like someone has the dynamite in the beam from a flashlight or a light mounted on the front of a helmet he or she is wearing.  The notable thing was that part two of the assignment took, maybe, a quarter of the time part one took.

After class last week one of the department tutors urged me to read the 3D Studio Max quickstart guide cover to cover before continuing on with the class.  He said that he did that and, suddenly, the high-speed lectures in class made sense.  I was trying to use the book as a reference guide and it wasn't much help.  I'm now using it as a textbook.  It's several versions behind, but reading straight through seems to be helping.  I'm only part of the way through (textbooks are pretty dry) but I will eventually finish.  If I can reach that "aha!" moment, I'll be able to create anything with this program.  Right now  3D Studio Max's interface is so user-unfriendly to me that it feels like Torquemada headed the design team.

You know.  Torquemada?

*sigh* Look it up.