Zenith, blurry reflections, soft shadows, and lights placed at the main contact point make the lighting surprisingly realistic:

Takes an hour to render on my computer at 64RPP. Above sample rendered at 144RPP. Download includes the basic room with athene replaced by a cylinder, as athene is not my model to redistribute. Enjoy!

Click here to download the br5 file

Looking good! I'll have to give it a good tryout soon, I've just about got my computer back in working order. Mahray

When faking light hitting and bouncing off a wall like that, I prefer to have my radials use Ranged Falloff, depending on the scene it can sometimes look a little like bounced light. In this scene the radials on the floor are set to a Ranged Falloff of 50.

Here, I also added another radial in the middle ofthe room, with no shadows and very low intensity, about 5. To suggest just a little more ambient light being bounced everywhere.

There is another similar radial right on the spot on the sphere where the imcoming light hits it. Rendered at 32rpp. I had to hurry, going to catch some sleep soon! AgentSmith

Do you have to use this light rig in a room? Can it not be used without the room part? Just turning off the atmosphere and sky dome colour? What about disabling sunlight? That destroys shadows, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't, it's turning off shadows that does that - duh! I'm so silly... Playing with it now... Thanks Max

Always a great learning forum. excellent information, thanks guys

Personally, I'm not a fan of lighting rigs/domes etc, but I like the look all the same. It even looks like there's slight aberration (don't know if that was intentional).

Len.

There is so many combinations that i think everyone else who tries this would have a different outcome......some wonderful images to be had.....

This scene requires it to be rendered on the Premium setting, don't set it to Regular, or it won't look right. If you need to, set the Premium render to less RPP so you can get a fast preview render. In fact, setting it to 4 RPP on the Premium setting will render faster than when it is set to just Regular. On my pc, the difference in render times is around 10x faster. (Premium, 4rpp = 4 minutes vs. Regular render = 40 minutes) AS

Message edited on: 11/19/2005 17:30

Thanks AS, doing that now.

Great tip AS. I'm doing a render (not with this model) and its taking sometime, so I'm Just trying it out now and your right, it looks a lot faster. Thanks ;)

Hmmm, will that work with big glass spheres and lights?

Fran; Do you mean just a normal scene? (Meaning NOT this scene) Well, It won't look as good. A normal scene, and you use Premium with 4 RPP, you will get a lot of grain. To get rid of the grain, you have to start increasing the RPP, and you will quickly be rendering for far longer than you would in Regular. AS

Ah, I won't bother then, it's getting near the end on original settings, well, when I say near I mean last time it showed anything it said 6 hours... Hey, nice column bandolin! I notice that the outside in all these shots above does look very... glary. Apart from AS's in message 4 - nice sky in that one AS. I also notice that the light seems to be at the same angle all the time - is it possible to change that easily? Max???

You would need to manually move the radial lights on the floor to coincide wherever the new angled light would come in and "bounce off". Easily? Sure...getting it to look good again, ah that's always the trick, lol. AS

Oh I guess I must have broken the zenith link..woops! Normally it would be connected to the usual zenith handle. There should be a way to link the other incident lights inversely using object tracking, i'll see what i can do. I want to be a beta tester. Can someone put in a good word for me at daz :-D

Can try. :o)

I'd make a really good beta tester, I seem to be able to find problems that no one knows how to fix. gg

Lol, yes you do! I can give DAZ some names, but it certainly isn't up to me at all, I have no pull when it comes to that. AS

I am absolutely indespensable when it comes to mac platform compatibility analysis :-0) THanks for anything you can do AS

Should have called yourself madmac_br5

hehehehe

And I am absolutely unbeatable when it comes to finding new (and often obscure) ways to crash a program... any program. ggg Unfortunately I couldn't think of a nice snazzy title to go with "franontheedge"...