Let there be lightLet's start lighting the scene by replacing the dull Lightwave default ambient light with Overcaster Ambimage. In many cases you may wish to run the Overcaster HUB LScript to run multiple subsripts at once, but for clarity's sake, we will run the scripts separately this time.For more in depth info about Overcaster, see the Overcaster documentation.
Overcaster ambimage interface - PlugPak 2.0 version. So, run the
OC_Ambimage LScript. Select manual
gradient as the method.
In the next, big requester you will see the colors of each of the 24 lights in the Ambimage rig. You can see that all lights in each row have the same colors, based on your gradient settings. Click OK. At this
point, select the Lightwave default light (the pink one called Light), and delete it
[-]. The
light couldn't have been deleted earlier, as there always has to be at
least
one light in the scene. Do a test render [F9]. You should now have a
smooth
ambient lighting in the scene. |
| |
| Let's add
some soft shadows. Run OC_Shadow LScript.
In the top view, make Shadow_area the active object, and move it between the speaker and blob objects. Done. Overcaster shadower uses shadow mapped spotlights to do it's magic. The spots are aimed so that they affect everything that is inside the Shadow_area object. If you scale the area too large, the shadows will become rather fuzzy due to lack of shadow map resolution, so you should always try to make the Shadow_area surround your main objects as closely as possible. |
| |
As we are
doing a daylight scene, we will need a sun. You guessed it right - we
will use OC_Sun LScript.
When you run the script, a requester will pop up, asking if you wish to get the light rotation from the SkyGen sun. Answer yes - this will cause the lighting and backdrop work in unison. In the next requester, just click OK - the settings (except name) are disabled anyway. Normally the sun orientation would be adjusted by rotating the SUN_mixer object, but in our case, as we have synced the light to SkyGen, we will rotate the Sun_REF object instead. I suggest doing a few test renders with different orientations - i.e. try to rotate the sun so that it is visible in the camera. I finally ended up at Heading 136, Pitch -27, Bank 0. If you examine the sun's shadow, you can see that the shadow gets softer over distance - you can adjust the softness and many more parameters with the SUN_mixer object's endomorph mixer. |
In
the next requester, you will define a gradient from which the Ambimage
lights get their colors. You can use the settings seen here, i
eyeballed them from the SkyGen background gradient. 
Set Juster_Left02 as the shadow parent, and
activate Automatic settings. This way the script will try to automatically place
and scale
the shadower rig so that it covers the parent object as efficiently as
possible.
This time we will want to use the same rig for both our foreground
objects,
so we will adjust the position a little.