PlugPak tutorials
PlugPak
2.0 tutorials: basic Overcaster setup
Download
and extract the tutorial
content zip. Load the supplied scene called Chastity01.lws. This is
a scene with a character standing on the ground, with default LightWave
lighting. Chastity model was created by Jeff Greulich. Thanks Jeff!! Motion blur is set to dithered with low anti-aliasing. Shadow ray tracing is turned on.
Let'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.
Overcaster ambimage interface. There are settings for defining the quality of the array, as well as settings for the method to retrieve colors for the lights.
So, run the OC_Ambimage Lscript. The plugpak setup should have added the button automatically. Select manual gradient as the method. The other methods can be used to automatically match the backround, but that's not necessary in this scene. Set the array type to Dome 12. This is the same as the default Sphere 24, except that only the zenith and sky lights are active.
In the second requester, you will define a gradient from which the Ambimage lights get their colors. This time i set up a blueish sky like gradient. Only the sky and zenith colors are taken into an account.
In the next, big requester you will see the colors of each of the 12 active lights in the current Ambimage rig. The color requesters for the 12 lower lights are hidden. You can see that all lights in both rows have the same colors, based on your gradient settings. Click OK. At this point, select the Lightwave default light (the 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. The only thing is, it takes a bit of time to render.
Chastity
rendered with overcaster ambimage lighting. On the left side, low anti-aliasing was used and the render time was around two minutes. Separate shadows are clearly visible. Ugly. The right side was rendered at dithered enhanced medium anti-aliasing. The result is decent, but the render time grew to about seven minutes (both rendered on 1.7 Ghz P4 at 1280 * 920 pixel resolution).
Let's get quicker soft shadows. First, run OC_Ambimage again, set the array type to Dome 12 (you always need to remember which type you used if you wish to modify settings later). Accept skip as the method and click OK. In the big requester, turn off the shadows checkbox. This will disable the raytraced shadows cast by the OC_Ambimage rig. We will replace them with OC_Shadow.
Run OC_Shadow LScript. Set Chastity.lwo as the shadow parent, and activate Automatic settings. Accept the defaults for all the other 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.
On the right, shadow area surrounding Chastity model, automatic settings were used.
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. If you run the script again with the current mixer object active, you can modify the shadow map sizes and other parameters - this requires Eki's PlugPak version 2.0 or better.
As we are doing a daylight scene, we will need a sun. You guessed it right - we will use OC_Sun LScript. This time the default settings should work fine. Rotate the sun mixer object to aim the light.
I suggest doing a few test renders with different orientations. I finally ended up at Heading 70, Pitch 30, 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 sliders or endomorph mixer.
The result of the tutorial. Consider this as just the initial setup, the light intensities and other properties can be easily animated with the sliders.