Overcaster

OC Ambimage

(OC_Ambimage.lsc)

Overcaster Ambimage lets you load the ambient lighting for your scenes in a variety of ways, or set it up manually.

As OC_Ambimage and OC_Ambient are meant for the same task, replacing the LW default ambient light (which the script will set to zero), the two should not co-exist. If you run OC_Ambimage from the hub, the hub will automaticly delete the ambient instance, if it finds one. If the OC_Ambient script is run by itself, it will notify you to delete the Ambient rig, but let both exist at the same time.

If the current camera doesn't have motion blur set up, the script will set up a requester where you can set up motion blur and anti-aliasing (Overcaster needs motion blur to work).

If there are no objects in the current scene, the script will add a null. This is because if the first object in the scene has sliders applied, the scripts will fail to apply the sliders plugin to the current mixer object.

There are five options for setting colors for the lights in the Ambimage interface:

1. Skip
This setting will either set all the lights in the rig to a default light grey, or, if you already have adjusted the lights, let you modify the existing settings.

2. Trace BG
The lights will get their coloring from the backdrop. Use this method if you wish to match the lighting to SkyGen, SkyTracer, Textured environment, Image world etc.

3. BG Gradient
The lighting rig will be set to match the scene backdrop color, be it a gradient or just a single color.

4. Manual Gradient
This will open a requester similar to the LW BG Gradient, letting you set the Zenith, Sky, Ground and Nadir colors for ambient light.

5. Image
Lets you choose any of the images loaded into your scene and match the ambient light to it. This works great if you use a BG image, or if you have a wide (Preferably a spherical panorama) render of your scene.

Tip: You can use either RefGen or Juan Jose Gonzalez's special projections to render the panorama.

There are also five resolutions to choose from.

1. Sphere 24
This is the same as in previous version of OC Ambimage. It sets up 24 distant lights in spherical array. 12 of the lights shine from above the horizon, 12 of them below.

2. Sphere 12
This sets up 12 distant lights in spherical array. 6 of the lights shine from above the horizon, 6 of them below.

3. Dome 24
24 lights arranged to hemispherical sky dome. All lights shine from above the horizon.

4. Dome 12
12 lights arranged to hemispherical sky dome. All lights shine from above the horizon.

5. Dome 6
6 lights arranged to hemispherical sky dome. All lights shine from above the horizon.

Choosing the correct resolution depends on your scene. Doubling the amount of lights roughly equals doubling the amount of AA passes when quality is concerned.

In some scenes, more lights but less AA will render faster, in others the opposite.

After selecting your method, click OK to get to the settings window .

You can adjust the color of any of the 24 lamps here. If a setting with lower resolution is chosen, only the active light's controls are shown. Also, there is a button for turning shadow casting on for the lights rig. With it enabled, the result is quite close to LW's BG radiosity, but with faster render times. When disabled, the render times are really fast, but you will need to add Overcaster shadowers to your object.

You can think of this panel as a 6*4 pixel version of your image - the color that was in the upper left corner will be the color in, uhm, upper left corner etc.

Each of the colors represents a light in the rig, and the lights are positioned in a way that can be thought of as the 6*4 pixel image illuminating your scene, spherical wrapped around it.

The strength of the ambient light is controlled with just one slider, called intensity. There's also an option to use an endomorph mixer, found in the Ambimage_mixer object's properties/deformation tab.

You can rotate the rig by rotating the Ambimage mixer object. The ambient rig can be completely removed from the scene by deleting the Ambimage mixer object and it's descendants.

PlugPak 1.0 notes
There are two versions of this script, for LW 6.5 (OC_Ambimage_b.lsc) and 7.0 (OC_Ambimage.lsc)

This is because the color requesters look different in the two LW versions, and i wanted to keep the backwards compability.

Some of the features mentioned above do not apply.